Episode 109

Jason Spencer on Exploring the Impact of Locus of Control on Workplace Challenges and Decision-Making

TIM: We are live on the Objective Hiring Show today. We're joined by Jason. Jason, thank you so much for joining us.

JASON: Thank you, Tim.

TIM: It is our pleasure to have you with us today, and where I'd love to start is learning just a little bit about yourself, just so our audience can start to think about who they're listening to today.

JASON: Sure. Yeah, no, I appreciate the opportunity to join you here. My name's Jason Spencer. I am a director of talent acquisition for, as I explained to you earlier, a scrappy little restaurant group based in Phoenix, Arizona. I oversee all the hiring for the company from executive team leadership at our headquarters and have a team that's focused on acquiring talent for leadership at our restaurants. And then I oversee all of our platforms and resources for our leadership to make. Exceptional hires at the hourly team level at our restaurants will just be a little over 40 by the end of this year, operating mostly in the southern states based in Arizona, but we're coast to coast from California all the way to North Carolina and Georgia, and we're looking to turn this into something special. We have a little concept called posting a wine cafe. That is a big yes. Has a cult following here in Phoenix, and we're really excited to, to, spread that coast to coast.

TIM: And what's that concept all about?

JASON: It is an all-day wine café. The inspiration for the concept original founders had traveled to Italy, and I think they, Spent a good amount of time in the little sidewalk cafes over there, sipping on some glasses of wine, and having some bruschettas, and some charcuterie plates, and when they came back to Phoenix, they realized you know, they didn't have anything like that here at the time, and so they decided to open up a little cafe, and ironically there was a 1940s post office that they had converted into retail space, and so that's where The original cafe went into and, being scrappy, they were making bruschettas on the back of the bar and putting cheap meat and cheese plates together and just trying to please guests. But it became a really popular spot there. And since then we've opened up 30-some locations of that concept. And then they developed other concepts as well too. So we have a multi-concept restaurant group.

TIM: Excellent. And living the American entrepreneur's dream, then starting small and growing big. It's amazing.

JASON: Yeah. Yep.

TIM: Importantly, do you get any stuff discounts? Are you getting some delicious food on a regular basis?

JASON: I do. I do. Yeah. My friends seem to benefit from that and enjoy that quite a bit. Yes. And funny, I helped; I have a teenage son, and he worked part-time at one of our locations as well too. And it was a great time there.

TIM: That's amazing. To transition into a discussion about hiring, I love to get your thoughts on the humble resume, the CV, a document that was allegedly. First created by Da Vinci 500 and whatever, 50 years ago. And I don't know, maybe that says something about hiring that it's still in use today. I have my views on CVS. Are they used much for the kind of roles that you hire for? Or is there almost like a different way of looking at a candidate's skills, given it's such a different domain?

JASON: Yeah. That's a great question, right? Here in the States, we call it a resume. But I would say over the last several years, Indeed has had one of the biggest impacts on what we expect in a resume when that comes through. They've made it very easy for you to upload your information and create a structure for that and make it really easy for you to apply it. Yeah. LinkedIn has had a big influence on that as well, too, with the way that you just input dates and companies that you're with. And, when you're doing higher-volume types of recruiting, what I've found is I'm looking for just a couple of things. I'm looking for titles, I'm looking for tenure, and I'm looking at the companies that you would come from, the brands that you would come from, and so the. That's the idea of a CV, where you list all your accomplishments and portfolios and all that information in a way that creates a lot of noise when you're, if you're looking at higher-volume types of hiring, you're really just scanning for Hey, do I have brand alignment? Do I have someone that's progressed in their career? Do I have someone that's demonstrated the ability to stay with a company and grow with a company? Those are the main things, right? What you're looking for, and how does that align with that position? Hope that answers that question for you.

TIM: And what about for some of the roles? I mentioned some of the roles you're hiring for in restaurants, chefs, and what have you, people who would do. Actual real-world work, some say, is one way to put it. Would they still encapsulate their skills and experience on a resume, or is it something that's more like, Here's a portfolio of my work? Or a different approach.

JASON: Yeah. What I generally see is your upper leadership, those that would be at a salary level at the restaurants, they do put some effort into polishing a resume that has some type of structure, has their goals listed on it, their education, that type of thing for the hourly team members. It's generally that Indeed format that comes in, and that's very satisfactory for the roles that we're hiring at.

