Hiring Humans w/Craig Fisher

[00:00:00] Welcome to The Recruitment Flex with Serge and Shelly. I'm Serge.

[00:00:10] And I'm Shelly. And we talk all things recruitment starting right now.

[00:00:14] Bonjour and welcome to The Recruitment Flex, Shelly. We have another exciting guest, one

[00:00:23] that they lovingly call the fish dog. So we got to introduce this and find out.

[00:00:28] Oh, yeah. We better quickly explain that for sure. I am so pleased to have joining us someone

[00:00:35] who's well known, renowned in fact, I would say in the TA community. We have Craig Fisher,

[00:00:42] who is the author of the book, Hiring Humans and also CEO at TalentNet Media. Welcome to

[00:00:50] the show, Craig. Thanks, Shelly. Serge, great to be here. I appreciate you having me on.

[00:00:56] So Craig, let's start with you. Something our endlessly curious audience wants to know. Who is

[00:01:02] Craig? And talk a little bit about your journey in talent acquisition or the HR world. Give us

[00:01:09] the story. Yeah, I started my career as a drug rep after college at University of Oklahoma.

[00:01:17] I got hired by Glaxo to sell pharmaceuticals. And I did that for a couple of years and I got

[00:01:22] a bigger job selling hospital equipment. I did that for a few years and I loved it. And I

[00:01:29] became team leaders at both places and got to hire and recruit people to my teams and to the

[00:01:34] organizations. And I liked that part of it as well. And then at some point in the mid-90s,

[00:01:40] a bunch of my mates from that business jumped over to recruiting physicians. And that was a

[00:01:47] hot thing at the time. So I got recruited into that. I got recruited into recruiting

[00:01:53] and promised more money, less travel, all that great stuff. And once you get into recruiting,

[00:01:59] you never get out. That kind of quickly moved to the mid- to late-90s tech boom.

[00:02:05] And so we all became tech recruiters and off to the races. I did all sides of big staffing.

[00:02:13] I worked for Matrix Resources. I did sales and recruiting and leadership. Eventually,

[00:02:17] I was an owner of my own staffing company in the mid- to late-2000s. And the whole time I was

[00:02:25] doing this, I was bringing my advertising and marketing schooling to the picture and saying

[00:02:35] these employers could do a better job of advertising who they are and what they do and why it's a good

[00:02:41] place to work. And it would make my job easier. So I would offer that basically for free to

[00:02:47] the employers. I'm like, hey, I've got some ideas for you. You might want to try this.

[00:02:51] Little search engine optimization on these job descriptions might be a good idea too.

[00:02:56] Anyway, that became the thought leadership business. Companies started asking me to come speak to their

[00:03:01] teams about social media marketing and things like that for recruitment. And in 2011, I officially

[00:03:09] launched my employer branding business, although I'd been getting paid for it since 09.

[00:03:15] And in 09, we started the TalentNet Twitter chat. So it was hashtag TNL to start with,

[00:03:23] hashtag TalentNet Live. And it was a weekly chat that kind of jumped over from recruiting blogs.com.

[00:03:31] That's what it was at the time. Everybody was on Twitter and no one was going to these chat rooms.

[00:03:35] So we just started a Twitter chat there and people from all over the world joined it and

[00:03:40] very quickly that led to people asking for an IRL meetup. And if you remember the IRL days.

[00:03:49] And so in the fall of 2009, we hosted our first TalentNet Live conference. People were complaining

[00:03:56] that the economy's bad. They don't have budget to go to a SHRM or an ERE or HR Tech conference.

[00:04:02] And so we just put on an inexpensive get-together. We had Bill Borman come over and he was our

[00:04:09] first keynote speaker from London. And that was exciting. He was my Twitter buddy. And we didn't

[00:04:15] know what we were getting into. PepsiCo, Frito Lay hosted us. Monster was our first sponsor.

[00:04:22] And 200 plus people showed up and we're like, wow, there's an appetite for this.

[00:04:27] And so we kept doing it. And we've done it twice a year ever since once in Dallas

[00:04:33] in the fall and Austin in the spring. And so that's a lot of fun. And it's become my user

[00:04:38] conference. My business has really evolved. I used to do pretty pictures and pretty words,

[00:04:43] I say. And now I want to prove that it does something. And so for several years now,

[00:04:48] I'd insist on being able to prove ROI and conversion rates. If you're going to do

[00:04:54] top of funnel marketing, let's be able to prove that you can track it all the way through.

