Hey, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar, Scaling Smarter, Maximizing Talent Acquisition Efficiency with Limited Resources. I'm Josh Jones, and we're glad you're here because let's be honest, budgets are tighter, teams are leaner, and expectations keep climbing. TN's nervous and with good reason. But here's the good news. You don't have to burn out your team or blow your budget to keep hiring moving. Today, we're gonna dig deep into practical proven strategies to fill roles faster without sacrificing quality, how to use automation to save serious time, how to deliver great candidate experiences at scale, and so much more. We've got a solid lineup of speakers today. We've got Sarah Forbes, SVP of sales for North America at PageUp. We've got Kirsten Greggs, founder and CEO of TrapRecruiter, and Brian Fink, veteran recruiter, talent strategist, and managing partner at the Rework Group. And today, Brian is gonna be our moderator guiding us through the conversation and making sure all of our questions get answered. A couple of quick housekeeping notices before we get started. You can drop questions anytime in the chat or the Q and A. Actually, use the Q and A area for questions. To chat amongst yourselves, you can use the chat. We are recording this session and we'll get the recording out to you as soon as possible after the webinar ends. And, before we begin, I wanna say thank you to PageUp, our sponsor, who made today's webinar possible. PageUp is an AI powered talent acquisition platform, helping teams hire smarter, faster, and with more personal touch, trusted in over a hundred and ninety countries. Alright. Brian, I'm gonna hand things over to you. Thank you so much for moderating today's discussion. I'll be watching from the audience. If you have any questions, if you need anything at all, just holler. Take it away. Awesome. Thanks, Josh. I appreciate you, and I appreciate the team at ERE. I'm excited to get this conversation started today. I'm glad that each of you are here. Speaking of being here, this is about being present. We want this to be interactive. If you would, just drop where you're calling in from, where you're listening from, where you're at in the chat. Feel free to drop in your LinkedIn profile as well. We wanna connect. We wanna continue to build a great community for everybody who's part of the ERE family. Now about what Josh said, if you're feeling the pressure to hire faster, to do more with less, and keep your teams sane, you're in the right place. That is where you've come to today. Today's conversation isn't about magic bullets or vendor hype. It's actually about practical real world strategies that are gonna keep us from burning out. I like to think it's taking us from better to best. And we've got a powerhouse panel with Kirsten and with Sarah today. And you, you are also part of this panel, so make sure that you're asking important questions because we're gonna dig into what's working, what's not, and we're gonna talk about how to make smarter, faster, better decisions with the tools and people that you already have. So without any further ado, I think it's time to kick So without any further ado, I think it's time to kick this thing into high gear. Look at that. We got people filling up the chat. We got Renee. We got Cara, Lita, Cara, Anita. What's going on everybody? So glad that you're here and so glad that you're part of this community. About this community, we're taking on big topics today. So the first thing I wanna I wanna tackle is I really wanna tackle this idea of burning out. Right? Because oh, that was a that was a big sigh. Right? Kirsten, I'm then I'm gonna kick it to you first. What are the early signs that a TA team is burning out? Right? And and I think I think the signs are important. Two part question. Signs are important. What are the signs? And how does a leader intervene before this becomes a problem? Okay. Few signs. I think the biggest one is those recruiters who were engaged all the time, the ones that talk in meetings that speak up, that stop doing that. They stop contributing. And more than that, the one that used to ask the questions all the time, like and and not just how, why? Why do we do this? What's a better way that I can do this? The ones that stop requesting feedback, they're on that's an early sign that they're burned out. Another one is those recruiters that are just trying to get through the day. You know, like, that sign I just let out, it's like, alright. What time is what time is this over? Not this because this is great. That's that's another one. They missed their follow ups. They don't they're not as creative as they used to be. They're not engaging with their hiring managers. And, you know, we all get those we always get those hiring managers that say this person isn't doing what I want them to do. I don't feel like the most important person in the world, but it goes deeper than that. You know? It when it's when it's that hiring manager that's always like, oh my gosh. I love my recruiter. There are a few of those like that. They stop giving that feedback or the recruiter stops engaging with them or now everything is is is terrible. Everything is awful. Everything is, like I said, just get me through the day. And how do you fix that? Check-in more than than than on their performance review. Check-in more than when you think that, when when you get notification of a problem. Because by the time someone else notices it, someone that's further away from your team, someone that's further away, then you've already you didn't you didn't hit that early sign. Ask talk about more than metrics. You know, recruiters don't like feeling like they're just a number or they're just here to make numbers or they're just here to put butts in seats. We don't like that. We we gotta feel like we're building relationships. Does anybody in the crowd, anybody in the chat just like to feel like their job is to put butts in seats. Right? Can I see some thumbs up if you if you're putting people in the seats? Yeah. Come on. Get excited. Right? So so I gotta ask that question. Right? I I know I cut you off, Kirsten. I gotta I gotta ask you, how do you balance that urgency from mister or missus hiring manager and maintain that workload? Because you just you hit on a lot of things in that in that confluence. I was trying to be brief, you know, from our conversation backstage. But the the way you do that is by redefining what successful recruiters are, what your high performance recruiter is, what your your high what do we what do we call them? High your your top billing High potential. High potential. Potential. Whatever. Yeah. You know? Yes. You whatever that recruiter is, think about that more than the number of jobs that they fill because that sometimes is not up to them, that sometimes has other factors. Think about qualitative metrics as opposed to just quantitative metrics. Celebrate your team. Like I said, think about every think about things that are more than just speed, things that are more about