TIM: And one thing we think a lot about here is skills-based hiring. And one of the typical challenges with a resume is it's just someone's. marketing document about themselves. I could claim to be a rocket scientist. I'll be, I'll come unstuck pretty quickly in an interview, I think, but I can put basically whatever I want on a resume. And so at least for kind of more like knowledge worker roles, there's been a bit of a movement to try to measure people's skills directly, a skills-based hiring movement. Is the equivalent thing happening in your industry? Is it even possible, or is that kind of an impractical type of mindset to think about when hiring? For those kinds of roles.

JASON: Yeah. When I'm thinking about hiring for our restaurants, what we're really looking for is some type of brand alignment with the restaurant industry. We all have that opportunity to go out and dine at those restaurants or be exposed to those restaurants. So we see the quality of product that they're able to put out and the level of hospitality and guest sentiment that. Brand might have out there into the marketplace. And an individual that has grown with a company that has a great reputation within our industry, those are the individuals that are going to stand out to us. And some brands don't align with other brands. And I spent a good. A handful of years in the agency world before I came in-house to represent a specific brand. And a lot of what I focused on was that brand alignment and those titles and the growth of those individuals in those roles. That's what I was focused on. And then, of course, you bring them in and interview them. And depending on some of the roles, there may be some type of skill. If it was a more fine dining, there's a process where they come in and they do a tasting or a cooking, something along those lines. What we prefer to do is really assess people on that attitude, their passion for the work that they're doing. And then we give them what we call a realistic job preview. And so we allow them to come in and spend a few hours with them, give them opportunities to interact with guests and staff to really just open it up a little bit and give them a view into what the role is going to look like; they get a chance to assess us as well too.

TIM: Yeah, it's a two-way street, and getting them in there actually doing the job or something close to the job surely is always the best indicator of whether or not they can do it or whether or not they'd like it. Have you noticed any particular pattern of where, I don't know, candidates maybe get through the first stages really well, like their background looks amazing? Maybe that interview is great, but then they get into that. A few hours on the actual job and it's, oh my God, this is not the right fit at all. Is there any kind of recurring pattern?

JASON: Yeah. Recurring pattern. What I think is, sometimes we get a lot of people that are interested in our particular brand because they have such a great guest experience, and they see how calm, cool, and collected our team members are and the vibe that we created in our restaurants, and it's why we're so popular as a concept. We're like that duck on the water. It looks like it's floating out there, but its feet are going a million miles an hour underneath the surface, right? And so we have a lot of systems and processes supporting technology that helps us track our real-time labor and food costing and sentiments coming in. And so there's a lot that we're doing that's underneath all of that that makes our guests experience seem so seamless. And for somebody to come in, they might think that these guys aren't as maybe structured, and you see this with the big restaurant concepts where we're just leveling up on technology. That's really pushing those skills. And so there's a, someone has to come in and be open and adaptable and willing to take on new projects that we're rolling out to make us better as a growth brand.

TIM: You mentioned adaptability. That is, I would say the single unifying theme of every conversation I've had in the last three months is people talking about adaptability in the candidates, willingness to learn, willingness to change their minds about things, and changing their behaviors. How do you think about that in evaluating candidates? Is there any way you can coax that out? I don't know. In a kind of behavioral interview, how do you think about that kind of growth mindset question?

