Grow Your Own Recruiter
Livestream and Transcript
Big Tech may be firing in bulk, but demand for technical skills of all kinds isn't dipping even a bit for my clients—if anything, the race for talent is hotting up. So where can you find great candidates, especially if you aren't technical yourself?
It may seem that recruitment agencies have the answer: after all, they have loads of connections and can send you a neverending stream of candidates. But that's the very problem: far too many engineers with excellent pedigrees and solid CVs, but many of them aren't actually who you want. And it can take forever to pick through the chaff to find the wheat.
Instead, for many years I've advocated hiring an internal recruiter, one who works for you and is fully dedicated to your roles. With the right skills, an in-house recruiter can filter candidates for needed skills before anyone else interviews them, as well as scouring sources like Github for passive candidates. Further, she's always polishing your brand and finding new places to hunt down elusive engineers. Those of my clients who've grown their teams by 100% or more in a few months have all gone the internal route—why not try it?
Join me and the best internal recruiter I know, Stevie Buckley of TalentStuff, to discuss:
The dark art of sourcing and whether you need to nurture relationships before hiring—or just dial for dollars.
Where to look for an internal recruiter and what skills she has to have to be successful.
Why some of the best candidates for your role may not even know the programming languages you use, and how to find these hidden candidates nonetheless.
And here’s the transcript:
Host (00:00):
I've now pushed the button twice. I think that's worked. Let's see. Let me get a little more light on, on the subject. There we go. That's a bit better. Oh, good. Now I think we're actually live. Oh, Haah. You guys got a good shot of my stomach while I was fixing the lights and I didn't realize we were light. Hi Stevie. Hi everyone. Excellent to have everyone here. And as people are coming on in I can see we've got a couple folks, and Berg has already said hello. Please do say hello in the chat whatever platform you're using. So we should be able to see it from YouTube and Facebook and LinkedIn including Stevie's wife, who I gather is watching us on one of those. So that's good. And I'll introduce Stevie and our topic in a moment.
Host (00:42):
But while people are coming in, let me just mention why you're here. So what, where are you and what is this? This is the Squirrel Squadron that's my community of oh, and by the way, I'm squirrel. I guess I should say that. it's there on the screen. This is the Squirrel Squadron, my community of tech and non-tech people learning together. So I think we have some folks who are more recruiter focused today, at least that's what I saw in the signups. And we have some folks who are hardcore engineers who are looking for jobs, perhaps. And we have company founders, CEOs see FOS people who are looking for folks to join their company. So we're going to cover all kinds of interesting recruiting topics today. The Squirrel Squadron has events every week. So there are Zoom calls for executives.
Host (01:24):
There are live streams like this one open to everyone. By the way, this is all being recorded, so if you're missing some of this or you have to go, don't worry about it. You can always come back and watch the recording or you can ask your friends to do. So. There's a forum where all these event recordings show up and where people are discussing all kinds of interesting topics. I was just commenting on well, internal recruiters. I hope Roland's here cuz he was asking a great question on the forum about that. Which we should get to Stevie, let me forget to bring up Roland's question. But we also have discussions about GPT four and Silicon Valley Bank and the latest in mob programming and you name it, we get up to it on the forum.
Host (02:07):
So that's at squirrel squadron.com. We'll put the links up at the end if anybody's interested in that. And I should mention also that the upcoming events include one on mod programming, one on making it up as you go. So if you're an executive and you're thinking, gosh, I really don't know what I'm doing, that's normal. And there's lots you can learn from improv theater. So we'll do some improv theater exercises that's coming up soon. And I'm in Krakoff doing a keynote on the topic of why Scrum and all the other frameworks are, are, are not something you need to worry about. You can do better without frameworks. So that's coming in May. All kinds of fun stuff. I think we've got quorum of listeners and viewers on the way. So let's get into the discussion. This is Stevie. Stevie is my old friend. I think we first met when, at one of the very first Hacker News events. Must have been 12, 15 years ago, something like that. I can't even remember how long.
Stevie (02:59):
I reckon it was, it wasn't 15. Cause I haven't been in the country that long, but,
Host (03:04):
Okay. Well then it can't be that
Stevie (03:06):
I think it was about 10 to 12 years ago, give or take something
Host (03:11):
Like that. 2012. 2013. Yep. So I met Stevie as a recruiter of course, but I didn't know him that way. I knew him as one of the two amazing people who ran the Hacker News meetup, which was in that period. And, and up until you guys stopped it a few years ago the premier place for startups in London. If you were in a startup in London and you didn't go to the Hacker News meetup, you were missing out. You didn't know the latest and the greatest and, and who was who and what was happening. So that was an amazing organizational feat, Stevie, and I was very impressed by it. And then I watched you do internal recruitment at multiple clients and really be a fantastic advocate for recruitment, which is what we're going to talk about today. So that's my introduction to Stevie. I actually don't know too much about what you've been doing recently, except I know it's talent stuff. And it has to do with internal recruitment. So what have you been doing since then?
Stevie (04:07):
Well, I mean, thank you for giving me far too much credit squirrel, but I think when it comes to hacks, London officially the largest tech meetup outside of the US. There you go.
Host (04:19):
I'm not surprised. Yeah,
Stevie (04:21):
I have to give a huge amount of credit to Dimitri Graboff, who hopefully is tuning in and listening, but Dimitri,
Host (04:29):
He's a member of the community. Absolutely. So if he's not, he'll watch the recording. I'm sure
Stevie (04:33):
Dimitri was the one that used to do all the heavy lifting. I just got to be the not so pretty face on the front lines, you know. So what have I been doing? So for the past four-ish years, up until September of last year I was working with a YC startup in London called Permitive initially as their VP talent. And then I kind of took on a bit more responsibility, but they were a very, very early stage startup at the time, 25, 30 people scaled up to about at the point where I left, there was about 230 people last year. And since then, I've been back kind of building my advisory and consultancy business. I do a lot of work with very early stage startups, startups that are on the cusp of growing and are mildly panicking about the task ahead of them, or startups that have been handed a ton of money and have just realized that they have no idea how to actually go about the people scaling piece. And I typically come in in various different capacities and help them, help them not just to spend their money, but spend it a bit more wisely and figure out how to scale up in the most efficient way, was looking after the people that make them successful. Right. So, fantastic.