quality, and that's gonna help. And then here's my biggest one, and I I think I'm gonna get some pushback for that. But it starts with the the TA leader. Like, normalize breaks. Like, normalize taking some time off, not just normalize it, model it. So if you're sitting at your desk during lunchtime or you're sitting, you know, you're having, you know, brown bag lunches, we all love those. Right? Or you're listening you're listening into a webinar, but you're also doing fifteen other things. They're seeing that, and they think that that's what success means. They think that's how they're supposed to perform. They think that that's what, you know, is gonna get them to whatever. But all of those things create burnout. When you never turn off, when you don't rest, you're gonna burn out. So so as you bring that up and and, Sarah, I wanna get you involved in this conversation. Right? Yep. We we talked about metrics. Kiersten jammed on that. Mhmm. What kinda high impact changes do you think need to be made to accelerate time to fill without compromising on that quality standard that Kirsten put in the field? Yeah. And it's I mean, from from my perspective, you know, one of the biggest time savers, it's and it's not a huge overhaul, so it doesn't have to feel big and cumbersome. It's really simply about, we're focused a lot on, you know, getting recruiters and hiring managers on the same page right from the start of the process. So using tools like ours, like PageUp, you know, we've built structured intake workflows that make it easy to agree on the priorities and the candidate expectations upfront, and that's just gonna save you elongation later or headaches, later in the process. And, you know, also letting, systems and tools automate, those time stealing or time sucking tasks like scheduling, sending nudges to candidates, you know, via SMS, email, whatever it might be, helping you surface warm leads and the like. So it's not really about it's not flashy changes that you kinda need to come up with. It's just trying to clear out the friction points as you have in a in the day to day of a recruiter and spend more time in in the right places like the candidate experience and, you're having engaging and, you know, quality conversations and interactions. And we've got a lot of customers that have had, some great traction in that space. Golden Hippo comes to mind. If you haven't heard of them, they're a fast growing health care and wellness company, and they have really interesting company. They have about twenty brands that sit, within Golden Hippo, and they use PageUp to capture and engage candidate directly from their career sites. They have that silver medalist, kind of mindset around, keeping people warm. So they then their mantra is never starting from scratch. So as you a requisition opens, you're never starting at zero. They've got warm people, and candidates there that they're constantly nurturing. And for them, that's, you know, had impact impacts of, stats wise, reducing their time to fill by thirty seven percent, and just really helping them save time on a day to day. They did an analysis, and I I love, like, ROI stories and just seeing the benefit that we can provide to, recruiters and our customers. But in a in a day, sorry, in a week, recruiter is having five hours time that they're getting back just using some of the tools and technology, which I mean, what I love I love that. I love that. I love that. I love that. I love that. I love that. I love that. I love that. I love that. I love that. I love that. I love that. I love that. I love that. I love that. I love that. I love that. Hours back. Maybe they could take their lunch breaks instead. Absolutely. You know, to that, one of the things that that I wanna touch on here is that you're bringing real sensitive takeaways to this conversation. Right? And you brought the data. So I Sarah, I I love it when people bring the data. I just have to call that out. About bringing about bringing the data and lowering the boom, though, there's a lot of talk about AI, and there's a lot of talk about leveraging automation and reducing those manual tasks so we recruiters can get that five hours back. Mhmm. I'm just kinda curious. Like, Kirsten, you're in the seat every day like I am. What types of automation what type of automation do you feel has had the greatest impact on your productivity as, as a as a awesome recruiter? This is gonna sound simple, but or I don't even know the right word. It's gonna sound like I'm taking the easy road out, but it's literally getting rid of those tasks that I don't have to do, those automated things, scheduling interviews, for those people who have enterprise level talent acquisition teams that have coordinators, they have people assigned to do all different tasks within the life cycle. I'm not necessarily talking to you because we do still have to involve a human being in these things. But anything that could take some of the burden off of me. Yeah. Like, anything that can give me back time to build relationships. Anything that can give me back time to advise my hiring managers, anything that can give me back time to improve the candidate experience and let them talk to someone human, like, that helps. So you're it's it's not just about replacing the recruiter. You know, people are gonna say, oh, well, AI does that. If you're using AI, you're replacing a recruiter. It's not about that. It's about giving a recruiter more time to be a recruiter. It's about giving a recruiter more time to build relationships, to build trust, to be, you know, to be out here sourcing, not just posting and praying and looking at who's coming in. You know, it's about giving them opportunities to be more strategic. I think I feel like that shift alone is is always a game changer, And we've been saying it now for how many years? I think every I think every webinar I'm on with you that talks about automation, we mentioned these same things. Experience. We still haven't figured it out yet, but, like, it it's time. We need to figure this out. That's To to to that about figuring it out, I'm gonna pose this question to both of you. I'm gonna I'm gonna ask Sarah and then and then Kiersten, what part of the workflow should be automated verse god bless you, versus manual? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we take the, you know, perspective of the, you know, what is something we're doing over and over again and then what always needs a person involved. So if it's repeatable, it doesn't rely on, you know, person interaction, and we're always looking to automate those tasks. So a great example of that, we've we've got an AI chatbot assistant and, you know, we've talked a little about AI. It's not here to replace, but it's here. You know, it can connect with candidates at any time and anywhere, you know, answering FAQs, helping them understand more about what the process might look like if they wanna apply, prescreen questions, scheduling interviews, and all that. That fun stuff that is tedious and takes time. And that kind of automation just speeds up engagement of candidates, especially, so many Gen z's and and the like in the market. They're expecting instant responses and and instant information, from prospective employers that they're reaching out to. So and that just keeps people moving for the recruiters through, the the process and overall reducing that time to fill. So, yeah, that's how we we look at it. And, yeah, that there's where that human interaction is important, you know, brings the most value, where there's empathy and real judgment that's required, and they're the things we should be focusing our time on as TA experts and recruiters being awesome at your jobs and and let technology take away the the mundane, the scheduling, the nudging, the prompting, the emails, all that all that, You know, Sarah, you touched on you touched on something that Kirsten brought up, and it was about that engagement with candidates in the human element. Right? Yeah. So it's really to you, it's really about giving us more time to be the human part of human resources. That's right. Yeah. Alright. I really don't have anything to add. She she touched on everything. If it requires empathy, if it requires judgment, if it requires relationship building, then it stays with the human. Like, we gotta be both high-tech and high touch. That human touch is is is you have to have it. You have to be able to make more than a like, use tech to make use tech for your knockout questions. Use AI for your knockout questions, those if and logic questions. Well, like I said, if there needs to be a judgment made because something is is nuance, something is in a gray area, you know, it's not about keyword, like, the the word security showing up on someone's resume a hundred thousand times and they are a hundred percent match because they see security, security, security, but you were looking for a security guard and they're a security engineer and your system is gonna send them an email saying I have a great job for you. No. That requires judgment. Okay? If it's if it's a reminder to a to a to a candidate that says, hi. Your interview is at at four o'clock with x y z. Here's the things you do. That's something that can be automated. Okay? You know, we come from the time of of the looking in papers. You know? We come from the time of of of, like, everything being, you know, a cold call or everything being a call or getting large spreadsheets and running down and ticking off and you have to make this many calls a day. You know, that's not as that's not efficient. That doesn't work anymore. We have tools that allow us to do that. And if you free up that time for that recruiter to not have to send fifteen reminders because they're a bad recruiter and they and, I mean, bad and bad meaning good, like l o cool j. You know, like, they're they're a kick butt a kick butt recruiter, you know, and they they can do all of those things. They they don't have to copy and paste that email or copy and, you know, or send those emails individually. The system can do that for them, And then they could go back and do follow ups with people that that that have already interviewed or just or make more offers that day, and they don't gotta stay till eight, nine o'clock at night. And then, like I said, be like, get me out of here. I hate it. I don't wanna work anymore. Okay. So so you have you have given me a list of automation tools that you love and automation tools that you hate. I'm gonna kick it over to Sarah, and I'm gonna say, Sarah, what automation tools have you adopted that didn't meet your expectations since Kirsten threw a bunch of shade on the fax machine and placing ads in the newspaper to get up I'm sorry. I went twenty years back backwards. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do that today. Yeah. I mean, as a software organization, like, this is the constant like, with our own tools, we're thinking about these types of things. And for us, it's it's really the partnership and, you know, I talked about our chatbot earlier. You know, we came to the table as an organization, it's a big part of who we are as a business and having customers at the table as we're evolving this. So having Brian, yourself, and, you know, inputting into how we're building the platform. And, recently, we bought, you know, thirty odd customers into that process early, and their feedback helped shape, you know, that chatbot, what it did, what it didn't, you know, to, to remove those friction points. And, you know, it's taking away. We've talked about the ability for it to manage FAQs and, you know, prescreening questions and all that kind of stuff. So it just helps candidates be seen, and, you know, we talk about our Gen z's, and their their expectations of, the employees that they're interacting with. And as recruiters, it keeps things moving. So, you know, we're always learning and evolving from our customers, and that's a big part, of who we are as a business. We got feedback the other week from a customer, which we've built into the platform. And I was asking one of my presales team earlier today. I was like, what what is this feature? And it, like, it came out the other day. It's a a launcher, message. So it's just a teaser that when someone comes onto the site, there's a little teaser against the chatbot to try and get people to interact with it, and that was feedback from one of our customers. So for us, automate automate automation is about really removing those unnecessary delays or distractions, and that's where the chatbot's been the value it's providing to our customers has been awesome to see, and I love hearing more stories about it. Alright. So let's let's have story time with Sarah and and Kirsten. Right? And and throwback Thursday, I saw Martha made that comment, so I gotta I gotta recognize that she when we were talking about that bad technology versus good technology. We've talked about candidate engagement and keeping candidates engaged in the process and respecting them and making sure they're seen and they're heard. Kirsten, to you, what targeted what what is I hate the word targeted. What what is specified engagement look like in an environment where you don't have resources, where you're constrained? What does that mean? It means, it means being intentional, doing the right things with less. You know? We we gotta focus on the things that are going to get the most bang for your buck, so to speak. My my cliche game is on zero today. You know, prioritize those rules that have the highest impact. We treat recruiting like it's not a business function. We treat recruiting strictly like an overhead function because of where we're probably situated in in a corporate environment, but we are absolutely a business function. And recruiting needs to be treated like a business function with impact. You know, we can do things if you can't afford to pay for for ads or to get your post, you know, highest on LinkedIn or your LinkedIn recruiter accounts aren't getting you the ROI that you need. Sorry, LinkedIn. Sorry. I'm