Episode 76

Forrest Dougan on Job Markets and Effective Networking During Times of High Competition

TIM: We are live on the Objective Hiring show with Forrest. Forrest, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us.

FORREST: Hey, thanks for having me.

TIM: It is our sincere pleasure. I think it'd be great if you could start by just giving a brief introduction about yourself and what you're currently doing. So audience can learn a little bit more about you.

FORREST: Yeah. Hi Forrest Dugan. I currently lead data and analytics at an automotive remarketing company called Open Lane. I didn't really know what automotive remarketing was until I started talking with some friends who worked there. But basically, if you turn your car into a dealer there is a whole. B to B side of how that dealer might sell that car at auction to another dealer who maybe has more expertise in selling that particular car if you turn it and say a jeep into an Audi dealer. So there's a whole bunch of infrastructure, finance, transportation, logistics, all of these knock on companies. And I try to make a smarter through optimization.

TIM: Oh, that's great. Yeah. And that's not a market I know much about either. So that's interesting to hear. The place I'd like to start today is around. Candidates and the current market conditions they're facing. So based on the conversations I've been having in the last couple of months, it seems as though if you were the median data analyst, data scientists going for a job right now in the U S and in Europe in particular, you would be facing a hurricane of competition. And if you're looking at these LinkedIn jobs boards, you'd be seeing, Oh wow. A thousand applicants in a day. Are you kidding me? And I could see how it would be. Innocence, almost demoralizing for these candidates to realize or to realize what they seem to be up against. And so I just wanted to start the conversation around that piece. And if you've had any thoughts around maybe how candidates should be approaching the job search. If you were suddenly on the market, if you were, in the early stages of your career looking for a job right now in this market. Any thoughts around how you would approach it? Would you still apply to jobs through LinkedIn and places like that? Would you try some other method?

FORREST: yeah I definitely see what you're talking about too. In the U. S. we're at full employment. There's many jobs open as there are people looking for jobs, pretty much like at parody from some of the recent economic indicators. My background's in economics, by the way. So I nerd out on macro stuff. What that turns into is these situations where there is just a inundation of noise in terms of the candidates trying to get through to, raise their hand to get their hand called on to even, again, a conversation I think that a lot of the aggregators so the LinkedIn's the jobs. com, any kind of those resume aggregators are going to necessarily be a low number, like a low probability game. Like it's just how it is right now. And that's tough. That said, I think that there is a. What I would be doing is I would be maybe doing my search, my discovery on those aggregated sites and then specifically applying within the normal like career site whether it's simpler career force or whatever it links you to those generic ones, but I would be finding the jobs that I want to go after. And then going after them through the company's channels. I just know that typically the recruiters that I know, both personally as friends that work in different companies in the recruiting space, and ones that I've worked with in the past, they're going to favor their own internal company platforms. There's a lot of depending on which tool you're jumping in between, it's just the one that they're in the most, they're the most used to. So I would try and touch. Those kind of like tech screening and recruiting places at that moment. That's not always universally the case. But I would try to keep through like captive owned surfaces that the companies are working on. Typically those are the most integrated into their pipeline management tools, all that type of stuff. It's just easier. And like when you're talking a thousand applicants a day, which funny story. We had an applicant or a roll open, maybe. Maybe three or four months ago, and I got a panicked call from our recruiter on Friday night at six o'clock. And he was saying, I don't know what to do. I don't think I can leave this job open. And we had opened it on Monday and we have 1500 applications. And he was like, do I shut the requisition? What do you want me to do? Because he was panicking because he's I have 1, 500 resumes to go through. So I had blown up his week. But to your point you can, those tech screeners are overwhelmed to receiving that information. So anywhere where you can be empathetic about who your potential stakeholder is. The next interaction and the one after that and reduce the frictions and their world being thoughtful about that is just always going to be helpful.

TIM: Yes. Now for candidates, I wonder whether there's a thought process or a conversation to be had about channels. So you basically said even within the inbound channels, you could go directly to the careers page and depending on the setup of the company, maybe because of the workflow of how those candidates come in, that's going to be favored or somehow prioritized compared to going straight through a jobs board, which is an interesting take. What about the kind of inbound versus outbound approach? Or another way to put that is how would you feel if a candidate connected directly with you as a hiring manager over LinkedIn? Would that be incredibly annoying or quite useful, or somewhere in between? And if someone were to do that, is there a good way versus a bad way to do that in your view?