Host (05:58):
And, and you're doing that on a consultancy basis, so you're, so you're doing that for multiple different companies now?
Stevie (06:03):
Yeah, so I work with a few different companies at a time in different types of capacities. So I typically take on one, one major client at a time, and I'm doing some passive work with a handful of other smaller companies. And yeah it's going well despite the fact that the tech industry seems intense and collapsing and upon itself, but
Host (06:28):
Well collapsing and growing at the same time. I want to cover that.
Stevie (06:31):
Yeah.
Host (06:31):
But let me come to this. There's a huge difference in your approach from sort of the typical thing. I, I remember the first person that my company ever hired, we kind of spun out from somebody else, so we had some people to start, but then I couldn't hire, I was terrible at it. And my boss said, well, this person just kind of phoned me up and, you know, I don't normally answer the calls, but this one sounded good. So you known we got a person to come and be in your team, a technologist to come write code. And I said, okay, I don't know. I guess this is a good idea. And the person turned up and he couldn't type. He typed like this all day and it got worse from there.
Host (07:06):
I mean, maybe he was a genius, but couldn't type. No, this was not a genius. This was the opposite. So it was a total disaster. And that kind of maybe not quite that egregious, but that kind of just go to the market, get a recruiter, get a hired gun to go out and find a bunch of people for me or to outsource. That's kind of the standard. That's kind of the normal thing. You don't do that. So say more about what's different. What's this internal recruitment idea that you are such a great advocate for?
Stevie (07:34):
Okay, so rapid fire, there's two forms of recruitment in the tech space. You have the agency model, which is your external recruiters, which is what everyone's kind of familiar with, and and knows they're the people who go out and harass a bunch of engineers and try and convince them to come and join your company, right? And then you have internal recruiters, which is very firmly my space. Internal recruiters are people that you as an employer hired directly. They're a member of your staff, they're a permanent employee, they're one of your team, they're permanently embedded in their business, and they are exclusively focused on hiring just for you and your company. And, and most importantly, they're hiring their peers, right? They're not hiring for our clients, they're not hiring for commission. They're hiring people that they're going to be working with themselves on a day-to-day basis. So immediately you can already kind of tap into the kind of motivational differences between the two. So I very firmly, like I said, represent that internal angle. However, I have worked on the agency side at the beginning of my career for my sins. Most, most internal recruiters have in some capacity.
Host (08:48):
Sure. You gotta cut your teeth somewhere. So when you're consulting with your clients, are you helping them to find internal recruiters? Are you acting as that internal recruiter, or how does that work?
Stevie (08:59):
So the way I work is typically, I'll come in where a company has nothing, right? They don't have any traditional HR infrastructure. They don't have any effective recruitment process. They're just kind of, everything has been ad hoc up until now, usually using a lot of agencies and so on. Now, what I'll do is I'll come in and I will help them to, sometimes I'll help them hire out a few key roles, but I'll, I'll build some internal process and structure for them, right? So, first and foremost, very straightforward. Do you have something better than a spreadsheet or a Trello board to manage your interviews and so on and so forth, right? Do you have something more than just an email inbox where applications for your jobs are going? Right? So they're the absolute fundamentals, right? Having a process, a structure getting set up, depending on the volume of scale that they're predicting, I'll often help them to hire a couple of strategic people on the people and talent side if needs be, if they're scaling a lot, if they're only doing a little bit of hiring, then while I'll often do is I'll work with them to show them how to run a more efficient process, right?
Stevie (10:15):
How can you hire quicker, spend less money along the way, create a better experience for your candidates, spend less of your own time, you know, interviewing people who you probably aren't going to hire in the first place and, and so on. So, you know, it's the old adage of teach a man to fish or teach a person to fish in this case.
Host (10:39):
So are you training somebody within the organization to do that? Do you often help them hire someone with maybe a more junior version of you? What's kind of left when you're done?
Stevie (10:49):
So typically at the end, what happens is I bring in a more junior version of me, right? Probably not a junior version of me in every sense, but because most people probably wouldn't enjoy that, but a junior version of me in terms of skills and experience at least. So that typically happens at the end of the process. Now, what I often do is I'm usually working with either the founders directly or the leadership team, because if they're not equipped and all in, in terms of how to hire well and how to look after your people, then there's no point in the engineers or the design team or the product team going through interview training and so on and so forth. You gotta lead by example, right? And typically in smaller stage startups, founders are meeting almost every person that they hire in the first place anyway, right? So I don't just hold their hand and show them, okay, this is how you do a good interview, right? Typically what I'm doing in an awful lot at the beginning is shadowing, learning how they currently work, how they position themselves and the company, how they approach interviews, how they approach screening cvs, even as simply as that, right? And, and then we'll pick apart the process, right? Where are you blocked? Where are you struggling? Where is the most room for improvement? Here's a bunch of recommendations, here's what we can do over the next, whether it's few weeks, few months, whatever the case may be, to level this up.
Host (12:12):
Fantastic. Okay. So we've got some comments, which are fantastic. I'm going to ask Laura, who's watching us and keeping everything running behind the scenes, just could you check that we're on LinkedIn and on Facebook the way we're, you know, we normally are, the reason is just all the comments are from YouTube, which is great. I'm glad people are on YouTube. That's just unusual for us. So I'm just a little curious. I'm sure Laura will let us know if something's not working. But we have some great comments and people have asked are asking questions, which is super, this'll be a short discussion if you guys don't ask questions, if you ask great questions. We're going to be here a while, and we're going to cover a lot of great stuff. So please interrupt with questions. Put in your questions in the chat, don't hesitate. So we have Berg to say hi to.
Host (12:50):
Thank you. We have Kaylee who says I think she never tires of strengthening the muscle to of her talent hat and seeking to do it better. Great. We're going to do our best to help you with that, Kaylee. And we've got Jess Sar, I hope I'm saying your name right? Who says Stevie, do you work with the internal hires on training them to take over the HR responsibilities moving forward as the company grows and develops? Oh, someone says we're, we're on LinkedIn, so good. I'm glad to hear that. Thanks, Matthew. Go ahead. What would you say to Jess?