always picking on you. You know, all of us have some type of ATS and or CRM. Why don't we ever source in our ATSs? Like, why don't we? We we all tell our organization for this or the place you wanna work, the best employer. We wanna be on these best employer lists. And we don't even look at the people that came that believed us and came to work there. We don't go back to them. You know, we don't look at how we've developed them or how long they've been there. We don't go back or we don't even go back and look at those people that we've already sourced that weren't the best fit for whatever role they they, were, you know, they initially thought about. We don't we don't do that. We don't try and build our passive talent. There are a lot of recruiters who as soon as they get a new requisition, their their mindset triggers them to just to go out and find somebody new. Alright, Kirsten. You just gave me a five million dollar idea. What's that? Don't don't don't tell me. I I've actually I've got you. Okay. So, Sarah, I got a chatbot question. Oh, yeah. When if if I was an applicant and I came back to your to a website that that was invoking your solution, right, Does the chatbot recognize me? Like, oh, welcome back, Brian. Just to give you an update, you know, we've got roles that are similar to front end developer that you applied to previously. Is that what brings you here today? Like, I I'm just I'm like because that would that's a heck of a reengagement idea. Yeah. Yeah. There's aspects of that that can be built in. It I mean, it follows your cookies, so it's a bit like digital marketing. Right? It fall follows you around. So there is some information that's captured to help personalize, yeah, that that chatbot or other experiences within the careers page. Like, last time you were here, you were looking for recruiter roles or, you know, IT administrators, and so it's serving you up like Netflix. This seems to be That's what I'm thinking. I'm like I'm like I'm like Yeah. Because some some of them allow you some ATSs allow you to check your preferences. Like, I'm looking for jobs in this in this career field, in this location, with this salary. You know? And and, again, we we've been doing it on a on a more generic scale. But I do think that if we're gonna start really leaning into large language models and really start using our the tools that we already have and making them a little bit more sophisticated and, again, giving those recruiters some of their time back and giving them more opportunities to do the human part of it, you know, imagine if you already had a list of, like, really, like, a curated list of of candidates who you do your outreach to instead of having to comb through forty thousand, applications before you find those and then not even remembering why you connected this person to this person to this person to this person, you know, especially for recruiters who aren't as tech savvy or aren't as organized, in a sense that, like, they're not they're not the ones that are going from here to there, and they're not they're maybe not necessarily going from this rec to this rec, or they don't have a purview into what the recruiter, you know, in another state is doing or a recruiter in another, business unit. You know, they might have similar roles. So, you know, there's not a lot of collaboration on your teams, which is another place you could automate. You know, you could you could automate that. You know, we used to do it. You know, we we would say, oh, here's our priority jobs. But I'm gonna be honest, like, that was more for candidates. That wasn't for recruiters. You know, we weren't the ones that were checking that list. Recruit candidates were checking that list. But imagine if we had something on our dashboards when we log in to our system that does the same thing that it does instead of giving you those same stale metrics that say, you're trying to fail this forty days. Please leave me alone. Like, that's not like, I know. I'm I'm okay. Speaking of about okay, and like I said, I want us to go from better to best. Sarah, I'm gonna ask you what practices help maintain that human centered candidate experience even when the volume hire the hiring at volume is really high like like what Kiersten suggested. How does that work? Yeah. And I think it starts with, for me, a simple reminder. You know, in many organizations that we're all in, you know, our candidates are also our customers. So, you know, that experience and that engagement and how you treat you're treated through the hiring process, whether you're successful or not, really shapes how you're viewing that brand. So, that's, I suppose, the first point. And we've learned that, you know, candidate experience, it doesn't have to fall apart because of volume. It falls apart when communication stops feeling human and stops feeling real. So it comes back to the, you know, automating the right parts of the process. And, you know, things get busy. We try and double down on the basics, like clear timelines, honest updates, and, you know, never leaving anyone, you know, not knowing where they stand with your organization or in the process. And no no ghosting, you know, having respect for people that are investing their time to apply for your roles. And we also give recruiters room to make it personal. So even if you're using, at volume, tools like PageUp, you can still insert your personalization in that process of quick text messages to thank them, for, you know, the interview, pre or post offer, sending them nudges. So those moments are the things that really, go a long way to building a real connection, with your candidates. And to make that scale, you know, you lean need to lean into automation to do that. And we work with a lot of new health care providers, for example, and who's not, you know, they're always looking for nurses. That is an always on kind of role. So how do we recruit, create experiences, targeted messaging, for nurses so it feels genuine and real, but also at scale? So at the end of the day, if people don't just remember the outcome of that experience, they really remember how it felt. And, that's what builds the trust and for your brand and for your organization and brings, you know, the right people through the door. Yeah. That makes me wonder. Right? Like, so much of what we do is driven over digital communication. Right? You talk about those nudges. Do you think and and this is to Kirsten's point when we were talking about that that blue square that has the I n in the center of it. Mhmm. Do you do you think there's a better way than email or text, like an Instagram DM or or some kind of other message that really resonates or makes it more personal, or is that creepy? Is that cringe? Cringe. Sounds like something you've, picked up from your your daughter or something. Yeah. I know. I know. She she so so real quick about my daughter. The other day, she when we were talking about the Riz, the Recruiting Innovation Summit, she said, dad, you don't go to the Riz. You have Riz. You have