[00:04:59] And so I'd insist on an intro to the HRIS team and sit in on vendor calls

[00:05:06] and interview recruiters and hiring managers. And the reason is very often conversions aren't

[00:05:13] because of the marketing, right? Conversion problems are from fallout when people hit your

[00:05:18] login screen to apply for a job or you're asking too many assessment questions or

[00:05:23] there's lots of reasons. Your jobs aren't coming out of the applicant tracking system well.

[00:05:28] They look three years old because you're using an old template. So they're not showing up in

[00:05:31] search results, right? I think every job starts in a search bar somewhere. And so I'm all about SEO.

[00:05:38] My practice is almost more about talent operations and candidate experience

[00:05:44] than anything else. We still do the attraction marketing piece,

[00:05:47] all those fun things. If you really want to fix things, connect the dots, make sure you can

[00:05:52] track end to end, all that stuff. I'm your guy. And I've got a great fractional team of

[00:05:56] people that helps me do it. It's fun. The whole notion of employer brand in 2011,

[00:06:03] people must have looked at you like what? Yeah. What I think even as recent as 2018, 19, 2020,

[00:06:14] chief marketing officers are still going employer brand. What do you mean? So wow,

[00:06:19] you were like way ahead of your time. So thank you very much for carving out the path for us.

[00:06:26] So let's talk a little bit about the book you wrote, Hiring Humans. Who's it for?

[00:06:31] Why did you write it and who should read it? Yeah, I wrote my first article about employer branding

[00:06:39] in 2009. And talk about nobody knew what I was talking about. But there was a global employer

[00:06:49] branding company that was just fledgling. And they had an in-person magazine that they would ship to

[00:06:58] HR offices all over the world. And so I was on the cover of that. And I wrote this big article about

[00:07:04] you're doing it wrong, don't just rely on job boards, all this stuff. And at that time,

[00:07:09] I knew I had a book somewhere. This goes back to 09. I'm like, I've got all these thoughts

[00:07:15] in my head. I need to get them out. And people ask me for years, could I do a lot of training for

[00:07:20] recruiting teams and sales team? And if we could just get this in a book, that'd be great. I

[00:07:25] write a lot of articles and I do a lot of broadcasts. But I struggled to really pin down

[00:07:31] what needed to be in this book because I wanted everything to be in the book. And that's

[00:07:35] too much. So I narrowed it down to what you need to do in attraction marketing

[00:07:42] to get people across the finish line. So not just attracted, but hired and retained.

[00:07:49] And so it goes through the steps, step one, two, three. And each step is a chapter with a case study

[00:07:56] from a company that I've actually done the work with. And these are all Fortune 100

[00:08:02] organizations like big companies. And so it's not just theory, it's practice. And it's a whole

[00:08:08] lot of outside the box thinking. So the book's really as much about thinking about things

[00:08:15] differently than what we've been spoon fed for years, as it is about practical tips.

[00:08:21] So at the end of each chapter, there is key takeaways. You could just read those and have

[00:08:26] a good guide to how to do this right. The book is really for anyone in HR talent attraction,

[00:08:34] CEOs, CFOs, COOs, right? Your business should be about growing with empathy and kindness.

[00:08:45] And the theme of this book is job candidates are our potential teammates.

[00:08:52] Why should we treat them as numbers or anything less than people who very well are our on-deck

[00:08:59] circle? They're going to be working with us at some point soon. So they're all worthy of our

[00:09:04] respect and attention. And if we treat everyone with that mindset, then we get in the right frame to

[00:09:11] do a good job of candidate experience. So there's a couple of things that really stood out

[00:09:17] for me in the book. Chapter four, you talk about employee value proposition. And that is a

[00:09:23] really challenging one for a lot of companies. And usually what they'll do, and this might

[00:09:27] be true, might be not. They're going to a consulting firm that creates a message for them that is

[00:09:33] extremely generic and sounds like every utter message out there. And I would say a lot of it

[00:09:40] is what I call aspirational, aka lying. It's just what they want to be, but it's not the true

[00:09:45] behaviors within the organization. Like how do we get away from this? Because I think

[00:09:52] I would say six, seven years ago, this was the message we need to be better marketers. And we just

[00:09:58] went way too far in that sense of actually distorting reality. How do we fix this to create authentic,

[00:10:06] real messages that in one way would entice people to come but also for the wrong candidate,

[00:10:13] decide not to apply, which is good as well? Yes. You made a really good point there,

[00:10:19] Serge, about helping the wrong candidates to opt out. Yeah. I think what happens too often is

[00:10:28] marketing firms are slick. That's what they do, right? They're consultants, they make things

[00:10:34] look appealing. And they go through the motions of doing an employee survey or something like that.