Stevie (13:23):
Short answer is yes. So the answer to almost every question by default is, it depends, right? Because every company's different. Every company's different in terms of the what's ahead of them in the next 1224 months, and so on and so forth. Some companies are going through hyperscale. Some companies are taking a very steady progressive approach. Some companies are, are staying relatively stable in terms of growth. So it fundamentally depends. But what I often do, the premise of HR and so on, there's so much nuance within it, right? That requires legitimate expertise and skill to maintain at scale as a minimum. I make sure that the companies I work with are at the very least, capable of being compliant, right? So it's not unusual for me to turn up at a very early stage startup, for example, and say, okay, where are all the employee contracts? And here in return I think they're in this person's inbox. Okay, we gotta sort that out. And just like helping them with very basic fundamental structure so that they can avoid any mishaps, avoid any data issues, compliance issues, privacy issues, and so on. And yeah, so in that sense, I help it like kind of elevate everyone in terms of what they need to be aware of and conscious of at their specific, particular stage of growth, right?
Host (14:53):
And when you're finished, you leave a more, I think we were talking about this as Jesse was asking your question. You leave a more junior version of you and I'm not sure I quite heard it. Do you hire that person? Do you bring train somebody from inside to become that person? What's your most common way?
Stevie (15:11):
Most common is to hire someone in, right? So most common is what I typically tend to do is I'll bring in someone with a bit of experience in a similar field to me, and I will typically work with them for a short period of time to not just hand over, but to make sure that they are, have the kind of rounded capability to pick up where I leave off effectively. Right? And that's typically a short period of time where I'll work with them. And yeah, I've not yet kind of converted a non recruiter into a recruiter from an internal Interview. That's not one I've done yet.
Host (15:52):
What do you have to teach when you're teaching, say the founder or the ceo or an internal HR person or someone, and they are saying, you know, I think maybe the contracts are in that shoebox over there or whatever, you know, they're not really where they need to be. What are the common mistakes they're making? One is, it sounds like not keeping track of contracts, but what are they doing in terms of recruitment that they could do better? What are you saying to them, this is a skill you don't have. By the time I'm finished, you're going to have this skill. Either I'm going to hire it or I'm going to teach you.
Stevie (16:20):
So there's a lot of very common kind of tropes that you'll see from a recruitment point of view, right? So the first thing you can do with almost every company is just look at their careers page and the jobs that they're advertising, right? And how those jobs are written can often tell you a lot about the internal structure, right? If you're reading very generic, not particularly inspiring job ads, chances are they've kind of just been copying and pasting and hoping for the best, right? But where we're typically starting is kind of opening their eyes a little bit, right? So one of the most common things that I'll see for companies that are hiring your typical software engineer, right, is first requirements, you know, computer science degree from a reputable university. Okay, fine. I, I can probably guess why you're asking for that. There's, you're a huge, you're probably coming from a computer science background yourself. You're a huge believer in software engineers having the fundamentals.
Host (17:18):
My dog agrees with you. I'll my mute. Go ahead.
Stevie (17:21):
That's ok. And what I will do is I'll help them to kind of open their eyes as to how you have a, you have a talent pool that you're starting with. Every company is the same talent pool. It's the world of software engineers, right? And for every requirement you're introducing, you're excluding a specific portion of that talent pool. Now that's intentional. You want to exclude certain portions of it. If you are hiring experienced Python engineers, you don't necessarily need people with no Python experience applying for the role. So it's okay to indirectly exclude those people by saying experience Python, experience with Python required, et cetera.
Host (18:02):
Can I disagree with you for a second?
Stevie (18:04):
Oh, I've hit your favorite topic, please.
Host (18:06):
You absolutely have what's one of my favorites. I actually have a different favorite now because I was doing something just before this, and you're going to have to listen to my dog. Sorry, she's just excited because I disagree with you that if you want experience and, and skill for your Python team, that you should advertise for Python developers. Because some of the very best engineers that I have ever hired are people who did not know the programming language or the framework or the industry of the team they were joining. And the way I always describe that, is with a little visual aid that some of you may have seen in my in my tweets and so on. This is a driftwood owl and I don't know much about the person who made this, but what I do know is that this person went to the beach and found some driftwood and said, boy, that looks like an owl.
Host (18:48):
What they did not do was go to the beach and say, I wonder if I can find the owl shape that I'm looking for today. Right? They went down and found something that looked amazing. They made it look amazing, and they did not know what it was going to be when they woke up that morning. And the same is true of the very best engineers. The ones that you can really make super productive are the ones who are learning different programming languages and different tools all the time. So I have found that I would much rather not be specific in that way. I'll say, I'd be happy to talk to people with any programming experience who want to work in this industry, in this area with this code, with this framework. So Stevie, do you disagree with me? Or have you seen the same hook? How's it look to you?
Stevie (19:31):
If I was able to convince all my clients to think that way, squirrel, I'd be a significantly wealthier amount.
Host (19:37):
Excellent. Well, we should talk about collaborating because I, I've been convincing people for a while and I agree it's a hard one to get people to do because it is so simple to just say, well, I need a Python engineer. Why on earth would I hire this Ruby person? I need a person who knows data engineering. Why would I hire, I hire this person who's been working at Meta in P H P for years? Well, the reason is the person at Meta, for example, has been working with huge amounts of data for a long time and may not know the tools you're using, but knows some really amazing tricks that you can use. So that's my take on it. And I'll encourage everybody who's watching and listening talk to us more, either me or Stevie, about how you could look for engineers who don't know the language because they are amazing.
Stevie (20:26):
No argument for me. The more the less prescriptive about specific languages companies are, the better as far as I'm concerned. But, you know, I get you.
Host (20:39):
Can't always win that battle. I agree.
Stevie (20:40):
No, you can't always win that battle. But like, to, to the point where we talk about excluding people intentionally and so on, like, a lot of people don't realize how they're unintentionally excluding a large amount of people, right? And there's been lots of conversations about this from a diversity and inclusivity point of view, which is great. And that's how you educate these people, right? Is by making it a part of the everyday discussion, right? And on the degree point, the premise is very simple. Not everyone has the means and the capability to go and study at university, right? So by default, by just simply putting that requirement in your job, and you're immediately excluding a huge percentage of people who would otherwise be more than capable of doing their job.