Riz. Yeah. And I was like, What? Oh, okay. I And Riz is r I z z? Yeah. Not r I s? But the audit auditory thing. Right? Like Oh, gotcha. You know? And I was like, no. And she was like, no, dad. You either have Riz or you don't. Don't. You won't get there and get Riz. Yeah. November no. If you want Riz, November fourth in San Diego, I'm just saying that recruiting If you have Riz, November fourth Yeah. There you go. Okay. That that got salesy. Alright. So so we I got cringey. So is is reaching out in the multichannel, is that cringe, or is that is that acceptable? What does that look like to improve the candidate journey? I think you've gotta do it for you've got so many generations in in the workforce. So I think it's just meeting people where they are and where they're expecting and where they will willingly engage with you. So, you know, platforms like TikTok and, you know, having a profile for your, employer brand there and for a certain generation. And so, yeah, I think it it is different for different generations, but I don't think there's really any boundaries. Being creative with your approach is is gonna draw the right people into your company. So, yeah. So Kirsten, back over to that and the cringe effect. Right? Yeah. What what candidate experience pitfalls do you see when organizations maybe scale too quickly or they do things in a one to many kinda what does that look like? Well, we scale too quickly and speed becomes the priority and not the candidate experience, which is what we should be trying to do. And you're also you're damaging your brand. I wanna connect this to the conversation you guys were just having around what gets automated and what actually helps keep human centered in the, in the experience. And that's the same thing. The biggest pitfall we see is this, for lack of a better word, like the replacement. So there are touch there's five touch points, you know, in our hiring life cycle that that you should never only be automated. You should be using automation as a tool to support it. You know, like, the initial response. You know, that message that we get that says some people are only gonna get that message that says you're not a fit. Other people don't wanna only get that message that said that get that leaves everything up to them that says, hey. I saw your resume. If you're still interested, holler at your girl. Like, we don't wanna like, we don't wanna necessarily only want that. Scheduling your interview, again, especially depending on the position. I'm not talking about the, you know, you have fifty, warehouse workers to hire and you've set up an interview day or something like that, interview scheduling. It can be automated, but there does need to be a human that's giving you the initial contact, the initial conversation around it, delivering feedback. And this goes both ways. I think this is a generational thing too. There are people who, if they're gonna be rejected, they don't want it they only wanna email. They don't want you telling them over the phone. Like, they don't wanna call you back. No. They don't. And that's fine. Treat people the way that they wanna be treated, but know that upfront. Presenting the offer. I know we love to get offers, but no one likes just getting an offer dropped in their in their inbox. First of all, they may miss it. Like, how did you not present an offer to a person? Like, why did you send them an email with an offer attachment because you were too busy dealing other things? And and this is not, you know, necessarily a thing, but, like, if you if you prioritize something else over presenting an offer to a candidate, that's a that's a huge deal. And then the hand off, like, the handoff to onboarding, like, that time period in between where people don't know if they're gonna start or what's happening, we let so many people fall out of the process at that point. We let so many people take the last moment, you know, take that last moment as, like, like, that's the stuff they remember. Those human connection points, those are the things that people remember. So we have to be diligent about, like I said, using using our tools, using automation to support these things. And a lot of times, when we're trying to go too fast, you know, that's a that's a canned experience, PIPFALL. Like, we're trying to go too fast. We're trying we're trying to get too many things done, you know, and we're ending up bringing bridges. We're ending up leaving, you know, these communication black holes, and just not having an like, a lot of oversight on what our systems are telling people about us and and what it's like to work in our organizations. So wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Yes? We talk about we talk about how time kills all deals. Right? Yes. How do you how do you I'm just, like, I'm just spitballing this. How do you balance speed and integrity and communication with the candidate experience? Like, how does that work? I'm opening that up to anybody even in the chat if you've got an answer for that. I think that is a million dollar question. I again, I say that it's keeping that candidate experience as the foundation and not trying to do too much too fast. Like, not getting ahead. What they call it putting the cart before the horse? Yes, ma'am. Before the cart. Yeah. No. You're good. Yes. Okay. Yeah. I think we do that too much. We're we're too busy getting to to point z, and we haven't even really reached c yet. Okay. Alright. So talking about reaching. Right? And the a b c the a b c's, which Kirsten We never our book and I'm We've never we have never done that. And I I just thought about that when I was when I go to the a b c's. I'm taking it back from you, by the way. Okay. Alright. So, one of the things that I think is been really pertinent in our conversation has been the attention to metrics and how metrics help us either make good decisions or they reinforce bad decisions. I'm just curious. Like, what what metrics or or real life insights or real time insights have become indispensable to you in the hiring process, in the candidate journey. Sarah, Kirsten, whoever wants to go first, I I'll I'll leave that up to y'all. I'm a pass it to Sarah first. Sorry. Okay. Happy to dive in. I'll I'll I'll leverage our throwback Thursday and, you know, recruiting back in the day, you know, it felt like we were driving without a dashboard. Like, we we didn't always know if things weren't working until it was broken. And, you know, maybe we'd hit the end of the quarter and we realized we still had open roles. You know, candidates weren't engaged and, you know, stretched thin as we've talked about earlier. And now it's a different story. We've got, you know, the equivalent of your GPS, your, yeah, speedometer, you know, and your fuel gauge all in one place, and we're tracking live signals. You know, we're tracking, you know, drop off rates, interview stages, candidate response times, you know, how long people are sitting in certain steps of the process avoiding bottlenecks. So if we notice a job is stuck, or a