JASON: Yeah, no, great question. What we really try to focus on is individuals attitudes. There is a psychological principle that was, I think, first developed in the 1950s and then published in 1960. It's called the locus of control. Locus means area and then control. So it's like the area of yourself that has control over the world around you. And some people have an internal locus of control to where they feel as if they're having an impact on the world around them, right? They're the change agent, and then other people feel like things that are happening to them are externalized, right? And so that kind of impacts their attitude. And what you find in people that have this internal locus of control is they really have a sense of taking responsibility. If you look at how anything that we achieve, like you starting this podcast. I'm sure you faced a lot of obstacles in your path to getting this podcast and the business that you have to achieve and to reach those goals. There's always going to be something that's standing in our way, right? And people that have this internal locus of control, they take it on, they take the responsibility to overcome those obstacles someone that has an. external locus of control, they view obstacles as things that block their path, like it's insurmountable and so they're not able to get past those and so these are going to be people in our life that we work with or we interact with that they're very much caught in this victim mindset and this excuse building, the world's happening to me as opposed to I'm happening to the world. And that's the idea there. And what I've helped our team try to focus on is asking situational-based questions. Tell me about a specific time that XYZ happened that's general enough that someone can tell a story and it's something that they have experienced in the role that they're interviewing for. And then we can ask follow-up questions. Maybe in our world, we deal with guests and customers on, on, on a regular basis. Some of them are very happy and gracious, and other times people can be difficult, and they can be upset. So a question that I like to ask our leadership when they're interviewing for our company is, Hey, tell me about a specific time you had to deal with an upset guest. And so you can get a real good sense of what this situation? was. And then the follow-up questions that you ask are, What steps did you take? What did you do about it? You can just have a conversation, and then you want to ask what that end result is, and so you'll get a really good sense if somebody's going to act, oh, the circumstances were insurmountable, like there was something that they couldn't, they couldn't fix, and when you ask what the end result was, they don't answer. They might not really have an answer, or they'll just say it's, it is what it is, type of thing, where somebody that has that internal locus of control, they have steps that they took, they were very direct in it, they had a plan, they were action-oriented, they knew what to follow up on, and even if the end result wasn't ideal, they were able to own all of that, and they'll learn from that. I think that's part of what you'll discover in that. What I found is that when you look at the behavioral type of questions, it's all scenarios and situations. And people can fake that, right? We can say, in this specific case, how would you have, if this were to happen, what would you do? They're going to tell you the same, the correct thing that they would have done. But if you can really bring that to, hey, give me a very specific, here's a very specific situation that I know experience, that we all experience for this role in this industry, they can give that example. And that level of action and results, you'll understand their skill. Set the ability in that, of how they approach that situation. And the level of ownership that they have over it.

TIM: That's such a great explanation and also a subtle one. Yeah, not asking about a hypothetical scenario, asking about what actually happened. What did you actually do? Because, as you say, surely they must've experienced this in their careers, probably.

JASON: Yeah, they've all, we've all been through training. We've all been put through, like, what you're supposed to do in situation A and how you're supposed to respond to that. But if you can get somebody into a storytelling mode and help them ease into it, they'll really start to give you a view of their, essentially, their attitude, how they view things, and give you a real good sense of how they're going to perform on the job.

TIM: And so again, the kind of red flags, or let's say not-so-great answers you'd be looking for, there would be. Oh yeah, there was this problem, but it's not my responsibility. I'm just this job. I'm not that job. And that was Joe's job. And he didn't do that.

JASON: people will hide in the fog a lot of times, right? And they'll describe maybe a situation like there was a wallflower. You really want people that are going to step forward and say, I did this, I did that. Some people hide in the fog and say we're supposed to do this. We do that, and you can't really pull out of them because in the moment, they're not really owning the situation. They're again being externally influenced as opposed to, like, influencing the situation. It took me a little while when I started changing over to this interview style and asking these types of questions. It made me question, is this the direction I want to go? Because a lot of this is based on the work of Carol Quinn. She wrote the book on motivational-based hiring, and that's where I got introduced to it. And I really aligned with that approach of asking these very specific. Situational-type questions and then the follow-up to it to really understand that. But once I started to hear people that really had that internal locus of control, the light bulb clicked on, and I think it can be applied to a lot of different roles, right? Because it's. We can assess people on skills, but if they have a kind of the world is happening to me mentality, even if they have really great skills, they're going to be somebody that's not going to take ownership of the situations. They're going to deflect. They're going to blame the team. They're going to blame others. They're going to say, Oh, I didn't have the right tools, or I didn't have the right training. Where people have that real internal locus of control, they will recognize, I'll say, Hey, I, I'll use Excel for an example. I don't understand the right Excel formula that I need to have for this. Let me look this up. Let me take this upon myself to go and learn this new skill so that I can better apply it to the job, as opposed to somebody that externalized that they'd say I couldn't get the work done or, my work product isn't satisfactory because. I don't; you didn't give me the right tools or show me the proper right way to do it or something.