[00:10:42] And then they take the best of things. And then they write something that's going to look

[00:10:49] good on a case study. That's what we're stuck with, but there's a better way. And so in interviewing

[00:10:57] your workforce in order to get to the crux of what's really interesting and authentic about

[00:11:02] your organization, you need to interview people from all aspects of work in your organization,

[00:11:10] right? The people who work in the cafeteria, people in accounting, not just frontline workers,

[00:11:18] everyone. And you want to interview cheerleaders as well as detractors.

[00:11:26] Not everybody's going to be fired up every day about their job after 15 years. There's going

[00:11:32] to be some people that have some dissent. And that's a good thing. You want to hear from

[00:11:37] those people. This company was great when we did this, now we're doing that and it's not as

[00:11:43] great. But that doesn't mean that they weren't a good culture fit to start with. They are

[00:11:47] still a great part of your organization. And then you want to interview managers and leaders.

[00:11:52] And you do this all individually, one on one. And then you put them in a room together and let

[00:11:58] them talk and give them interesting ideas about what to talk about. And when they do that,

[00:12:05] and you just say, this is a safe space, we're going to have a bitch session. And let them

[00:12:10] have it out. They'll get around to what's great. Absolutely. But then you also know what's

[00:12:16] authentically a struggle. And you want all of that to be part of your organization. We are this.

[00:12:24] We aspire to be better at that. Glass door and indeed reviews, places that people walk out

[00:12:30] the door and roast your company. You want to acknowledge, hey, we're working on this. We

[00:12:35] hear from our employees that we need to do better at this and we're doing it.

[00:12:39] And so you can get to an authentic place, a transparent place that still appeals to the right

[00:12:47] people and then use skills based hiring to try to make sure that they are. But we can talk about

[00:12:57] skills based hiring in a minute because I've got some ideas about that.

[00:13:00] Yeah, we definitely will. So I agree true behavior,

[00:13:04] sweeten organization, highlight the good, but also highlight what you can fix.

[00:13:08] I do want to jump into another part. I think this is in chapter five where you talk about content

[00:13:13] generation for recruiters. And a lot of recruiters I talked to, this is where they struggle because

[00:13:20] the only content they share is job postings and that gets pretty lame pretty quickly.

[00:13:25] So I loved your concept. It reminds me of the Gary Vaynerchuk concept of give, give,

[00:13:31] and then eventually ask. But what is in your words, what is the five to one content generation

[00:13:39] plan? How do you use it? How should recruiters leverage something like that?

[00:13:43] Yeah, Gary's concept and my concept are all the 80-20 principle. And the 80-20 principle

[00:13:51] works in all kinds of equations for relationships. If you give 80% of the time and ask 20% of

[00:13:58] the time, then you're going to be better off. And the reality is we generally ask first online

[00:14:06] because we're spoon fed content. So hey, check out this article about our CEO on the cover of Forbes

[00:14:14] or refer someone to this great job. Those are all asks. Right? If you're going to give first

[00:14:21] and build trust in your network on a regular basis to where then they are cool with the

[00:14:26] occasional ask, you want to provide things that are helpful, humorous, entertaining on a regular

[00:14:34] basis and even slightly personal. So I feel that everyone should have three things about themselves

[00:14:41] that they feel okay with sharing with the rest of the world that are not business related.

[00:14:48] And so for me, for years, I've got three boys. So I shared stories and pictures of my kids on

[00:14:54] social media and we had a boat on Great Bind Lake and I'm into photography and travel. And so

[00:15:01] like all these things come together to be my three things. And I'm constantly just building

[00:15:06] relationships and entertaining, which is the main thing recruiters should be doing. You want to

[00:15:12] keep your network warm and trusted. And that's how I started out in the 90s. So we had

[00:15:19] these chat rooms, remember like AOL chat rooms and places where tech people.

[00:15:24] And recruiters would get booted out all the time for just going in there and posting jobs

[00:15:31] and recruiting. You get booted out. And so I actually taught myself to code during this time.