candidate keeps dropping off at a certain point in the process, you know, now we can make really early cues to jump in before, you know, that might cause bigger delays. So, you know, one of the most valuable signals, that we've mixed into that hiring process, and those dashboards is the the quality of hire. So for us, that's a really key metric. So looking at once that person's on board, you know, how did they rent? How did they perform and stay? So that onboarding experience, that they've had, how's that impacted, them staying within the business? And it's not just about hiring fast. It's about hiring right. So all those data points can give you the indication of we've got high performing people that are staying and that are engaged. You know, where did we find them? What was that experience like at the front end so we can do more of that? So then guiding your strategy is so important. I wanna I wanna ask Martha's question. Oh, wow. We got we got questions in the in the comments. Martha wants to know how are we measuring quality of hire? That's a good question. I think I mean, for us, quality of hire, it comes back to, you know, their speed to competency, their length of tenure, a bunch of other data points that would play into that. And that's gonna be slightly different for it's not a one size fits all for every organization, so what quality means and even in certain roles. So that's where kind of working with our customers to define what that is so you can then, you know, have your own measure, for for your organization. But they're just some of the the aspects that fit into it. Kirsten, what do you got? What was the question was how are we measuring quality of hire? Yeah. I mean, big I think the the thing that we leave out there is how long before we had to refill that position again. Are we retaining those people? Yeah. We don't we don't look at that, and we don't think about that all the time. That's that's my my biggest one is retention. So so I I just wonder about this because everybody talks about the quality of hire like it's a metric that's kinda settled science. When in reality, I think it's more like arguing about what the best pizza topping is. Like, you know, I think about this. There's no universal recipe, but they're core ingredients that most high performing companies can agree on. So I I I think that we have to start and say, you know, are you defining performance outcomes for somebody their first year? They're the are they hitting their KPIs? What's their speed to productivity? Like for me, when I'm hiring for technology roles, it's like, how quick can this person get up and running and producing production code? Yeah. So, so I think there are a lot of different pieces that are that are there. I agree with Jana's comment. First year attrition is a common quality of, call it common another bad. Common quality of higher metric Yeah. That you've experienced. Understand that. And then there was another question about, that somebody had asked, about how do you reach out to international candidates or to or to kind of ramp that or get beyond paywalls. And what I would say is, hey. That is a topic for another webinar, but I do love me a good paywall, and I do love to break me a good paywall. Mhmm. So if you if you want DM me on LinkedIn, linkedin dot linkedin dot com slash in slash, brian fink, and I will be more than happy to show you how to get around some paywalls later. Alright. So we we've got that. Also in q and a, I do we wanna do q and a now, or do we wanna save it to the end? Just keep going. Yeah. Okay. Alright. Lisa asked, how do you benchmark what good looks like and how it differs from department to department? I'm not sure I fully understand. Like like, what's good quality of hire versus a bad quality of hire? How do you differentiate that from department to department? That's a very tough question, Lisa. And I think it would depend on the department, because each one would have a different measure of what they're looking for. So, even even in recruiting, like, a lot of times we speak more high level. We speak from a more enterprise level. We speak about we speak about things in terms of people have all of these things, and we also think about them from a more in house perspective as opposed to a third party respect perspective where recruiting teams don't have the same compliance and governance and, restrictions that some of or administrative tasks that that your in house recruiters have. So I so I I hate to give you that answer, but I think it depends. It it really does. It's it's about what is what does success look like for that team, what does impact look like for that team, what does quality mean to that team. Because, you know, it it could be a small thing. Like, we haven't had to hire a new software engineer on this team since this manager started doing the interviews as opposed to this manager doing the interviews, and they're bringing in more quality people. Or you've got a team of people who are the ones who are constantly the ones making referrals of other people to join. Or you don't get referrals. Referrals is I mean, that may be a quality of higher metrics. Do you know? Right? I think it is when, you know, you've got people that are excited about inviting peep other talented people to your organization. I think that's a huge one that can go across the board. Retention isn't always, a bad isn't always, the the only indicator. It is a key indicator. But that person may not be leaving the organization. That person may be leaving the team. So that's another quality of higher thing. It could be a it could be, like she said, a a a business function, a group a group function of, like, this is just a bad group within this company to work for are terrible. Not bad meaning good, bad meaning bad. And we wanna move on to something else, you know. But we're talking about people exiting the company as opposed to exiting a team or exiting a a position. And we gotta pay attention to the fact that we do have a lot of positions that are springboards for something else. So if you got a position that you're cut that, I know Sarah mentioned nurses, and I'm not trying to, you know, diminish nurses, but if there's a a a position like that on your team where you're constantly hiring for this role because these people are moving into other things, that's a quality of hire. Your intern programs are gonna be a good example of that. How many of those people are converting to full time employees or permanent employees, whatever we're we're calling it today, from their internship programs? Or are they coming are they returning to the next year if they were, you know, whatever year they were in school or trade school, college, university? Are they coming back and wanting to do this job again? And then are they wanting to stay and become an employee when the time, comes? You know, I wanna double click into something. The the term nurses. Right? Like Yeah. I I'm I'm thinking about that, and I'm looking at some of the questions. Nurses. Right? Like, I'm I'm