TIM: Yeah. And we've experienced this ourselves. If I think back to the last six years of running the business, we've had relative success or lack of success in hiring, and after we've done like our first round of hiring, we start to think, hang on, what are we actually looking for? What do we want in? In people in our team, one of the values we identified that we liked the most was what we called own it. And so it was very clear the people we'd hired maybe did or didn't have that mentality. And so I just pulled up a documentary we'd written about this a little while ago. And one of the examples we were given of someone who, let's say, wasn't owning it as an engineer was. Going, I can see there's some kind of bug on the production website, but that's not my job to do that. Like that. So I'm just, I'm doing my ticket. Yeah, you could think of it that way, or you could just fix it so that our company's product is working. I feel like the exact same thing in sports, by the way, like the best teams I've ever played on. Where each individual was doing their job, but it's not like just because you're in football terms, just because you're left back, doesn't mean you can't do other things. All right. If the ball's there, you need to get it. It's not out of your area. Because it's just a meter away from where you should be. You just solve the problem in the moment. You know what I mean?

JASON: No, a really great sports analogy to understand this is somebody that has this external locus of control, they would. lose the game and say, Oh, it was the ref's fault. They had, they were bad referees, or somebody that had the internal locus of control would say, Hey, we really failed on our execution. We didn't do enough in these moments, these specific moments, to win the game. So it's having those different attitudes. I really wanted to deduce this down a little bit for my team so they can understand this a little bit better. And we refer to it often here as an I can attitude or I can't. Attitude, and I've given the team some statements to think about. For somebody that has an I can attitude, they'll say things like I can and I did, or they'll say, Hey, I had to find a way to get it done. I'm still working on it. It was difficult, but I saw through it where somebody that has that I can't attitude, they'll say, Oh, I couldn't; it was just impossible, or It never would have worked anyways, or Really, I didn't have any control over it, so it's like those different types of attitudes. You can really see that I see it with all the different roles that we have here, from out in our restaurants to here at our office. And this is always, I probably drive my son crazy because I talked to him a lot of times about these things, so yeah, attitude plays such a critical role and will be a huge determiner to somebody's long-term success because that's correct. An internal locus of control is going to be someone that owns their own skill ability, and there'll be somebody that's always, the people you've worked with, the people that are always improving their skills. They're always going on and learning new ways to do new things. And they're the ones that are wanting to push those boundaries.

TIM: Yep. I a hundred percent agree and think it's so important. And yeah, the current zeitgeist of the last few years has probably not been the route. It's been more of the victim mentality route, which I also get it because there's obviously a lack of fairness in the world, to put it mildly. People don't get what they deserve a lot of the time in hiring. We've seen that as well through a lot of the experiments organizations have done where they've applied for different roles using a CV. And the only difference in the CV is the name. And so you can prove through experimentation that there is bias and discrimination. It's really important to acknowledge that, but even with that, surely you're at least partly in control of your own future, too, the foot to the sports analogy before. Yeah. The referee might've been an idiot, but so what are you telling me? There wasn't any moment in the game where you couldn't have done something better; that's impossible. So you may as well just focus on what you can actually control and forget about the things maybe that you can't control.

JASON: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Just really taking that ownership and having that ability again, you've got this internal view of the situation to where you're going to say, How can I learn from this? Even if it's a failure, a lot of times people make the biggest leaps in their careers or in life when they've really taken ownership for their results. And that's what we're talking about here. There are really great examples of people throughout history. There's a little bit of an American type of view, but you, Thomas Edison, would invent the light bulb. I think he failed 10,000 times or something like that before he actually, it very easily could have said it's impossible, but continued to refine and improve and was able to invent something that changed all our lives.

TIM: You mentioned then the kind of American almost acceptance that failure is part of the journey being, yeah, willing to fail and not collapsing at the first sign of failure. People think of that as quite an American mentality. Certainly. Led to a lot of successful businesses. Is it still the case? Do you think this has changed in your lifetime? Or is there still this real willingness to give it a crack? Okay. You fail, but the most important thing is you tried your best. Is there

JASON: Yeah.

TIM: Risk tolerance?