[00:15:37] I downloaded Dreamweaver and all those fun tools and I started building websites and

[00:15:43] hacking my way into learning about the skills that I was recruiting for. And so I would go

[00:15:50] into these chat rooms and post legitimate questions as a user, right? And contribute and say,

[00:15:56] hey, I've created this wild hack. Has anyone done something like this? I'm a passable hacker.

[00:16:02] And I built rapport with these folks and every once in a while I'd say, oh, by the way,

[00:16:08] this company's hiring. If you're interested or know somebody, let me know. But never post the job

[00:16:15] and follow all the rules. But it became easy to remember as 80, 20 or five to one. It's all very

[00:16:25] similar formula and you just want a cadence. And the reason for the cadence is its consistency

[00:16:34] over time. And what people tend to do is they've got an initiative, they've got a hiring event or

[00:16:42] whatever, they'll post posts and then they disappear for weeks or they get a new job and they stop

[00:16:48] posting for various reasons. And you can't do that. A week should never go by that you don't

[00:16:53] post something. And so if you're following your formula, it's easier to remember, hey,

[00:16:59] I'm off track here. Let's get back to center. Such good advice. I had an aha moment

[00:17:07] listening to you and realizing what so many recruiters fail to do. They talk about building

[00:17:14] their personal brand, but it's always the we're hiring or great opportunity. And I just cringe,

[00:17:21] but what a great formula to have. And I love the idea of sharing, like that's the recipe.

[00:17:28] Share something personal, share a cartoon you think is funny, but don't always be asking.

[00:17:34] Absolutely brilliant. Thank you. I had a real aha moment there. So you brought it up. Let's go there

[00:17:41] when we looked at the top four things in TA for 2024. Skill-based hiring is right up there.

[00:17:49] Do you see it as a disruptor in the way we hire? Share with us your thoughts about this

[00:17:55] trend for skill-based hiring. Before you do, can you define what skill-based hiring means to you?

[00:18:01] Because we've heard different definitions from different folks. Yeah. What I hear the most is

[00:18:08] skills-based hiring is based on things you've actually done and not things like degrees and

[00:18:15] certifications. So you actually have experience doing X. Now there's a flip side to that

[00:18:22] that I think gets overlooked. And I've done some live streams with Plum recently,

[00:18:29] and they're good at talking about this. Jason Putnam does a real good job of talking about

[00:18:34] soft skills-based hiring. The point of that is you do a psychometric assessment about a person's

[00:18:40] enthusiasm for the work that they would do at your organization. And a person who gets up

[00:18:48] every day and is excited about their job, who has five years of experience in a certain skill,

[00:18:54] is going to be a better hire than someone who's just doing it to get their next job that has

[00:18:59] 10 years experience with a certain skill. And so soft skills-based hiring is really important.

[00:19:06] What's your prediction? Where are we going with this? Is this going to be adopted from

[00:19:11] a lot of organizations? We're trying to figure out, is the resume going away or is this

[00:19:16] just a part of it? Yeah, a few things have happened in the last few years. The push towards

[00:19:24] salary transparency. Remember this? Google got sued and Amazon got sued and women were just

[00:19:32] getting paid drastically less. And so laws and rules started coming up about you can't ask about

[00:19:40] a person's salary history. That's a no now, you're not supposed to ask that. And so if you can't ask

[00:19:46] that then in theory, you don't have a baseline to decide where a person gets put salary-wise.

[00:19:54] And I feel like this works also well for people coming back to the workforce after having executive

[00:19:59] level positions. They just want to do good work. But if you can't ask about their $300,000

[00:20:05] salary, then you can't discriminate against them for $140,000 job that they're perfectly capable of

[00:20:11] doing. All right, so then fast forward we have the affirmative action ban, which kind of takes a lot

[00:20:18] of diversity out of the equation unfortunately for recruitment that also pushed away the necessity

[00:20:29] to have that college or university degree in the equation. If you don't have to consider that because

[00:20:40] of things like affirmative action, then you might have a even broader slate and potential for

[00:20:51] even better diverse recruiting. Now then unfortunately, we had a recession and

[00:20:57] TA jobs got slashed, diversity is one of the big roles that has been decimated by this.

[00:21:04] And so what happens next? I'll be interested to see how we rebuild from that. But if you're

[00:21:12] focusing on the skills, then you're not focusing on a university background or a collegiate

[00:21:19] background or any sort of macroeconomic thing. It's just you've done this work, you seem to be a

[00:21:26] good fit for this company. That should be the right way to hire people. Is it a trend? Yes.