thinking about that, and I'm looking at some of the questions that we have in the q and a, is that Julian asked any advice for freshmen in talent acquisition recruitment with a small network. And when I think of I think of nurses, I think of Instagram or TikTok and the hashtag nursing life. Right? Now that's not to Julian's question, but that's just to give you the idea that go to where those communities are and build the relationships in the communities as opposed to trying to necessarily cold call your way into it all the time. Right? Like, there's a there's kind of a way to to jump to jump into that, to really get deep into that measure. And then I wanna connect it to something that Sarah said is that you talk about that engagement and that monitoring and that constant, that constant flow of information. Don't don't just show up and give information to a candidate when it pertains to a job. Give information to a candidate where it pertains to their career decision and their career pathing and the choices that they're making. Right? Not to get too preachy, but, like, when I used to recruit in hospitality, I would actually send out videos that were put together by other candidates like chefs, like, using Loom, showing them how to do, like, how to make a make a marsala sauce or what have you so that we could better create, an environment in the community. These questions are great. I wanna I wanna keep answering some of the questions. If I don't get to your question, don't hesitate to DM any of us. We are open to a dialogue and a conversation, whether it's here at on ERE or whether it's on LinkedIn or on on our emails. I am I am wondering, though, because we talked about, we we talked about, metrics. Kirsten, how do you get the the data that you get, how does it reshape the way that you prioritize requisitions and allocate your efforts? You could forecast better, like, what's the recruiter bandwidth. Again, our dashboards are great, but a lot of us don't even know how to set them up the right way. So, you know, we're we're we're not even looking at the right things. We can look at our funnel activity to see where we're having the largest business impact. Like, for example, if you got a requisition that, is highly visible and you have no or qualified candidates attached to that rec, pay more attention to that. Then if you've got another rec that you're working on that does have a healthy pipeline, you can kind of scale back a little bit, put push it, you know, put it on pause for a bit. We we always, like I said, we're our main I feel like too many of us think only in terms of what's my time to fill, you know? And that is so that's not the right way because we we are we already know how to trick those things. I may or may not have ever taken a wreck down and then put it back up. Like, I'm just saying. I may or may not have done that. I I may have I may have not had the rack and then posted the rack for a silver medalist and then hopefully, you know, supply. Yes. Okay. Back to recruiting. Never have I ever. Everybody. Never have I ever. I ever. But, yeah, that's a way that's a way to do that to prioritize, you know, your workloads is to really see where where the attention is needed the most to really dig down into the data, and then use your resources properly for that. Because you got I mean, you all of us have teams that are, you know, better you have, you know, people that are better at doing other things. Some people may be better at, you know, making the phone calls. Some people may be better at sourcing. Some people may for for teams that don't differentiate those those, those tasks across different different dimensions. Right? Like, the recruiter is full life cycle, the sculpture is getting Yes. So for people that do all of those things, you know, at once, you know, you may have some that are better at it. And, I hope that that more of us are getting more collaborative, you know, amongst our teams where we are sharing things because the worst thing that ever happened to me was filling all my positions and then not having anything to do. Okay. Alright. So speaking of having things to do, I understand how you allocate and how you drive that effort and what have you. And I also understand your feelings on time to fill Yes. You see the hire. Yeah. I I I'm curious because it's come up in the questions a few times when and we said we were gonna talk about this, is that when budgets are tight, what becomes your biggest priority in TA strategy? Sarah, Kirsten, who wants to tackle that? Kirsten? What about you? Yeah. When budgets are tight, you'd look at, again, what position do I need to hire for? That that that goes to to going back to your hiring manager. Like, excuse me. Like, you said you want you need this position filled today. What will happen if this job isn't filled for three months? And if their answer is, oh, nothing. It's not a big deal. Then Not a big deal. Yeah. Then go work on something else. You know? Like, we have to we have to get out of this idea of of that. Use what you do have to make the biggest impact. So, like I said, we we talked about this a little earlier about not having budget to post things or to do a large campaign, not being able to, you know, buy space in a place or even have a person that, you know, you might have a a recruiter that can, that does make good TikTok videos and that has a a following that may wanna out of Joel. Shout out Joel. We love you, Joel. Joel. We love you. That that may wanna do that. You know, that's a way to reach candidates where, you know, you might not have the the I mean, time time is a is a is a, It's not going anywhere. It is Time is current. Time is currency. So time is a cost as well. So so look at that. If you don't have time to interview or source or screen every every candidate, or a group of candidates at a time or you don't have the bandwidth to, you know, devote that time or, you know, buy space on a or, you know, buy a a a niche job board, you know, subscription for a certain amount of time. Here like, something something I'm not gonna say it's easy, but something that you could do is, like, host a q and a, host a host a webinar. Oh, yeah. Like and then have other people come and and ask you questions that, you know, the next can't land. And then you have a pipeline of people. You have you have a a core group of people that are not only interested in your position not only interested in your position, they're interested in your company, and they're sharing they're sharing insights. And you're you're creating a good a good candidate experience because they're gonna remember that. Like, they thought so much about me that they they took my question on this on this webinar. They took my question in this group session that we had. I learned a lot here. Speak speaking of questions, I I I've got, I I wanna kick this over to to Sarah in a little bit of a different way is that, you know, there are a lot of companies that are facing slowdowns and and what have you. How do you what advice would you give to