JASON: Yeah. We're America, I think about the Europeans getting on these rickety little boats and sailing across storm-infested waters to land with the whole idea that they want to improve their lives. And that's always been the mentality. And then there was a big push to conquer these rugged lands of hostile lands here within the U.S. to tame the rivers and to tap into the resources. And it's something that we continue. And you look at Elon Musk for an example of someone who's watching rockets go up into space that are coming back and landing, and he's catching them, but he is. South African, right? But he came here to the United States with that type of attitude to build something and do something special and to push boundaries. So I think that, in essence, is still the Americana that we have today. But there is, I think, like I said, you mentioned, where people, it's become some sort of like social currency that you can label yourself in some type of victimized way and blame lack of success or movement or whatever on external factors, and it's, but it's within our control. I think that's the beauty of this as well too. I know when I started to learn about these psychology principles, I was like, Geez, how is, how does that apply to my life? When have I gone into excuse mode and thrown up my hands and stuff? And so I think everybody can do some sort of looking inward when they think about these things and make those steps to self improve and figure out like. Where does your motivation come from to,

TIM: I feel like I've experienced both sides of this. So definitely, facing problems where I'd be throwing my hands up saying, I can't fix this. I think it's just too hard and making excuses. I've definitely done that. I have to say, as an entrepreneur, I feel like I've experienced maybe the opposite as well, which is things that probably are actually outside of my control, like that we still try to beat in and give it a crack. If I were maybe more practical, I would say, you know what? This is impossible. I can't actually change this thing. That's fine. Here are these other nine things that I can change. Let me focus on those. Have you ever had that in your life where you would try it? You've gone was like beating your head against the wall, trying to change the way someone fundamentally thinks or something. It was just impossible. And you realized that in retrospect,

JASON: Yeah, to a degree, but I've always looked at things in the long view as well, too. Sometimes we all have to make concessions and goals. Don't a lot of times goals get redefined in that process of getting there? And, incrementally, if you can make small strategic steps to reach that goal, you'll find that you'll, it'll accomplish it. It might not look the same, but it might actually end up being a better result in the long run. I know everybody was impacted by this, but in our world, the hospitality and restaurant industry during COVID, we got shut down. And we as a company, we huddled up and got together, and we said, Hey, we have to figure out a way where we can still keep this thing going. And we went right into, Hey, let's put online ordering on something. We really hadn't been pushed to do that. The first day that we put that online and our guests could order food, we had 5,000 in a couple of hours of sales that came in, and people started to really understand and support that. But we were, we got a hold of, we got a hold of a couple of 1970s Volkswagen vans, and we were driving around; we called them the wine wagon. We were delivering wine and going out there and setting up in parks and stuff and really just taking an entrepreneur. We're a very founder-led entrepreneurial type of company that, again, we love that scrappy mentality, but we're also in that process of really having some. Amazing experienced strategic leaders in this company know how to take us to a hundred locations if we want to get to that point.

TIM: Yeah. Talk about facing a curveball. You run a restaurant, and then, oh, no more customers can come in. We're shutting the whole city down. That's probably not in the business plan, and you kind of risk analysis when you started. That was not in there. But you've got to somehow get through it with great ingenuity. And is it a case of having now gotten through what is surely going to be the most difficult moment of the business? Now there's a lot of upside because you've conquered almost like the hardest problem you could possibly conquer.

JASON: Yeah, absolutely. It's, but there's always new things. One of the challenges that we face these days is. Opening a single location in a city that its nearest location is 500 miles away and trying to build a relationship with the brand in the community. Like we have in our cities, our markets that we've been operating in for a decade plus and trying to shorten that cycle, that cycle of a guest becoming a raving fan. Getting, we refer to it as a long time here of getting that flywheel; at first, it takes a lot of effort to get the flywheel going. But once it starts to build momentum, it becomes easier and easier. And that's, as a group, one of our challenges. And part of that challenge and what I've really focused on with my team is how do we build that employer brand? So we have a brand with our guests. But we need an employer brand as well, too. And there are a lot of little things that we can do with community outreach, and being a restaurant, we have an advantage. We can invite candidates in to come experience our restaurant and treat them and surprise and delight them with moments within our four walls that maybe we might not be hiring that person, but we can. Have that type of all of branch that we can extend to someone that maybe won't work for us for a couple of years. And I've got tons of examples of that, to where we've said, Hey, we really love your CV. We love your resume. We don't necessarily have a job open right now, but we think you might align with our company. Here's an opportunity to come in and experience us, and those are sometimes, those passive candidates end up being people that begin to follow us, and when we have an opportunity open up, they're the first ones at the door wanting in.

TIM: Yeah, it's great to have that product that attracts people to work for your business. They come in, they experience a great night out or a great day in, and then that makes them interested in the brand, and they eventually come back. Must be difficult to track that sometimes. I can imagine it's almost the sort of thing that you might undervalue if you didn't have all these individual direct anecdotes yourself to go, Actually, I've spoken to this person a couple of years ago, and they applied, and they had this great experience. Yeah, but I guess you guys have thought about this.