FORREST: Yeah I, maybe have a controversial opinion on this in the way that this is currently done that I'm receiving these types of requests. It's generally a net negative. The, I think five or 10 years ago, it was a really nice effort with a, custom thoughtful note. But most importantly, it's the, how I see most of these come through is trying to circumvent processes that we have in place internally as a company to collectively make our lives and our interaction, our professional lives and our interactions easier. So when that happens. It's like throwing a wrench in the machine. Maybe the machine is not the ideal machine, but it exists nonetheless. And particularly for newer graduates, I think that there's a little bit of context that they're missing. And that asking for 30 minutes ahead of the screening turns me into the screener. That is one, not really my job. Two, it's somebody else's job who's probably better at it than I am, specialization of labor and all that type of stuff. And three, I only have so many hours to work. And when you're asking for 30 minutes you're asking for, two and a half to 5 percent of my work week, depending on how many, hours I'm working and blah, blah, blah. But very often those notes are come with like non trivial asks. Can you review my resume? Can you schedule 30 minutes ahead of time? I just want to talk about the role and get to know more about it. And it makes me think that you don't have as much experience and shows that you aren't thinking about how our interaction is like a leader and employee would maybe work. Like the realities of it. So I don't want to like bang on that. But connecting without asking for something great. So I just said a whole bunch of stuff that would be maybe phrased in like stops. But I hate giving a stop without a start. So what I would do is, message the leader or the hiring manager after you have the screening call. Even if you don't know you're through the screening call, don't ask for anything. Just say Hey, I just spoke with your technical recruiter or, I emailed, I got an email reply from your generic system. I'm super interested in the job. I'm looking forward and hoping that I have an opportunity to speak with you further about it. Great. That, you're not asking a whole lot. You're not stepping outside the system, but you're. Giving that personal note and acknowledging that you're interested, you're creating a value signal, right? And then the other piece is, and I think that you and I talked a little bit about this a couple of weeks ago was sending notes to hiring managers that you're not trying to apply to their team right now. Just connecting network to network. Build your you're to the ground on when, when I have a job open on my team, I post about it on LinkedIn. If you are connected with me on LinkedIn, you haven't asked for 30 minutes of my time because of that job existing. But, maybe you've interacted with some posts, comments, sent me a note, just said, Hey, I know that we've been connected for nine months. That investment and thoughtfulness and is. It gets noticed to just put it a different way. So leveraging those kind of cold communications, if you will in a manner that respects the professional environment outside of that specific job requisition is really the way that I see that being most effective. But right now, if somebody sends me a note saying, Hey, I applied for this job. Here's my resume. Can I get 30 minutes of your time? If they do get through the tech screening, that's a check in the con for me. And we might talk about that as part of like, how do you work with other customers? What happens when there's a process in place that you disagree with? How do there's a little bit of a behavioral thing that I need to poke on when that does come through my LinkedIn inbox, for instance.

TIM: Wondering a couple of things. If you think back to the last few years, would your perspective on this have changed in a different market? Let's say the 2021 market. Oh, there's no candidates anywhere in the world. It's the zero interest rate phenomenon period. Oh, we have to have the shortest hiring process possible. Quick, get an offer into their hands. Don't give them another stage. Like we just need to grab them where it was just the. Opposite of this kind of market, would you have thought differently? Or can you remember thinking differently then?

FORREST: it was a little tough because I was in, or I said, answering that is a hypothetical to me because we were on a pretty limited hiring conversation at that point with the roles that I was at during the depths of the pandemic. But I think that, yeah, I guess what I was trying to say is that it's situational. The situation in 2015 was different than it is today. I think the tough part here, and maybe that's what these type of conversations that we have in public serve is understanding the rich context of the current environment that isn't necessarily available by just seeing that thousand candidates thing. The So in 2021, if I had a dearth of candidates and somebody sent me a note saying, hey, I was super interested about it, again, Not asking me to circumvent the process, but we may, we, I may reach out to the tech screener in that case and say absolutely screen this person. Here's a check mark in the positive for them. So situational awareness and this advice can change basically.