[00:21:32] Is it a good trend? We'll see. We go through all these things saying this will make a company

[00:21:39] better and more productive. And then there's a study about that. And we use those numbers for

[00:21:44] years from one study. And then several studies come out and say, no, that was all trash. So

[00:21:49] we're going to do something else. And that's what will happen. We'll be on this for a couple

[00:21:54] of years. We've been talking about it now for a couple of years. It'll keep going. But

[00:21:58] the reality is technology will take us beyond that at some point soon.

[00:22:03] Agreed. It is interesting, Craig, because I know what you're referring to. Like as

[00:22:07] soon as you mentioned how one study will come out and say, this is all garbage and

[00:22:13] we'll never do it. We'll never get there. And when you look at who wrote those studies,

[00:22:17] and could there be a bit of a self-serving interest? I've read some studies out of the UK

[00:22:22] that is saying skill-based hiring, it's impossible. We'll never get there. And it's usually coming

[00:22:28] from those very large human capital management system providers that would mean they would have

[00:22:35] to rewrite their entire system in order to move in that direction. And we know that you can't

[00:22:40] move a ship that big. I think I hear what you're saying and I see it as well in the studies. And

[00:22:45] I love the tie that you made back to salary transparency and diversity, equity and inclusion

[00:22:52] because looking at the skills and as you mentioned, Plum, Plum talks about what do you like doing?

[00:23:00] Imagine, oh my God, put all those things in one blender and mix it up. It does make for

[00:23:07] a more engaged workforce for sure. That's right. Yeah. Also, when we're looking at some of these

[00:23:12] studies recently, even when you looked at who in 2023 and so far in 2024 have been doing really well,

[00:23:20] job boards are slowly declining. But what we're seeing is the gig workforce, like Fiverr and

[00:23:28] Upwork, their revenues are up. Give us your thoughts on the workforce composition of the

[00:23:35] future of work. Do you think that the gig economy is going to be a major factor in the future or will

[00:23:40] it continue? I think it already is. And I think one of the ways that we're doing more with less

[00:23:49] on paper, layoffs left and right, we're outsourcing a lot of the traditional things to

[00:23:56] gig workers and maybe they're gig workers plus AI, right? Who cares? But gig workers who are

[00:24:03] able to create these things quickly and build processes and fix equations and all these creative

[00:24:10] things that you're able to do as well, they're your outsource team now. And your traditional

[00:24:17] 20k a month marketing firm is also doing the same thing. They're outsourcing half of things they

[00:24:25] do to Fiverr and Upwork and AI. And so it's already here, it's not going away. And if you think about

[00:24:34] what we've seen in trends in universities, the student populations are declining fairly rapidly.

[00:24:42] Part of this is due to COVID. Part of it was already happening before COVID. Some of it is

[00:24:50] generational thing, right? Wealthier parents equal kids that don't have to have as much school and

[00:24:56] can still make a living and do well. And that's just been the way our economy has worked. A lot

[00:25:03] of these kids now are not finishing school. Some of them are not even going to school,

[00:25:08] but they're getting training to do some of this gig work stuff. And that's where

[00:25:16] a lot of this economy comes from. I think that completely aligns with what we were talking when

[00:25:20] it comes to skills, base hiring because they're acquiring one particular skill and bring it to

[00:25:26] Upwork Fiverr. Interesting perspective. I wanted to go through the whole episode without talking

[00:25:33] about AI and I'm almost there but I think I might have to bring it up in this case.

[00:25:39] Because one of the things that I'm dealing with talking to a lot of practitioners and

[00:25:42] leaders is the quality of candidates have gone down significantly over say the last decade.

[00:25:50] A lot of people blame it on the easy apply, which I don't think is a culprit because you needed to

[00:25:55] figure out something for these horrendous ATS and HCM's application process. But

[00:26:02] indeed being the main driver of it has really brought the Amazon approach to applying for

[00:26:08] jobs like that one click apply. Then if you add on to that AI assisting people to apply,

[00:26:15] we've heard of the company like LazyApply that you can do 750 applications in one day.

[00:26:21] Then in Canada a huge challenge that we have is we have a lot of international applicants

[00:26:28] that are not actually in the country. So you take all of those factors, less recruiters,

[00:26:33] as you mentioned, a lot of teams have laid off the recruiters, less resources,

[00:26:37] a ton more applicant but generally not qualify. What's your take on this? Is this something that

[00:26:44] is going to be like these couple of years then we're going to get over it or is this

[00:26:48] something that is going to be a challenge for talent acquisition in the future?