Host (21:32):
Best engineers I ever hired didn't finish high school.
Stevie (21:34):
There you go.
Host (21:36):
As a high school board teenager at school. He didn't finish, didn't go to university for sure, but he was amazing.
Stevie (21:44):
But I mean, that's where we start. We start by pairing back those things, right? So by helping the founders or the hiring teams or the hiring managers look at their company and their, their job ad and their process from the point of view of a candidate, right? It sounds very cheesy and very on the nose, but fundamentally, we're teaching them how to be empathetic with the people that they're trying to hire, right? Because if they can do that, if they can constantly maintain the lens of how does this look to the person I'm trying to hire, they're going to be very, very good at hiring all of a sudden, right? because unfortunately, most companies don't, most companies not most, a lot of companies still maintain this anti antiquated point of view of, I have a job, therefore you must jump through hoops and bend over backwards to convince me to hire you.
Host (22:31):
It's all about me and what I need. Now you can do that if you're hiring for a commoditized role. So I wouldn't advise people use the driftwood method or hire people who don't know say bookkeeping, right? So I have a bookkeeper and I expect my bookkeeper to have taken some courses in bookkeeping and to understand balance sheets and income statements. because I sure don't. And I'm glad that they do. But that's a commodity. That's something you can get off the shelf. We've been doing balance sheets and income statements for 500 years, if not longer. So but that's not true in, in technology, technology we're inventing today. I I was just using something I want to talk about. We have a question on it. There was invented, yes, well, as released yesterday, invented say in the last six months, which may revolutionize hiring, that's GPT four.
Host (23:21):
So there's so many things in technology that you, if you went to university and studied them, you'd need to, you'd need to have had a time machine right back then to have known that you'd be working with whatever it is today. So I, I can't emphasize enough that I agree with you that for places where it's not a commodity, you need creative people. You don't need people who took a whole bunch of boxes. And that means you need to approach them completely differently. You need to approach them more on an equal footing knowing that they have 10 other recruiter emails in their inbox and give them something that's interesting that will bring them in. Is that how you do it, Stevie? Do you see it differently? How does it look to you?
Stevie (24:06):
I think I agree with you for the most part. I, again, kind of harken back to my earlier points, right? It is very circumstantial, right? So I noticed in the comments the wonderful Celine Hamid made a very valid point. For those that aren't aware, Celine was the first internal recruiter at Deliveroo.
Host (24:27):
Hi Celine, nice to have you.
Stevie (24:29):
He's a remarkable recruiter, makes a very valid point, right? He, at an early stage startup, when you've got a lot of pressure from VCs and you've got a lot of pressure generally to move quickly, you, it can be very difficult to bring in someone who isn't particularly familiar with your tech stack, right? Often you need immediate impact, and you don't necessarily have the time or resources to help someone get up to speed, right? And there can be an awful lot of pressure to just hire someone who knows the stuff, bring them in, and let them be effective immediately. Now, as, as the company scales, that that pressure eases off and it becomes a very different challenge, right? But yeah, to begin with it in an early stage, it can be very, very challenging.
Host (25:19):
Well, and so that's why I'm a big advocate of making sure that you hire someone who has a very high index for learning that the person is very interested in learning really quick. So the people who were amazing that I described were not people who just turned up in six months later, they were able to write code. It was two weeks of learning the new language, learning the new stack that they were production. They were productive on day one. They just, you know, ramped up very fast to be as good as in the existing development team by that point. Now I had to test them to do that. So I wonder, Stevie, do you do tests? Do you run them? Do somebody else do them? How do you verify that the person in front of you has the ability, say at an early stage startup to be that super productive person, maybe later, has the ability to do management or principal engineer work influencing others? How do you test that?
Stevie (26:09):
Do you mean during the kind of interview process or after they've already joined your company?
Host (26:14):
No, no. I've interviewed, yeah. So you want to make sure you get a person who, who matches the description. I'm giving not a person who might be good in a year when you don't have a year.
Stevie (26:23):
Sure. So there's two aspects there, right? One is the kind of technical capability, right? One is the kind of, I guess, more leadership potential, right? So the technical capability piece is always a sore point that I tend to have not arguments, but I tend to run into challenges with experienced CTOs and so on when it comes to vetting their engineers, right? there's only so much that a take home test or a two hour GitHub challenge or an online platform can tell you about a person's coding capability. And I promise you, it's not everything you need to know about that person's capabilitythe only thing that I can say that they're universally good for is establishing whether or not someone can actually write code, right? And that's about it. I don't necessarily believe that they're a very good measure of a person's capability of writing code. There are different types of types.
Host (27:22):
It gives you one aspect, it gives you, it gives you a particular, an important aspect of their character, but they are broader. And this is a narrow slice. Is that how you see that?
Stevie (27:32):
Yeah, I very much so. And I, that doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't do it, right? You shouldn't necessarily just take people's word for it, right? But it's like, I'd ask anyone, ultimately, what, are you going to learn more from it? You're going to learn more from them sending you back a result of a test that they went off and didn't silo that you had no visibility over, or would you learn more if you, whether it's virtually or in person, spent a couple of hours pairing on a challenge together, right? You get to not just see their technical skills, but you get to like, understand how they communicate and how they think about challenges and problems and so on and so forth. And, and honestly, the most effective tests that I've seen from a technical point of view are one where the candidate is asked to effectively tackle the, the challenge with one of the team, right? And not just go off on the silo and do it themselves in at home. So yeah. So from a technical point of view, that's generally my point of view, and that's what I've seen to what I have seen to be very effective, right? The kind of correlation
Host (28:38):
That's my favorite way.
Stevie (28:40):
The correlation between good results with that approach and performance measuring over time, right? Tends to be quite high, right? The kind of the alternative one, the leadership capability and, and future leader point of view and so on, it's a much harder one. It's a very, very subjective one to measure and test, right? I think for me, the piece that I keep coming back to is rooted in the values of that particular company, right? So what's that particular company's shape of a good leader right now? There's some universal truths around what makes a good leader and what makes a good whether it's head of or VP or whatever the case may be, right down the line. But for it to be good in your company, there needs, I think by defaults with almost everyone you hire, really, but more so with someone who you are earmarking for a future leadership role, there needs to be really strong alignment with how your company operates, right?