TIM: I think one aspect that's also relevant here is how relevant is the candidate? I don't know about you, but I find that on average, if I'm getting bombarded with people's CVs about a job, it will be. The job isn't even with our company, it's with a client, so I can't help anyway. It'll be the person's not even in the right country that role's being hired in, so therefore it's a moot point anyway. The candidate doesn't have any skills or experience that seem to even overlap, and so on average I feel like there's a level of almost spamminess that then would discredit any other person from applying that same tactic.

FORREST: Yeah, no, that's a really good point. A lot of times when I see that kind of behavior I've described that I don't like. I think it's a product of somebody knowing that this is a low likelihood fit. And so they're like, the heck with it. I'll roll the dice. There's no, they don't perceive any negative ramifications because it's already a stretch roll for whatever stretch means in that case. But yeah, it just turns into spamminess. I'd say like being a good steward of the data professionals community is maybe just acknowledging that you're reducing the likelihood that a really good candidate is going to get noticed by filling, my inbox with spam. Throw your trash in the trash can, like just be a good citizen, a good corporate citizen, both at your corporation and other corporations. If it's a huge stretch fit. Don't harass the hiring manager. If it's a really, if you're like, I'm a, specialist one, two, three with 10 years of experience, they're asking for specialist one, two, three with eight years of experience. We have a secondary connection through this other higher, LinkedIn professional. Let her rip like that. That's a much more again, context relevant situation where that might be more reasonable again. Don't ask me for 30 minutes of my time. But feel free to reach out and make the note and know it, knowing that it might not be, or it'll probably not be negatively received in that case.

TIM: was speaking to someone earlier this week and they had mentioned for an open role they had where there was something like 1, 500 applicants. They'd spoken to their recruiter or their talent team about this. And although there were 1, 500, which seems like an extraordinarily large amount of competition on the surface, when it broke down to it, it was like, Oh, 1, 500. Okay, fine. So 700 weren't in the right country and had no working rights. So there goes half of them. Another 600 were completely. A relevant experience wise, as in like it was a data scientist role. And these people were chemical engineers or lawyers or something like just no overlap at all so that there was another 50 percent that was pretty much gone. And so what it boiled down to was they found a hundred, at least on paper, reasonable looking CVS out of the 1500, something like that was the ratio of relevance to irrelevance. So even for candidates seeing this massive number, if you are a relevant candidate and you have relevant skills, probably, still apply, don't be completely deterred because so much of those, so many of those applicants are just completely irrelevant and have no hope of getting the role. So they're not real competition in a sense.

FORREST: totally. I've observed very similar results. I think that we have these conversations about social media platforms. And we don't always think about LinkedIn as a social media platform exhibiting many of the similar qualities of an Instagram, a Facebook, a LinkedIn, a comment section at the local newspaper. There's a whole bunch of just BS going on, in the 87th post on a LinkedIn or a Instagram photo I'm a millennial. So Instagram I don't know a whole lot about tech. com and threads, but I hear they get crazy. But like understanding, like that there's a bunch of spam and irrelevant stuff that's getting thrown into those social media dialogues. Similarly, when you're trying to drag candidates out of what is inherently like a social media. platform or social media adjacent on a linkedin or something like that. Some of these other aggregators, they're going to be experiencing a lot of those same dynamics. And frankly, a lot of the tools we're using are really good at boosting the relevant comments to the top that are going to get the most engagement. Similarly, the tools we're using are pretty dang good, especially some of the recent evolutions of them uncovering the relevant candidates to your point. So Yeah, I think that while there's 1, 500, the job market certainly tight, I'm going to be the first to admit that we're getting more applications and probably more real relevant application certainly than we did three years ago. It's not as tight as the kind of, I don't want to call it bot driven because most of the candidates are real. But that kind of spammy, churny, frothy stuff that we just have to sort through the nature of these kind of aggregators and internet based sourcing. So yeah, I agree. It's not, you're talking going from 25 relevant resumes to a hundred relevant resumes. We're still going to review most, if not all of them.