teams hiring facing a hiring slowdown who still wanna stay proactive and improve efficiency? Yeah. What what does that look like? Yeah. I mean, it's it's definitely it's real. It's it's we're all dealing with it in many ways and and certain industries worse than others. But I suppose kind of I thinking about, the question, and I've been asked this similar from from our customers, and it's kind of an analogy comes to mind maybe because I have just watched the Formula One movie. But, like, in a hiring slowdown, you know, it's like being in a pit stop in the Formula One. So you're you're you're not racing at full speed, but it's the perfect time to, you know, tune the engine and replace the tires, and and you can then hit the tracks faster once the the green flag or the green light, drops. And, I mean, Brad Pitt does it very well in the movie if you haven't seen it. It's a, a Sixty one year old Brad Pitt. I have to call him out. He looks better than I do, and I'm like, when I'm sixty one, I wanna look that good. Sarah, I'm sorry. I did not mean to interrupt. I apologize. Yeah. So when when things get busy, it's really easy to go into autopilot. So, you know, posting the same ads, running the same intact intake meetings, sending the same candidate messages. So it's a great point to stop during those quieter periods and just kinda ask ask yourselves, ask your team, you know, how are our intakes, how conversations, how can they be sharper? Yeah. How are job descriptions? Are they nailing it? Are they really defining what success looks like in this role? You know, does employ your brand, is that still is it telling the right story for our organization and helping us bring in those the right hires at a faster pace, because they really engage and they understand what we're trying to achieve, as an organization. So it's using the time for small, you know, meaningful tweaks of of your process and, strengthening your connection. So Awesome. And then when when the floodgates open, you'll be ready to hit the road and and fly. Yep. Power through turn four. Got it. Right. Alright. So so who we have seven minutes, and we have five minutes left. Right? Because Josh is gonna come back on, and he's gonna tell us how what a great job we did and how much fun we had today. We got some questions in the q and a. Right? Okay. The I mean, we got we got some good questions. Julian, I think we answered this. What advice for freshmen in talent acquisition recruiting with a small network? Sometimes we're, behind the paywall to connect with international candidates. Julian, if you want, connect with me or connect with Josh or anyone on this on this podcast, and we will be happy to share with you Brian Fink's super duper custom search engine, which you can learn how to build your own at Riz, r I s, fifth the fifth, or just ping me on LinkedIn, and I'll show you a link that'll get you through those paywalls. I I guess that that was me answering the question I was asking. I'm sorry about that, Sarah, that I didn't give you the chance. You're good. Okay. Kirsten, Brooke wants to know what are the best resources outside of LinkedIn and your ATS to find candidates? Yikes. Your network your your network that's that's closest to you. I always talk about from a candidate and from a recruiter perspective starting with what's closest to you and then working your way out. You can find candidates at your grocery store when you go and pick up your, you know, your when you're down at the Trader Joe's and you're going to find your stuff, they're at your your children's, games and activities. They're they're all of those places. Referrals are always great. Ask her, like, ask the candidates, the people you already have relationships with. The people who tell you no. The people who tell you no. Yes. To recommend someone. You've got a nose. I mean, look, like Yeah. You know, and we do have Dawn has a question about the about the current current climate we live in. Look. We've we've got a four we've got at least a four percent unemployment rate, which means that It's more than that. Yeah. It's more than that. Right? But the the reality of it is that means that if you ask one person in one person in ten is going to know somebody that's gonna know somebody who's gonna know somebody who's looking. Right? Lisa, we already answered what benchmark, what good looks like, and how it differs from department to department. Dawn, do you have recommendations for organizations with lack of budget? I think we've talked a little bit about lack of budget, and this weird sense of fear in a highly charged political climate. My answer to that is do not ignore reality. Stay vigilant about what's going on in people's lives and be aware of the challenges that they face every day. You know, you know, here in Atlanta, we did and that's where I'm where I'm from or or where I'm at is that we did have a we did have a politically charged shooting the other day, where somebody emptied five hundred pieces of ammunition into the CDC. And, I would think that if you're calling on people that are at the CDC, you might wanna be careful about bringing that up or having that kind of conversation or contacting them on a day when they are suffering some trauma. The same thing with wicked weather in all parts of the country and, you know, reaching out to candidates that are in the Carolinas or candidates that are in LA and be, be, be particularly, responsive to the situation, the circumstances surrounding I I think I got a little preachy. I didn't mean to get preachy. Alright. Let's bring Josh back up here and have him round out the show. I wanna I wanna thank, ERE for having Sarah and Kirsten and I. Josh, thanks for putting together a great webinar and a great panel. What else can we do for the community today? Oh, and about the community. Drop your LinkedIns in the chat. I wanna connect with everybody, send me a connection request. We wanna host a great community here at ERE, and we want you to be at the center of it. Thank you all for being here. I can't take much credit. I just happen to know really, really awesome people. So anytime we have to create content, I just reach out to a few of my friends and and magic happens. So huge thank you for today's conversation. Sarah, Kirsten, Brian, really, really appreciate your insights. To all of you tuning in from from webinar land, we appreciate you showing up every time we do these because it gives meaning to our work. Huge shout out to our friends over at PageUp for making today's webinar possible. We will be sending out the recording very, very soon. If the Recruiting Innovation Summit November fourth and fifth is not on your radar, please put it on your radar. You can attend with us in person. Brian's going to be there. I'm going to be there. But it's also a hybrid event. So if you can't make it in person, we'll be streaming it online. And there's tickets available for the streaming as well. Stay tuned for more content. It was really great to see all of you. And we will see you next time. Bye bye. Thanks all.