Stevie (29:44):
And typically it's the company values that, that dictate how that company operates and things and so on internally. You have to have, you have to have to have to have very capable, very experienced, and a very good leader meet with that person themselves, right? So you, you need experience to be able to tap into whether or not this person is kind of hitting all the hallmarks of a future leader, right? And that, and who, that person who's going to be interviewing them or speaking with them, or whatever the case may be, you kind of have to almost internally interview them first, right? What does their picture, and this is something we do, by the way, with every position, right? So if you're hiring a mid-level software engineer tomorrow, who's going to be involved in the interview process? Okay? We've got four people in total. You know, one's the CTO and one's another engineer, and one's a person from product and so on, right? Don't just give a list of names and tell them, go off and interview them. These people need to come together and they need to define a shared set of criteria that they want the successful person to meet. They all need to be on the same page, right? They all need to be in agreement of what good looks like for this specific role. Because I promise you, if that doesn't happen in advance, what you're going to get time and time again is the CTO loved them, the product people hated them, the engineers loved them, the product people were on the fence, or whatever the case may be. I'm blaming product a lot here. Like they're the blockers, but you get my point. So bringing these people together, doing that kind of internal alignment is critical. It's absolutely critical regardless of the seniority.
Host (31:30):
Makes sense. So my favorite way to do that is also to give a test. And it's actually a test that's very similar to the pairing. The good way of, of testing an engineer. You get them working on a problem. And so I'll have somebody and when I'm coaching the CEO or the CPO or whoever it is who's going to interview, just as you do, I'll tell them come up with a scenario and ideally a problem. You really have, like, when you don't know the answer to, and I'll often say to the candidate, you know, by the way, we may get some free consulting here. That's a good side effect, but it's not the goal. So here's our actual problem, how would you attack it? And there's various variations and various complexities you can do with that. But if I get them working on a real problem with somebody in the organization, that tells me pretty quickly whether their values match.
Stevie (32:19):
Makes sense. Cool.
Host (32:21):
I like we have so many good questions. Stevie, can I jump to questions? Is that all right? Please do.
Stevie (32:25):
Please do we
Host (32:25):
Have some great ones? So we have let's see. We have Sanjeev, I'm not going to put Sanjeev, you're someday you're going to get on the screen, but you write really long questions, so we're going to teach you some brevity, but that's all right. Sanjeev says when he's been an internal recruit, he actually himself has been one and I know him as a leader of an IT organization. He prefers the internal recruiter. His challenge has been having the capacity. So he might have one internal recruiter, but he has many roles to hire for. And so then he'll go and use an agency to help or he'd have one recruiter for the whole organization. And other roles outside. Technology will come first. So what's your approach? Do you advocate an internal recruiter who is just for technology? Would you say you can share it among the different parts of the organization? How does that work for you?
Stevie (33:27):
It depends, depends on the scale, depends on the size of the company, right? But if we take Permitive Myla company as a kind of a template example, right? So around the 200 person mark, give or take, right? If you've got 200 people and you're planning to grow to 3, 4, 5, 600, what if, regardless of the length of time, but the intention is to get to that level of scale at some point, if you don't already have someone exclusively focused on technical and go to market or commercial or ops even as a third possible candidate, then you're, you're going to be, you're going to be, you know, swimming against the tide constantly, right? So like you have, technical recruitment is a discipline in its own right? Okay. Like to be a really good recruiter for engineers and product people and, and designers as well, you need to kind of live and breathe it.
Stevie (34:28):
You need to be embedded in the communities, and you need to be embedded in both online and real life, right? In terms of understanding where these people operate, how they think, how they communicate, and what's important to them, and so on and so forth, right? The same can be said if you're hiring for, you know, experienced sales or customer success or marketing and so on and so forth. And honestly one of the things that I work with a lot of companies on is, is establishing that hiring plan, right? So if we look at your roadmap for the next 12 months, for example, what is our predicted growth depending on the levels of success of the company, right? So what, what do we need from an in infrastructure perspective to support this growth, right? If you know, you need to hire a 100 people over the next 12 months, well guess what?
Stevie (35:21):
You definitely need more than one recruiter, right? For sure. Because if you don't have more than one recruiter, you're going to spend an awful lot of money using external recruiters to, to pick up the gap, to pick up the space. Right? Fundamentally, in a well-rounded organization, like if you look at the bigger, more established companies, right? The, the aspirational companies, the companies, everyone tries to mimic the Spotifys and the, you know, the Metas and the Googles and so on and so forth, they all have refined, dedicated functions, right? There is a recruitment team exclusively focused on engineering, design, product marketing, customer success, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, you start with one, your generalist badass who can do a bit of everything, right? But as you grow, your function needs to grow with it, right? If you need to hire a team of 50 engineers.
Host (36:16):
Or, and we have a question on this. I if you're trying to grow by massive amounts, you know, 500 in a year or something like that, I don't know if you agree with me, but I would say you can't do that without dedicated recruiters in technology. So if you're, if you're going to grow your technology team by some massive amount I think you couldn't do it with generalists.
Stevie (36:37):
I agree. Yeah. I've always focused on people with who have laser focus on one particular area of expertise, and that's always worked very, very well for me. So, you know, the best sales recruiter I've ever worked with, they just spent their entire time exclusively focused on hiring salespeople. Nothing else. They never once hired an engineer in their lifebest engineering recruiter I ever worked with. She literally did nothing but engineering recruitments. I mean, she used to run a scholar meetup in her spare time because that's how focused she was, right? So, laser focused
Host (37:16):
Being a programming language for anybody who might not know. So that's one of those that... Write in it, but if you find a scholar programmer, they're likely to be pretty good. So that's a very good tip. Excellent. We were talking about tests before, and we got a question which I promise I didn't pay Jessa. I hope Jess, I hope I'm saying your name right to ask this question, but I really wanted to get it because the reason I was late coming to set up for this Stevie was that I was playing with G P T four, which I just got access to. And Jessa says, what's your perspective on how GPTX will affect the hiring process? Now I have a test, which I have used probably 1500 times.