TIM: One dynamic that I'll be interested to see how it plays out is, so if the current market condition is basically okay Suppressed economic conditions a little bit, which is driving more available candidates plus AI, which is allowing candidates to apply on mass, which is my current assumption and understanding of how things are working and why there's such high applicant volumes. It seems as though that has broken the screening process, at least in the short run, because most companies would still have a human sitting there screening CVs and applications. Yeah, with some keyword filters and whatnot. But I assume we'll get to a point where AI gets added as that screening layer, but it's just candidates adopt AI quicker than companies possibly can, because companies have rules and regulations. There's laws around how you use AI, especially how you make people based decisions. So there's just this weird delay period where candidates are using it en masse. Companies can't quite use it fully yet. So there's now these thousands of applicants. I worry in the short run period, would there be a reversal to almost like a referral based system where it's more about who you know, not what you know, where now companies have to rely on. Their current people to give recommendations over who they should hire just to get rid of this mess at the top of the funnel, at least until that bit is fixed. And if so, is that an issue? Is that's going to cause some fairness problems potentially? You're just relying on referrals.

FORREST: Yeah. I've been thinking about this a little bit as well. If you look at The CV, everything in hiring is like signal theory around value proposition, right? And what are the most relevant signals? It's not that referrals didn't mean a lot pre LLMs or however, whatever AI family archetype you want to be discussing here. It's not that the referral didn't mean a lot. It was that relative to the CV, they were maybe close peers, right? I do think that we're entering, especially maybe not right now today, but trending towards a world that's probably going to be 12 to 36 months from tomorrow until the corporations can catch up with the filtering mechanisms and somebody founds a great company and it blows up into the next, Salesforcey type thing that, The relative gap between the referral and the networking work and the value of the CV is certainly going to increase rather than come closer to parody. Do I think that has some fairness issues? Yes. I don't think it has as much fairness issues as it maybe 1970. Just culturally, socially, we've I'm an optimist. I like to think that we've improved but I, I think it speaks to networking and doing that in the right manner and understanding the job change is probably going to happen maybe a little bit slower. So I think that's the knock on effect is that it's going to get higher to It's going to be harder to find the candidate in the short term, so it's going to be more reliant on networking, social graphs, that type of stuff, and the speed of information transfer in those, that networking, social graphs the buyer seller discovery, the supply demand alignment, whatever you want to, again, econ guy it just happens slower. So understanding like the job change time horizons might be helpful. shift a little bit over the next the next, a couple eight quarters or so along with the economic conditions that we're more broadly seeing as companies are being much, much more thoughtful about their capital allocation and cost structures in a interest rate environment that is historically normal, non zero.

TIM: Yeah. To continue the economics analogy, I feel like we're in a weird disequilibrium and we're going to get back into an equilibrium, but it might take, as you say, 18 to 36 or 12 to 36 months to play out. In, in the meantime, for let's say the more junior candidates, let's say the ones who were maybe graduating a few years ago, that almost like the end of their university was in COVID, the start of their career was in this weird lockdown COVID period. Is there maybe some empathy we should have for that cohort? Maybe they're at a bit of a network kind of deficit if they've had to spend a couple of years in their bedrooms rather than out there in the real world.

FORREST: Yeah, absolutely. I think What they used to say, like 50 percent of lifelong friendships and like domestic partnerships in 1980 were formed at the workplace. Like it's just I am a remote first, I, we, I work at a remote first company. We do have headquarters within person. I've worked in hybrid roles. I've worked in wherever you want roles. So it run the gamut, especially Startup I was working for was hybrid before hybrid was cool. Then we're talking about 2014, 2015. But there is definitely a higher hurdle in building online relationships. I think that some of those, social media platforms do some work to alleviate it, but there's really no. No more impactful conversations that I've had from either a leader mentor or a peer mentor. Conversation has not been in person for me transparently. And so I do think that, early career professionals would be massively served to walk away from their work at home desk. And Grab coffee with somebody who happens to be in the same city as them. Go for a bike ride. I've really liked just going for a walk. So I'm in Seattle, Washington. And one of my favorite offices I ever worked at was on the piers, like actually over the water. And we shared a space with an architecture firm. So we got to see all the architects doing the architect work. And it was just like a gorgeous space to be in. But on top of that, we would. Have meetings where we would just walk the peers, especially in the, beautiful Seattle but that sort of like casual, no agenda. How are things going? I didn't need to have a one on one with those people, but we had one anyway and developed relationships that have paid off multiple times years later, either through just a, Hey, can you refer me to this thing? Can you connect me? Do you want to hire me? All of those have paid off and being very purposeful in a digital world about creating human touch is I think something that maybe a lot of us didn't give its due when we started going remote. There's a lot of excitement about the digital first. You can work from anywhere. Hey, I'm on a top of a mountain and Colorado. Hey, I'm At a club in Miami, great, but all of those pros did come with taxes and I don't think we necessarily realized the taxes and like many regressive taxes, they give the most burden on people who are in the earlier stages who are the, the left hand of the distribution. I think that's a really Thoughtful insight, but my advice would be to just go grab a beer or a coffee or you're going to have to curate those moments