JASON: Yeah, I think a lot of it is establishing those relationships, and as a recruiting team, I know for myself, there's days I interview seven, eight people, and I do that for a week, and at the end of the week, I can barely remember anyone's names, right? But if our recruiters can connect with an exceptional individual. And then help them build a relationship with our operators. A lot of times, you're going to follow the person that you want to work with in the long run and establish those relationships. And we have ways that we can put them on a little bit of a short list and a little bit of a marketing campaign, a little bit of a recruiting marketing campaign where we have ways we can stay in touch with them. And just relationship building. And that's the name of our, we're a hospitality company. And one of our core values here is inspire with hospitality. And that's always been a challenge for me. How does that translate to what is oftentimes a transactional experience for candidates? And having a great candidate experience that, even if sometimes you have winners, mostly losers when it comes to getting hired for those positions, how do you create an experience where somebody feels seen and heard and feels good about that experience? And then how do we? Have that individual ready to join us at that next moment that we need to tap into that specific talent.

TIM: And is there anything that happens throughout the hiring process where someone ultimately doesn't get the gold prize, they get the silver, the bronze, or whatever; they don't get the job? But they still feel like you say, feel like they've been heard. Are there any particular elements of that hiring process? Is it about, I don't know, being very transparent with them in the interview? Is it about just really treating them as a human? How do you build that up?

JASON: yeah, I think you touched on it there. It's a personal type of relationship that you're building. Professional, right? And making the individual feel respected in that process, to feel wanted in that process, even if they're not selected and feel that there is still an opportunity for them at some point to join the company. I often challenge my team to look at requisitions from five or six years ago and to look through those old applicants with the lens of who did we not select for this job then that we probably would select for that job now. And there's nothing wrong with just a quick little phone call, just, Hey, I know you interviewed with us, or you applied, and I just want to see what you're up to these days. And we now have social media that we can use, that we can continue to put out information there so people still think about you and see what's going on with you. Often people want to join a company that's on its way up. And that's one thing that we really want people to understand is that we're a growth company and we're a company that you can grow your career with.

TIM: One thing that I'd love to ask you about is the interview process itself. And in, what kind of makes a good interviewer? How do you help hiring managers interview candidates more effectively? Have you seen almost like a spectrum of really great interviewrs versus people who are doing it for the first time, and what separates them, do you think?

JASON: Yeah, I think that's a really great question, and what I like to focus on is giving a little. I like to help them understand what it looks like to set the stage for an interview. There I've worked with hiring managers where they do a lot of telling and not a lot of asking. There's going to be hiring managers out there that are maybe just a little too friendly. And it doesn't quite feel like an interview, and you wonder how objective they are or can completely digress and not really get to the meat and potatoes of things. But what I want people to focus on, I call it being a candidate whisperer, like a horse whisperer, but if you want to have a general approach, typically people come in to an interview very guarded. And they're going to have their walls up. They're going to have practice. They're going to anticipate that I'm going to be asked this, so I need to get this type of answer. And so one of our roles when we get into an interview is to help lower those walls and make people feel more comfortable. We're just having a conversation here, a little bit of small talk. Hey, how's the process been so far? How was parking? How was the commute over here? What do you think of the office, you know, those types of questions? That gets people, you know, a little bit more used to it, and I want them to recognize their biases. I mean that you mentioned that before, but we have a whole host of, we make assumptions about people when we first meet them, or we will really focus on one specific thing, and we can be very tunnel-visioned and not see the bigger picture of what we're doing here. And we've got to have a structure to those interviews and focus on those objective questions that we ask. And not let those personal biases creep into there. And then I have what I call the 80 20 rule, where you want the candidate to talk 80 percent of the time where you ask questions 20 percent of the time. Shouldn't it be the other way around? I've had hiring managers where it's the other way around. And I think it's really important that we have follow-up and communication at the end of the interview. That could steer in two directions, but we really want people to, hey, this is going to be the next steps. I want to get you set up with this, or, I really enjoyed the time; our recruiting team's going to follow up with you about next steps. They still feel great about the process. They don't know what the outcome is going to be. And, but they have some communication around that.