Host (37:55):
I mean, literally 1,500 times I've given this test to different engineers. I calculated it once cuz I did so many interviews in my early days these days. I teach people to use it as part of my consulting. And so I thought, well, I'll try it out on GPT four. The GPT three really wasn't quite ready for it, but GPT four literally came out yesterday and I got access and I said, I'm doing recruitment with Stevie and I better have some opinion on this. So I'll see how badly it does on the test. It aced it. You've got the test. Absolutely right. It got every component, all the pieces that I do. And I do it very in a para-programming kind of way. So I'm typically watching the person write code and I advise them and make comments and suggest things. I'm not trying to catch them out. It's not a blackboard exercise, which a lot of engineers get very frustrated by, you know, write some obscure algorithm on the blackboard while I watch you, but nothing like that. So I'm interacting with the program. This is a program, writing a program, and I'm interacting with it and I got everything right. So I just wonder what you think, how are we going to do testing?
Stevie (38:56):
Yeah.
Host (38:56):
There are computers that can do the job. They at least can do the test, know that they can't do the actual job, right? Because we, they can't do the, the exact action that you're describing, the values adherence, the collaboration, the creative ideas. But man, they can pass a test.
Stevie (39:13):
I think. So it's my favorite topic at the moment, right? As it is for a lot of people in our industry. But I think the most, on the nose description, I've heard summary, I've heard of this technology is someone who referred to it as a second opinion machine which I absolutely adore. I think it's, I think it may be, I mean, it's very hard to tell what it's going to be like in five or 10 years time, right. But over the next year or two or three, it's, it's not likely to go off and just do the job for you. Right but it is likely to be a very effective companion. Right. And it's going to make interviewing harder. Right. have a lot of.
Host (39:58):
Think take home tests are dead. I can't see how anyone could put in.
Host (40:00):
Credence in a take-home test these days.
Stevie (40:02):
But that comes back to my points, right? I've been advocating for this before GPT, you know, rather than giving people a take-home test, give them something that they pair with you on rights, very hard to fake it using GPT when you're sitting there with them, or you know, even if it's on a life pairing online or whatever the case may be. Right? It's not impossible, but it's very, very difficult, right?
Host (40:22):
So, yeah, I'd have to, I'd have to kind of look over here and Yes, Stevie, this is the next code I would write. Yeah,
Stevie (40:28):
It happens. But look, I think what's more interesting for me, it's, it's less interesting for me to think about how someone might bluff their way into doing a job. Because what GPT isn't going to do is it's not going to make you successful in that job, right? Yeah. But what's more interesting to me is how that technology can actually elevate this process, right? And how it can help you hire better people and so on and so forth. And what's really interesting to me about GPT four and so on, is the capacity for it to absorb huge amount of information for context and be able to produce results based on that. From my point of view, that means we're only a couple of steps away from saying, okay, here is the profile of everyone that I'm current that is currently employed by my company here is their CV effectively for everyone in my business, and here are the parts of the business that I think need improvement, create a template profile of the perfect candidate that I should hire next. Right? And honestly, I think that's only a couple years away for even, right? I think that's sort of technology. I think it's only a matter of time before we have a very effective tool that tells you, here are the gaps in your business and here's where you need to be prioritizing your hiring focus, right? That's done manually right now, and it's not necessarily always accurate, right? And it requires a huge amount of skill and experience and teams to be able to do that in time. And I think that's the sort of stuff that we're going to see come out of this from a hiring point of view. I'm very excited for it, honestly. I think it's a wonderful thing.
Host (41:59):
I think it's got all kinds of legs. The interesting thing to observe is that you can also do it the other way around. So we had a question about, you know, what, if you want to hire hundreds of engineers, and I, I've helped people do that. And, and when they are doing it, one of the things that was the biggest challenge was scaling the humans, doing the work to get the candidates in and, and you made a lot of hiring mistakes and you just had to plan for it. I strongly suspect, I think you could probably do this now or, or close to it hand one of these tools 200 cvs and say, which are the best 10 based on this description, based on this information. because the greatest thing they've done literally yesterday with, with GPT four is they've made the token window wider fancy way of saying you can give it more input. And as that gets wider and wider as there's more and more input you could give it, you could just hand it, you could hand it a 50 pages or so today, so there could be 50 cvs and say, which are the best 10? And this is only going to get better. This is only get more and more input that you can give it.
Stevie (42:59):
I hope that happens, but not for the reason you might think.
Host (43:02):
Ah, tell me.
Stevie (43:03):
I I hope that really does happen, because if it does, it will accelerate what I think is inevitable and it's going to take too long for the rest of the world to figure out, which is that CVS are an absolutely terrible way of, of measuring whether or not someone's actually going to be capable, right? Indeed. I hate cvs. I think there's so little value in a CV other than giving you a guideline for a conversation. And that's about it, right? And, you know, it's not difficult right now for someone to tweak their CV to bypass a sort, you know, a filter, right? And, but
Host (43:34):
In all the keywords, I I love those, Wendy, you see just keyword after keyword, right?
Stevie (43:39):
So hopefully, hopefully if they start using GPT technology in that capacity, it'll accelerate the need for a better method of conveying my skills and experience to perspective employers,
Host (43:51):
Hopefully. Yeah, and you're right. I bet a lot of people will use it just as you described, as a sort of super duper keyword search. And those folks will be surprised that it didn't help them.
Stevie (44:00):
I mean, I'd be interested to see if I can feed one of my job ads and say, create a CV that's perfect for this job ad.
Host (44:06):
Oh, I'm sure you could.
Stevie (44:08):
I'd be
Host (44:08):
Interested. I'm sure you could do it that way, no question whatsoever. So Berg says remove job hoppers please.
Stevie (44:16):
Think Berg has been looking at my Twitter, I think because I can't think so that phrase
Host (44:21):
It's certainly very challenging. Let's see. We have some comments here. I'm looking for more questions. We have Kay, who is weighing in on the idea of getting people who are doing recruitment to also help on the people side and people, folks to do more recruitment. I wonder what you think about that, Stevie, is that a direction we should be going? Should we be trying to distinguish the roles? How does that look to you?