TIM: Yeah, and when we talk about networking, that's really what we're talking about. Networking isn't oh, shit, I need a job. Let me spam a bunch of hiring managers on LinkedIn. I'm sure there's must be some blogs out there which are encouraging that as the concept of networking, which is nonsense. I wonder if it's about, so is it about one, the long term? So it's a long term game. It's not like a, I need something from this person now. Let me quote unquote network with them. It's very transactional. It's leachy. It's more about mutual benefit, long term, genuine, no expectations as well. Like just meeting people, have a, to know people, not necessarily expecting something. Maybe you could help them in 10 years. Maybe they might help you in five. Maybe you won't help each other ever. Isn't really, it's not really the point though, is it? And so is it just, yeah, having the right mentality when going into it?

FORREST: I think so. I key in on I've heard the term transactional relationships in the past and When networking turn is very obvious with like in a professional situation when somebody is beginning or initiating a networking moment and it becomes transactional. You earn that transactional by being non transactional, like this is a relationship you're building. If you're selling me something, sell me something. If what you're selling is yourself, but I think the cognitive, that's fine. As long as you're really transparent about it but the price has to reflect the value. And I think that to our point about like asking for 30 minutes, I'm like, there's five levels of conversion here, diminishing the top of the, the customer acquisition cost or employee acquisition cost. If you go spend a lot of time in digital advertising and just respecting that as well. I do think that there's a place for reaching out to those hiring managers, but much financial investment, you should understand your investments in time horizons. There are investments that you're going to make that you hope pay off in, zero to three months. There's other ones that are three months to 18 months. There's other ones that are 18 to five years, five years plus, et cetera. Just being thoughtful about where this kind of conversation could help out. And then letting the, Time you give to create the, the next conversation I've had, some of the, some great calls that have led to professional success for me. I scheduled five months before they actually happened. Just not wanting to be a burden on that person's time, knowing how busy they were. We still had a relationship. It was in the ice box because we, built it for three or six months working together and that person went on to another company. But I said Hey, Jimmy, just want to see how things are going. Do you have time in June and this is January. You can always get on somebody's calendar with that type of time horizon, but placing those investments or planting the seed, letting it grow. You don't grow a watermelon overnight, like just, that's a weird metaphor to roll with me. But just being thoughtful about it and, know that it's work and it's valuable work, it's a valuable investment both in yourself and your career. And I think as well, thinking about it at letting other people place seeds in you, where you can help them in the future without that transactional, like being very be very clear or understand in your mind, and that'll come out in your behavior and your language, that these are two way conversations with networking. It's not always a Parasitic transactional thing that you're trying to gloss over it. It's just, if you go into it, that it's not that it'll come out in your language and your voice and how you compose yourself with making wonderful, deep relationships that oftentimes turn into personal friendships, which are even more valuable than those professional ones.

TIM: Is there something to be said for maybe the value of these networks increasing even more given the development of large language models for data roles? Maybe now you could argue if you think of like soft skills versus technical skills, maybe the technical skills are being slightly diminished in some sense in their relative importance. Maybe if large language models can do a lot of the heavy lifting. If I think about all the people I've spoken to in the last couple of months, they're all emphasizing the soft skills and like adaptability, willingness to learn as the key criterion they have for candidates. But what about just the value of your network? If you're a candidate and you're sitting there going, okay, I need to improve my career. What am I going to focus on? Udemy is telling me I should take this technical skill course. My manager's probably saying actually to improve your communication skills, but then there's this network thing that maybe no one's pushing because you can't really sell it. There's almost like a bias against valuing that thing. Cause there's no way for someone to monetize it. And maybe for candidates investing that might end up being way more valuable than the 45th Udemy course they've done.