[00:26:54] So it is a huge challenge. We are seeing recruiters with a lot more recs on their plate

[00:27:00] than we have in the past. When you get past 20 or 25 recs, you're not doing a good job.

[00:27:05] We've got low churn and turnover in the workforce right now. Even though the unemployment numbers

[00:27:11] come out to pretend to be great, they're not. Especially in white collar workforces,

[00:27:17] there's a lot of people unemployed but the majority of people that those numbers come from,

[00:27:23] good numbers, are hourly workers. And so they're all doing great. Recruiting is not broken there.

[00:27:30] People from other countries aren't applying to those jobs either. So we have this as a

[00:27:36] white collar problem and it is a problem that a couple of knockout questions or opt-in

[00:27:41] questions as I like to call them could fix. If we just take the extra step with an easy

[00:27:46] apply and create a landing page or a chatbot that asks a couple of questions and then

[00:27:52] creates a candidate home in the applicant tracking system or updates a candidate home

[00:27:56] in the applicant tracking system, those bridges are now easier and easier to build.

[00:28:01] Almost every ATS has an API that you can create a webhook to. So all of these excuses for not

[00:28:10] doing it are bad excuses but technology will save the day soon and weed out the AI applicants

[00:28:19] within a couple of years will be past this problem. Okay, interesting take. It's funny you say

[00:28:25] knockout or opt-in questions because I agree with you and we've moved away from it over the years.

[00:28:31] Right? This was very common practice when I started recruitment in the early 2000. We had

[00:28:36] multiple opt-in questions so we're coming out. So Craig, I was on LinkedIn not long ago and I

[00:28:42] saw a picture of you. I saw a picture of you with Bill Borman, Matt Charney, Joel Cheeseman and I

[00:28:49] forget who else but it was like the motley crew of talent acquisition. It shows of how long that

[00:28:56] you've been doing this and you're like, I don't want to call you no G but you're kind of a no

[00:29:00] G in this space so that is probably why your talent net conference and you held it last

[00:29:08] week and I had a lot of FOMO because I was looking at the pictures and I'm like, this looks awesome.

[00:29:12] It's a movie theater and you had the who's who of the industry to attend so how did they go?

[00:29:18] What was the goal of this conference? Yeah, it's a lot of fun. So one of the reasons the talent

[00:29:24] net conference has always been popular and good is because we've got so many leaders that are

[00:29:30] of the OG school right here in Texas. And we're in the middle of the country. It's

[00:29:36] really a regional event but it's become such a go-to thing that we get people from all over the

[00:29:41] country and all over the world attending for different reasons. So Dallas is a drastically

[00:29:46] different thing than the Austin event and we were actually supposed to be at Yeti's headquarters

[00:29:53] for this conference and we outgrew the space very quickly. Oh wow. And just turns out that

[00:29:58] next door to Yeti's headquarters is this cinema movie theater that they paid to put us into

[00:30:03] which turned out to be awesome. And so it was fun. Our event is sort of intimate right? It's not a

[00:30:09] 1500 or 15,000 person thing. It's a couple hundred most of the time and we create a safe space to have

[00:30:18] honest conversations and that's what we do. So we're showing off our latest innovations and

[00:30:25] ideas. William Tencup calls it a speakers conference. He says that we all go there

[00:30:30] to show off what we're going to talk about for the next year and basically what we've learned in

[00:30:34] the last six months, we're trying out our new material. And I invite my customers to come

[00:30:39] tell case studies of innovative things that we've done together and then I invite my sort of

[00:30:45] influential friends to interview them about it or sit on a panel with them. And it's just fun

[00:30:50] because the rest of the recruiting community gets to come watch and if they're good

[00:30:54] participants then I ask them to speak at a future event. So the community evolves and a lot

[00:31:02] of the leaders in our space who are also speakers got their first opportunity ever to speak at a

[00:31:08] talent net live conference. And so now those leaders are sending their people saying you have

[00:31:14] to go to this and tell me what's cool and what's new and bring it back. And in my conference

[00:31:21] everybody is a colleague. So it doesn't matter if you're brand new or if you've been doing it for 20

[00:31:26] years, if you're a vendor, if you're an analyst, if you're currently a practitioner, everybody in

[00:31:31] this space does all of those things at some point very often. And so we're all colleagues

[00:31:38] and then I make people raise their hand if they're looking for work because just because you're

[00:31:43] not employed right now, does that mean you're now not my colleague? No. It's right there in

[00:31:47] my book, Job Seekers are our future coworkers. And so you might be sitting next to your next

[00:31:52] customer or employer or vendor. The CEO of your next coolest tool might be sitting next to you at this

[00:31:58] event and that's sort of how we roll. We're all in it together. It's fun. When's the next one?