Stevie (44:46):
I think the more recruiters understand and value the employee experience, right? The experience of people who have been in the company for multiple years and so on and so forth, the better a recruiter it makes them, right? This is one of the challenges with using an agency recruiter is the second that that person turns up on day one to start their job, the external recruiter no longer cares, right? They're moving onto the next hire, right? And they have no vested interest in 12 months down the line. Are you still enjoying the job? The only interest they have is if you're not, I can find you another job and get another commission check for myself. Right? Whereas an internal
Host (45:29):
Recruiter, so they're driving the job happening, behavior that you and Berg are not so keen on. Right? Okay, I understood. Keep going.
Stevie (45:34):
Well, the internal recruiter is motivated to ensure that people are happy because if people are leaving, if your company is very bad at retaining staff, your internal recruiter is going to be very busy, backfilling a lot of roles, right? And that's not what an internal recruiter ever wants to do, right? And they have to live up to what they're selling too, right? If you're an internal recruiter and you're telling someone this is the best place in the, the world to come and work, and we've got all these bells and whistles and you're going to love it here. Well guess what? When they turn up on day one in the office, you are there too, right? You don't get to hide, right? So you have to be, you are by default motivated to ensure that you're being truthful and transparent and honest, right? So back to kayleigh's, valid point. If an internal recruiter is more exposure to the people operations, the day-to-day task of, of keeping people engaged and happy and growing in the business, the more likely they are to succeed as in terms of attracting people into the business in the first place.
Host (46:30):
Good point. I like it. Excellent. So I also want to talk to you about the, the state of the market because previously it was very easy. I remember when I first met you you know, I was recruiting like mad. So I would come to the Hacker News meetup and I would say, come work for my company, whichever one it was at that time, and tell people why it was wonderful and feed them pizza. But and it was very simple because we would just hire anybody. We could, anybody who was qualified, who had the right kinds of characteristics, we would find a place for them because you always wanted more. But today, the market is kind of upside down, right? You've got native firing like mad that they just can't, they're kind of addicted to firing people. But the smaller startups are busy hiring and we don't have a low a high unemployment rate. So in fact, people are finding jobs, I don't know what you see in the market, but it sure looks to me like people are leaving, the big ones going to the small ones, but, but we we have a game of musical chairs going on, but there's not a missing chair, right? Everybody's finding a seat.
Stevie (47:27):
So the missing chair is about a year away from being revealed.
Host (47:35):
Okay.
Stevie (47:36):
What I fear is there's a huge staggering amount of redundancies happening across the industry, right? You can't help but have a sense of, oh, I better find a job and I better, you know, do well in that job and I better hold that job for as long as I can because it's a rough market out there. I don't want to be out there having to compete with all of these people. So I, and I can't, I will never blame anyone for doing what it takes to make sure that they're able to look after themselves and their loved ones and put food on the table and pay the bills. Right? I'll you do what it takes right Now, let's say the market bounces back and let's say we get back to the sunshine and the golden days of, you know, of tech and it's a candidate market again. Now suddenly I fear that there will be an awful lot of people in jobs that they took for the sake of having a job, not necessarily a job that they care about, right?
Host (48:40):
They'll bounce further
Stevie (48:41):
And all of a sudden they realize, oh, hang on, Met is hiring again. Or, you know you know, Open AI or hiring again and so on and so forth. And there's a ton of jobs out there again, and all of a sudden my concept of a dream job is a reality. Again, there's opportunities out there and recruiters are coming to me again saying, here's a great opportunity, et cetera, et cetera. If you have a large volume of people who are in work that they are doing just for the sake of having a job, right? Then you're going to see an awful lot of people moving again very, very quickly. And that's going to cause a lot of disruption for companies, right? They'll find it difficult to retain the staff over the next couple of years if they're not doing a thorough enough job of vet don't, like, yes, there might be an ample amount of great people out there, but don't just take people for the sake of taking people, right?
Stevie (49:29):
Stick to the plan. Do these people actually align with our values? Are they legitimately interested in working here? Is this exciting to them? Is this, is this actually meeting all of their criteria of what they want from their next job? Right? Don't just be in the, I'll take every great candidate I can get, oh, you used to work for Meta, here's a job. No, it's not good enough, right? Stick to the plan. Otherwise we will see a lot of, I think in a year or two we're going to see an awful lot of people moving again very quickly. And I think that's going to cause a lot of problems, unfortunately.
Host (50:01):
And I think there's a risk as well that people read the headlines and say, okay, well it must be a employer's market. In other words that there are loads of jobs and or sorry, not very many jobs and lots and lots of candidates, and that's not what I'm seeing. I don't know if you see the same as me, Stevie. It's not that suddenly the hiring is super easy and you have a choice of lots of people, much the opposite. The people who have left those companies appear to have found good homes elsewhere and they may be kind of hanging on, which is not unreasonable. I agree with you. And that may be that they jump again in the future, but right now I don't see the market as loose and easy and you've got 10 applicants for every role. I I see still people scrabbling and, and trying hard to find the right fit. But how do you see it?
Stevie (50:50):
Yeah, Hiring is still hard, right? It still takes time and effort to find good people, right? People that are going to be excellent in the job that you're hiring for.
Host (51:06):
I think that's always going to be true in tech. It's just a proportion of the population that can do it and are interested in it. And that's not a high percentage before. There's always going to be a lot of roles and not so many people ready to fill them.
Stevie (51:21):
Correct. And look, in the last couple of weeks, I'm working with a couple of different companies and you know, one of them is hiring for a head of engineering and one of them is hiring for a lead front end and a lead designer and so on. And I've helped craft wonderful job specs, which include all of the salary information and they're paying good salaries and so on. And these are good companies with good stability under them. And are we inundated with applicants that are ex Meta and ex Twitter and so on? Absolutely not, right? There's the odd one or two, but it's not like we're suddenly seeing a volume and a quality that's unprecedented. No, I wish that were the case, right?
Host (52:02):
Absolutely
Stevie (52:03):
Right, but that's certainly not the case.
Host (52:06):
Let me come in for just a second cause we're running toward the end of time and we got so many great questions. I want to see if we can get to a couple. Is that okay, Stevie?