FORREST: For sure. Particularly, starting to invest today and we, you talk about how crazy things are going to be in like, 30, 36 months, something like that, I think that there's a significant opportunity for hedging your own human capital and building those networks right now. It's certainly going to be a differentiator. I think it always was a differentiator. I talk about those kind of like soft communication skills. Something that I have banged on for years about with, analytics professionals and mentors is. So many people forget that, they say Oh, I want to go into data science. Oh, I, business intelligence, creating intelligence assets for a company, machine learning. The most important part of the scientific method is the final stage, which is communicate your results. If I know that you are a good communicator because I have networked with you, I've let, we've had maybe short, maybe long conversations that are abstract, but personal and professional. Like I get your communication style. I see that real time and probably much more abstract, challenging situations and thought games than we've had it like something tactical reviewing an AB test or something like that. I know that. This person in my network who's become a valued part of my network who's contributed to me, I've hopefully contributed to them, is going to be excellent at landing the final stage of the scientific method that is going to create action. And that's the most important part. You can take, be a top 0. 01 percent lead code person. I've interviewed these people. And At best, I would lock them in a closet and tell them not to talk to stakeholders, and that would be as high as they can rise. And I'm being a little bit facetious, right? That'll, hopefully that's not a pull quote at any point. But the, you have to have these conversations. Networking is a reflection of your ability to influence inside of an organization. And I think maybe people aren't so explicit about that. But. Networking is an analog reflection of your ability to influence leaders, your ability to convince people who are not necessarily aligned with you to challenge people. How do you argue? How do you empathize? Like you're demonstrating all of these soft skills when you're when you're doing these kind of networking, get to know you things. I've never been in a meeting with this person. They walk in. How are they going to compose themselves? I know because I've talked to this person, but nobody else does. But I can confidently bring this junior employee into this room because I have a nine month history with them, even though it's their third day on the job. I think it unlocks access to a lot of rooms a lot faster because I don't have to review this employee for nine months before I consider letting them in to present their own work rather than me present their work for them, for instance. And I love to do this because that type of exposure Gets employees excited. It gets them working. They receive the questions in person. There's nothing lost in translation. It makes the entire organization better, but I also have to know that they're not going to cause swirl at, a senior leadership review. So I think that there's a, there's not only like a short term for what's your next role, but I think there's also an investment in how quickly can you accelerate after you get that role. into growth at that next company. So I think there's a two step that, that you could create a mental model for.

TIM: It's really interesting. And so in a sense, there's. The benefit to the networking, but also there's this other signal, another signal of your competence of your skill in doing it in the first place, it's like a meta benefit almost,

FORREST: Yeah, absolutely. And I don't think people think about it that way, but I think that in practice, that's how they're actioning it.

TIM: Yeah. And yeah, for perhaps younger candidates who haven't gone out of their way to network before. I'd share an example of my own. So when I was founding Alluva, the first thing I did was reach out to people in Melbourne and Sydney data leaders and just asked to grab a coffee for 30 or 60 minutes. This is pre COVID. So you could still do face to face stuff. It wasn't in this weird online world. And most people are happy to have a coffee, certainly back then. Like I know things have probably changed because maybe there's just more asks. Being made on LinkedIn, but people were more than happy to have a coffee and chat about what they do. I wasn't transactional, so I wasn't, there wasn't a bait and switch. It wasn't like, oh, let's have a coffee to catch up and then I'm trying to flog them something. It was just a genuine conversation. It was just genuine conversations. And what I noticed was something really interesting was I never asked for anything. So other than the coffee and we had an interesting coffee and hopefully it was mutually beneficial, but it's not like I got to the end of the coffee. I was like, so buy this thing that I haven't built yet. I'll sign this contract. We just had a chat about stuff and then it was funny how probably a third of them would spontaneously go, Oh, I should introduce you to X or it'd be really good. Once you've got the first version of this product, I'd love to see it. I'd love to try that out. And our first customers were all people from this very soft, like research stage of the business where I wasn't asking, I wasn't trying to sell them anything. I was just having a conversation, learning about what they did and sharing my thoughts. And yet. I guess maybe based on their personality or the kind of character they were, some would go out of their way to try to help you. If they see that you're genuine, you're giving something a lash, they'd almost be happy to help. So there's almost some sense of yeah, if you keep it non transactional, don't have high expectations and are genuine, then kind of luck can turn on your

FORREST: yeah,

TIM: a sense.