[00:32:04] So November 8th at Lenox headquarters. If you look on the cover of your air conditioner

[00:32:10] it's going to say Lenox on it and we're going to their headquarters in Richardson, Texas.

[00:32:15] We've got some one-off events in the meantime. May 10th we're going to do the

[00:32:20] Talent Technology Summit, also in Dallas. And then in August we're going to do the

[00:32:26] Talent Operations Summit and there's going to be lots of tech and inspiration and cool

[00:32:34] things to see but there's also going to be a lot of roundtables where we're going to sit

[00:32:37] around and talk about it. And so all of these things can be found at talentnetlive.com.

[00:32:42] Perfect. I was going to ask that. And the book Hiring Humans is available everywhere. I'm assuming

[00:32:48] Amazon is your most popular destination. It is. I do recommend for all our listeners. It's a really

[00:32:54] quick read. I think I read it in a plane ride so it was amazing. It's exactly the type of

[00:33:00] book that I like, Craig. So if anyone wants to get a hold of you what's the best way to get a

[00:33:04] hold of you? Yeah. So hiring-humans.com is a great way. There's plenty of ways at my

[00:33:11] website and talentnetlive.com to get a hold of me. I'm easy to Google. My search game is strong.

[00:33:16] You can Google Craig Fisher and Recruiting or Talent and you're going to find me all over the place.

[00:33:21] I am on social channels at Fish Dogs. Okay, tell me Fish Dogs. What does it mean?

[00:33:26] Okay. So when I started my first website and blog, craigfisher.com was already taken.

[00:33:33] And this is back in the sort of mid 2000s. And at that time it was cool to have kind of a

[00:33:38] hacker name. A buddy of mine from college, when your name is Craig Fisher, people call you fish

[00:33:44] everything, right? Yeah. Fish sticks. And he called me Fish Dogs. And my original blog was about

[00:33:50] Craig Fisher and his dogs. I was already using my five to one ratio and I had discovered that

[00:33:56] tech people, there was a big dog owner community within the Dallas technology sector. And so

[00:34:04] I was writing about technology and dogs and learning how to blog and all kinds of things. And so

[00:34:10] I just use that as my Twitter handle and then Instagram. And so that's it.

[00:34:16] It's a very bro type of nickname. I like it. So Craig, this was a pleasure. I've been following

[00:34:22] you for a really long time. I appreciate what you do for the talent acquisition community.

[00:34:27] Shelly, we're going to have to attend one of these conference very soon.

[00:34:32] Yeah, I'm in. I'm in. Let's do it.

[00:34:34] Let's go. I love the whole community. It's really true to your brand, Craig, about

[00:34:42] the five to one give, give, give and creating a safe space for us to talk about those challenges

[00:34:48] that we have. Just brilliant. Just brilliant. Thank you so much for what you do for the

[00:34:53] community. Really appreciate it. I appreciate both of you. You've been doing this podcast for a good

[00:34:58] long time now and I'm glad to finally be here. Yeah, it's been way too long. So for everyone listening

[00:35:03] Coming to Texas. Yes. Please do go get the book Hiring Humans by Craig Fisher. Craig,

[00:35:10] thank you so much for joining us. Great to be here guys. Thank you. Thank you. Au revoir.

[00:35:23] Shelly, let's face it. Texting candidates is the easiest way to hire quicker today,

[00:35:29] but your cell phone doesn't connect to your ATS. You're sharing your personal number with strangers.

[00:35:34] That's pretty scary, right, Shelly? And it's not even legally compliant.

[00:35:39] This is where our friends at Rectex come in. They've created simple yet powerful text

[00:35:44] recruiting software that works with your ATS plus it's designed by recruiters for recruiters

[00:35:51] so you know it works. To learn more and book a demo, visit www.rectxt.com.

[00:36:00] Mention the recruitment flex and get 10% off annual plans. Hi, my name is Sara and I want to tell

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