Stevie (52:13):
Go for it, please.
Host (52:14):
Fantastic. So Berg asks and lemme see if I can get himm on the screen. Come on, let's do it. There we go. Berg asks, no, it won't do it. There we go. Stevie, separate question. If there were an agency which put part of their commission on performance of the candidate after the hire, would this resonate?
Stevie (52:34):
It would never happen Berg simply because for whether if you're an external agency or an individual like myself, for example that fee is now you have no control over how the company treats that person, right? You might have a lot of control over the caliber of the person going in there, but there's so much now that's beyond your control. Once they're in the job. Now, a lot of agencies and recruiters have rebate fees. So if they quit after a week or after three months or whatever the case may be, you get a percentage of your money back and so on.
Host (53:07):
But they're not giving you that long-term guarantee, which I agree would make no economic sense for them.
Stevie (53:10):
Yeah, logically it's a good idea, but in reality, no one's going to take it. No one's going to bite on something like that, unfortunately,
Host (53:19):
Which is why the internal recruiter is such a great strategy, because it has that built in. You have that built in, you're not getting a guarantee that it's a year from now, but the person's going to have to see the other person at the lunchroom and in the company meetings and in other places and, and therefore is going to be accountable for Hey, you told me this place was great, it sucks. I'm not performing well, you know, why did you let me in when I didn't have the skills?
Stevie (53:42):
Correct. And as your company gets bigger, your internal recruiters often get measured by the long-term success of their candidates as well, right? So, you know, it becomes a thing that gets measured with your internal recruitment team eventually
Host (53:54):
Makes sense. And we have one more from someone that you, you and I know and love that's our good friend Dimitri. And he, he says do we think that AI and GPT and all these wonderful things are going to eliminate entry level roles? Well, Dimitri may know, I think Stevie already knows this is like red flag to a bowl for me. So I'll do my view then Stevie may completely disagree, that would be fun. But I have a lesson from chess and I did a session a couple weeks ago on this. You can find the recording. If you get in touch, I'll help you find it. The idea from chess is that you get computers and humans working together and they actually beat computers for a long time in chess, computers could be humans, but if you go human with a computer that's called a Centar in chess, like a half horse, half human, the ancient Greek mythological figure if, you get a Centar, it will beat the computer because you get the creativity from the computer and you get the, or sorry, creativity from the human and the sheer horsepower from the computer, it can look at many more moves, much farther ahead.
Host (54:57):
And so the human will say, well, out of those things you found, for me, this is the one that will have the most effect. Now there's also one scary thing, which did happen after many years, that the centar were better. That the centar actually now just in the past few years have become not better. So the evolution of chess computers are such that actually the human doesn't add anything anymore. But we're a long way from that in the more general realm of writing job specifications or passing, passing coding tests and other things. You still need a human in the loop. And one thing I did try this afternoon also was to play a game of chess against chat GPT. And it beat me. But it couldn't explain ITSMs very well. It kept referring to pieces that weren't on the board and, and other things. So it's wiggly as yet. But the way people are making huge, huge strides these days, I'm sure you Dimitri and Stevie know this, but viewers may not, is by using things like GitHub co-pilot, which will write a lot of the boiler plate code for you. It'll say, just like the Centar chess computer, it'll say, here's the stuff you can do, here's the sorts of things that you should consider. Here's a technique that you can use. There's a lot of controversy about it because it uses stuff that's on the web and it doesn't have the right to use it, but the productivity gains are very, very great. So I'm predicting that those entry level rules will remain, but they'll be fewer of them and will hook people up to compute. Not, not like in the Matrix. We won't plug things to their brains, but we will give them tools that allow, say, a junior programmer to be much more effective than he or she might have been before. So that's where I think it's going. What do you think, Stevie?
Stevie (56:35):
I'll try and keep it short in a nutshell. I think the one word answer is no, but the, the kind of more reasonable answer is I think it'll just raise the bar of what entry level is ultimately, right? No matter what you are, whether you are the world's greatest lawyer, recruiter, cfo, there's an entry level to every single job, right? And it, I think it might raise the bar for a lot of, it might raise the entry level bar for a lot of jobs but not universally. They'll always be an entry level. Always.
Host (57:09):
Okay, well, we've got more questions here than we can deal with. So I will try as I always do, to cover some of those on the forum and Stevie's on our squirrel Squadron forum, so I'm sure he'll come along and, and comment as well. And great to have you there, Stevie. So I'm sorry if we didn't get to your question, but we had a great involved audience with, with loads of very good queries for us. Thank you for that. And lots of provocative ideas. I don't think we agreed on everything, Stevie, but I really enjoyed it if we did. Yeah, absolutely. So where can people find more Stevie? How do they talk to you more?
Stevie (57:44):
You can find me, believe it or not, I'm still on Twitter Stevie Buckley on twitter @Talentstuff.com. If you want to just get in touch, if you want to find out more about how I can help or if you just want to reach out and have a chat, you can find me on. That's my website. That's about it, that's about, well, LinkedIn, but, you know, LinkedIn's just performative for me. I'm there because I have to be nothing else. But the kind of the true version of me is on Twitter and reach out to me directly.
Host (58:13):
Fantastic. Okay, so you can find Stevie. I've just put talent stuff.com cause I know everything else is there. It is indeed. You can start there and find all the other Stevie Ways and I can absolutely vouch for Stevie is a great person to have a cup of coffee with and he loves to do it. So I definitely encourage that for sure. And I will just mention that if you want to find more exciting events like this one and you want to see our continuing discussion and so on, that's at squirrelsquadron.com and I'll stick that up here and that's open to anybody. Thank you, Jess. But I meant to put up Squirrel Squadron. So you can find us there find me there answering questions in the forum, holding events like this.
Host (58:54):
I have live events like the one coming up in Krakoff in Poland, and I'm often up in London as well. So very happy to engage with more of you there because this is where tech and non-tech people get together, discuss how we can make tech as productive as possible in these crazy times with GPT and Silicon Valley Bank and who knows what plenty to discuss. Excellent. Thanks everyone for coming. Really appreciate it and hope to see you soon both on the squadron and talking to Stevie over coffee. Thanks so much. Take care. Have a wonderful day. Thanks Stevie.