FORREST: I strongly agree. At the end of the day, I said earlier, I'm an optimist, but I think people like to help and they like to be helpful almost universally. And, maybe it's a personal belief, but I personally need to believe that. That said, I have more evidence for that than the opposite. And I think as you make those non transactional elements, people will actively think about. Ways that they can help you if they had a good conversation and it pays off in compounding effects across your network. I, I don't know what happened, story for my myself, but I don't know how it ended between these two previous colleagues that I connected, but one was working on an AI startup for special needs learners and another one. I worked at an educational technology company. Had helped us pilot a lot of, pre LLM at risk learners or needing some kind of additional support due to, whatever kind of challenge they might have academically. And so when I found out that, I just sent a note, Hey, Tina name's not Tina. What are you working on these days? She told me what I was there in pre seed funding and I said, you absolutely need to talk to Sandy. So I connected Sandy and I was so excited to do that. I want, I wanted to be helpful. The more investments that you're gonna make in that type of stuff You're gonna see people helping you along the way just because they want to be helpful and it's particularly It's a good feeling to do too, and to be a steward of that, community and relationship that you're a part of, right? The community isn't there to serve you, you're there to serve the community and be part of it. And there's no better feeling, so I guess long story short, is even as a junior candidate or an entry level employee, if you see an opportunity and somebody does that for you, trust me that will pay off at some point in your career. If you say, hey, Jimmy, you need to talk to Johnny. Here's the connection, BCC yourself and be gone. That, you're not planting one seed there, you're planting a hundred.

TIM: Yeah, I can think of a lot of emails I've written the last few years where it was like Joe meet Ben, Ben meet Joe. That was the first two lines of the email and then a basic introduction and let them get on with it. Yeah, it's a great thing to do. And as long as the intro makes sense and it's mutually beneficial, then I agree. Most people would be happy to do it. Why wouldn't they?

FORREST: Yeah don't grid search the your network. Yeah,

TIM: one question I'd like to ask you is around like hiring philosophy and Where you sit on the spectrum of hiring decisions in terms of using data versus intuition. I feel like that's a spectrum where you could sit anywhere on it. And also, like, how is this going to change? Do you feel like we're going to become more data driven in hiring or less? I could feel like a bit of a yin and yang here, a feeling like, oh, AI is taking over. We have to keep it as human as possible and almost go the other way. Or I could see also a future where the entire process is automated, quite soon, to be honest. Where do you currently sit and where do you see that,