TIM: I spoke to someone last week who had a really interesting interview technique that I'd love to run by you to get your thoughts. And their approach was basically that about midway through the interview, they'd, and they take very religious notes. They try to summarize back to the candidate and explain, This is what I feel like I know about you. This is what I've learned about you. Try to paint this picture. And they do that kind of at the start of, sorry, the middle and the end of the interview. And their thought process is that it gives a candidate an opportunity to correct and go, actually, no. You got that. A little bit wrong. You haven't quite seen this element, and it helps to give the candidate a chance to feel like they are being heard and listened to and that they've been understood. Not necessarily giving direct feedback about you answered this wrong or you did this right, but just almost running through their narrative and their notes and being quite transparent with that, which I hadn't heard of before. What do you think of that approach? Would you give that a shot?

JASON: I'm always open to new ideas, and that kind of reminds me of something—you might go through couples therapy. But from my experience, you do from time to time have a candidate, or what do you think? How do you think I'm doing so far? And I've found if I've given critical feedback, it becomes this point of negotiation, and something I would rather avoid because it becomes a little bit contentious. But maybe I was approaching it a little bit wrong. So yeah, I'm open to that idea. I'd love to see that. Podcast and learn a little bit more about their approach to that. But my experience with it is, if I've provided any feedback, it's become a little bit of a negotiation at that point.

TIM: Yes, it's a tricky one and also depends a little bit on your personality, how much you can really lean into a little bit of conflict. I would rather not have that personally. So sometimes there's something to be gained from it. But I feel like interviews are draining enough for both people that, yeah, maybe in real time, slightly top-of-the-mind feedback that you haven't really thought through in enough detail. Could you be misconstrued? I would have thought quite easily.

JASON: Yeah. I could see it being used in a bullet point of what you've learned about them. And, for the XYZ title, I see that you accomplished these things that you were involved with, that type of thing. I don't necessarily, if you provide, like, your feedback on what you're assessing on the candidate, it might not go very well.

TIM: Yeah, I could see that. And yeah, our guest Alex, who is talking through this year, his approach was just around—it was just basically sharing a summary of what he'd learned about the candidate rather than the good, the bad, or the ugly. Yeah, I found it really interesting, and I want to give it a shot myself one day. So I'll let you know how it goes. If you could ask our next guest any question about hiring, what would you choose to ask them?

JASON: My mind goes to employer branding. So I, the more time I spend at the conferences I'm seeing. A lot more is combining this idea of recruiting efforts and talent acquisition efforts with employer branding. So the question I would probably lean towards is. What role do you see employer branding impacting, like the front end of recruiting, in the future? How important is that? How critical is that to your organization? How critical do you see that being to the future of recruiting?

TIM: Yeah, it's a great question and not one that we've chatted to any guests about in the past, I don't think. You can, if I just think about it now, certainly find some companies that I know that are almost no one more for as a place to work rather than the product or service they provide. And so I can only assume they're very good at the employer branding side of things.

JASON: Yeah, Zappos is a really great example of that, the shoe company. They actually didn't have open jobs. You could apply, generally, but they didn't have to recruit, per se, or go out to fill jobs because they created such a strong employer brand, such a strong culture. And that's what they led with, that. So many people wanted to work for them. They had such a great reputation that whenever they needed to go external, they had a tremendous amount of people that had already expressed interest in working with the company. And I thought I always found that very fascinating. So they really push the culture of the benefits, what it was like to work there. And all the fun stuff. They were like that company where they had the basketball court and all the fun stuff going on to where they really were that employer of choice. And they always had; they didn't have to delay; they didn't have that, okay, now we have to open a job and fill the pipeline. Now we have to select; they just always have people that were expressing interest in them that they could assess and based on their CV have. Waiting in the wings, ready to contact.

TIM: It sounds like the ideal scenario is having too many good candidates to choose from just waiting there to join you.

JASON: There's a lot; you get a little bit of work when you do that. Because I know locally, like a lot of times we'll open, and all bartenders and servers want to work for us. And I have to tell the stores, I'm like, are you hiring right now? Because you have 300 applicants sitting in your queue that you have to get through. That creates some work there.

TIM: I feel like that's a champagne problem. Can I call it that?

JASON: Yeah, I like that. We have plenty of champagne, Prosecco, and Cava. Yeah, come on in.

TIM: Jason, it's been a great conversation today. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for sharing all your insights and knowledge with our audience today.

JASON: Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you, Tim, for the opportunity.