FORREST: that's an interesting question. I will split hairs here, and say that I don't think that there's a lot of great quantitative data in the hiring process. There's Do they have a degree? Yes or no? Is it in the STEM field? Yes or no? And how firm am I about that requirement? Yeah, there is some quantitative data but most of the data that we're getting in turn, that I would call data versus intuition is qualitative. I'm a big advocate for qualitative data. I think surveys are really important. I think, natural language processing and AI summarization for employee surveys, that type of stuff. It is absolutely vital in a leadership in a leader's quiver in terms of how they analyze their business, how they make hiring decisions, that type of stuff. But most of the data that you see in like doing a technical screening. There's a lot of qualitative work that's going on there. Did they answer the question? Yeah, but how good was it? How quickly did they get there? Did they ask enough questions along the way? So the method of answering questions and the methodology is where I get a lot of my kind of qualitative did they ask any questions at all would maybe be the quantitative element. And then, like, how good were those questions? How creative? Those are important indicators for me, but at the end of the day, I think of intuition as the final boss, right? Does this person fit the type of role? Do they have the voice that we need for this role to carry? Or do we think that they can grow into it given the preponderance of additional skill sets they have and some of the, non soft skills? But, back to our mic. Thoughts about communication being the most important at the end of the day, if I say my perception of your communication skills are going to be the North Star here then it's going to be intuition. 51 percent qualitative data, kind of 49%. That's where I land. I think that there's a lot of different points of view on it. But the long and short is you can't throw out either when you're making a hiring decision. Yeah. And frankly, I think it's a little bit different depending on where you are, where you're hiring in the career journey to I'm more concerned with the qualitative elements, the horsepower, the just like the raw horsepower of the candidate. Are they a blue flame thinker? Do they ask questions? They don't even have to be the right questions. Do they have broad exposure over, going super niche? And then can they communicate how they fix problems? As you start to get a little bit more senior I want a candidate to have an opinion even if I disagree with it. And I want them to be able to articulate what that opinion is. And if we disagree, argue with me. I don't consider arguing as a bad thing. They need to be able to handle conflict. They need to be able to invalidate assumptions, that type of thing. And then they need to, something that I wouldn't necessarily expect from a junior role is really demonstrate stakeholder empathy. And what I mean by that is like the junior role, like you're going to rub some stakeholders the wrong way. You're going to piss some people off. Like it's just going to happen. Like it's okay. Learn from it. Take your lumps, take feedback, proactively ask for feedback. So that you can develop this empathy for how your peers, how your, distant stakeholders, your skips do their jobs. Leading to what I look for in senior candidates, is they're not fixing problems, they're preventing them. So that, they know what square or tile on the sidewalk not to step on. They're, that becomes intuitive. So I do think that there's different stuff that I am looking for. And then, an additional layer. Is do I want to hire somebody to, to challenge the status quo? Do I want them not to be a culture fit? That is, particularly as you're like building teams of teams. Those are really important things that are getting assessed in the interview process that are difficult to suss out with data. There's just a lot of intuition. Does this person know when to raise their voice and do they know when to stop raising their voice? Those are, you just suss those out, which, back to the networking conversation, the more time I have to suss that out without there being a lot of pressure on it to build that kind of quiver of intuitive, qualitative moments it, it pays off in the future.

TIM: Let's see, a great angle there is in the hiring, the typical hiring process, even a lengthy one that might be, I don't know, four or five interviews, still four or five times one hour, that's a limited sample size. That's not even one full working day to learn about someone. And so if you've had the opportunity to meet them already, a couple of points in time over a year, that's a bigger sample size and also just the trust element. If hiring is sales in a sense, like you're buying a person or selling yourself in a certain way, I'm not sure people would phrase it that way, but anyway there's a trust element on both sides. And so what builds trust better than time? I don't know anything. If you've known someone for a long time and they haven't been a jerk, then that's the best possible indicator. And it's hard to replicate that in a, Oh, I've got a few interviews over the next couple of weeks.

FORREST: Yeah, like when the pressure's on, you know the person's trying to like compose themselves in a certain way. It's like, how do I know how you're going to react in a when there's not a Pressure and money on the line, that kind of stuff. I guess there's always money on the line.

TIM: Yeah. A more genuine real environment rather than this kind of contrived dance act thing that we all do in hiring inevitably.

FORREST: Absolutely.

TIM: Yeah. Forrest, I have one final question for you today, which is if you could ask our next guest one question, what question would that be?

FORREST: if you could hire one historical figure for your leadership team, Who would you hire? They have, I would say they have to be dead or like at least 80 years old, like to the point where Who would you hire? Like historical figure?

TIM: Oh the first name that comes to mind is Churchill. If we were in a crisis and we need to get out of it, I'd be going, yeah get Winnie in. He's gonna probably rub a few feathers the wrong way in 2024. It's fair to say, but I don't care if you need a man in a crisis. He's the dude.

FORREST: I just watched the new Netflix documentary about that and it was excellent. I'm a Churchill nerd, so I feel

TIM: Okay. Yeah. I haven't seen that. I'll have to, I'll have to watch that one. Maybe we don't have it yet on the Australian Netflix, but I could VPN in,

FORREST: restricting trick the network security engineers.

TIM: right. Yeah, I will level that question and our next guest and i'm interested to see what they'll say. Maybe they'll also go for churchill. Who knows? But time will tell for us. It's been a great chat today really interesting conversation. You're very eloquent and you've shared Some really interesting insights with our audience and covered off a lot of ground that I haven't heard before. So I think it's going to be really great episode for everyone to hear. So thank you so much for joining us.

FORREST: Yeah, thank you so much. It was nice talking with you and I'm looking forward to networking again sometime soon. So we'll chat.