importance of soft skills and hiring w/ jm huret

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Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco, VACO.com is how to get in touch with me old-fashioned email social media at T D S and T D E S S E Y N. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. Jam, let's dive in, man. Let's get the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? We'll go from there. Cool. My name is Jam Hirei. I am the head of software engineering for Vaco-built, the Consultant Services Agency within Vaco, where we connect the extensive network of candidates that VACO has to the extensive network of clients, and we build projects and deploy teams.

And I'm largely responsible for making sure that our teams are built with the best what we can put forward of engineers when we have engineers on the team, which is most of the time. And we're a technology outfit, so I work to make sure that our engineers are all cared for, that we have training, that we have career progression, that we have cohesion with how they work together, standards and practices. And I also as well of course do a ton with just interviewing and hiring and recruiting and making sure that we're bringing the right people into the group. Absolutely. So I wanna dive in. We got three main topics today.

So the first part, and again, I've seen kind of an importance of this or an emphasis rather, but let's talk about soft skills, man. I mean, I think working with you over the last few weeks, that's been incredibly important. But talk about just what you see as an engineering lead and maybe some things, some practices people can put into place where you're seeing people really fall short right now. Yes, great question. I think that there is an increase in emphasis on soft skills. I think with some of the remote working environment, like having enough EQ, having enough ability to truly dig in and find a way to know the people you work with and being willing to put yourself out there in a remote world, that's not easy.

And I think that we're seeing a significant uptake in need for that. And so when I'm interviewing, that's a big part of what I'm looking for from people is just that they're comfortable talking as a real person over a video call, and that they lean into that, and that they look like they want to be connecting with people than people that they would presumably be working with. that's the point of interviews is gut checking that and making sure that we're gonna, actually if we're gonna bring this person on the team, I wanna know that you are gonna be a real person that we work with, we're not bringing you on just to be a body that gets the people.

We do, where do people really mess up, at least in your mind, with being open and vulnerable during an interview process? In terms of being open and vulnerable, I think there's a tendency to represent themselves just with the hard skills that are part of the job. And of course that's super important. We're not trying to ignore that. But it's, in your room you've got there some interesting stuff behind you. Occasionally we see that with people, but they won't talk about it. And I'll ask them and they're just, they just kind of, oh yeah, that's just the thing I do. And they don't really dig into it.

Like I wanna know you, I wanna know like why you have these things that you are in your life beyond just what you do day to day at the job, because that's gonna come up, that's part of, if you were working in an office, you would end up talking about those things. So being open and vulnerable to just say, yeah, I actually play this instrument, or I record or whatever the things are that are on screen, or even off screen, it doesn't have to be just visible. Sure. I feel like that comes because the traditional way of hiring is to beat people up. Right, I've been fascinated with this kind of trend where I feel like interviewing in tech is, well, I think there's memes on the, I don't think, I know, there's memes on the internet where it's like, like the job in the interview and then a job in real life.

And basically, how it's completely different and how the tech industry is the only industry where, you know, the interview is harder than the actual job. And I think, and I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this because I feel like a lot of people aren't willing to be open in the interview process because they're so used to getting beaten over the head that if they divert, that may be seen as, hey, listen, like this person can't stay on task or this person like, you know, isn't, you know, has too many past times. I don't know, but like, I think, I feel like the people interviewing are so focused on the technical and because of the way that industry is that they're actually worried about talking about themselves.

I'm interested to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, it could be. I mean, to your point, some of those memes, I've seen one recently. It was like, must be willing to work in a fast-paced environment. That's something that everyone says. And then there's a space environment environment. And it's like the most boring little cubicle. It would be a new color. And yeah, great. That's definitely what I thought you meant with that. Yeah. In terms of that tendency to lean so much on the hard skills, and being beaten up in the interview process, like I've personally felt it, I hated it and don't want anything to do with it.

I don't want to put people through that. That's not what their day-to-day is going to be like. And to sort of counteract that, I think that some people are kind of not blindsided, but they're not expecting it when our interview process is a little more normalized. It's a little more, this is what it would be like we're going to have a conversation. we would do this on a regular basis. The evaluation that we do with a hard skill is also supposed to be similar to what you would do on a day-to-day basis. We're not asking you to solve a complicated computer science algorithm that you would maybe never have anything to do with when you are actually working on the in this job.

So, you know, we try to replicate just the experience of working together to enough of an extent that we can actually really know what that would translate to in a day-to-day environment. I do think that people are not used to that. There's, I don't want to like, you know, throw anything under the bus. I have personally experienced, in my time as an engineer, going through the processes and just feeling like literally the only thing we're going to talk about is how I approach this algorithm. And I'm also fully knowing that I might never need to know how to do this with the job I'm trying to get here.

So the whole thing just feels inverted and not very conducive to a real person coming in. It feels like a task deliverer coming in. Yeah, 100%. 100%. I love what Beth says. Obviously, you know, are you building for people with disabilities? 75% of people with disabilities are unemployed. I love to chat with you. You have Beth, you know is fantastic at sign language and obviously they did a lot of stuff with React Miami. So I think I'd love to get y'all connected. I think that could be cool as well. Barrett comes in, stay on target, stay on target. Seriously, Tkia, it's great to see you.

Trey comes in from my short lived experience tuning the interview in a conversation as much more enjoyable for both parties. Yeah and to be honest with you too, like, I don't know why it's not more of that. I mean, the companies that I've seen that have more of a conversation usually have a better retention, right? The companies who grill people don't. Yeah, it makes sense. And so this kind of goes into the next thing that we talked about to off air is a bigger interviewing for the bigger picture of who the person is. And so we're going to kind of kind of mesh all topics together because then I want to talk about mistakes on hiring and hiring philosophy.

Where is this hiring philosophy come in of seeing the bigger picture? Like what maybe, can you give an example of maybe some things that you've done early on? Maybe you did grow some candidates and then you realize that wasn't a good fit. Where does that mentality of trying to view the person as an actual individual instead of like someone who bangs on the keyboard comes from? Well, you know, this is not, this is something we're going to dig into too much here, but you know, I have a spiritual influence to what I'm doing here. I am interested in who the people are from that perspective.

I'm not working with robots. I'm well, maybe I am and I don't know it, but I am working with people, I presume. That's another conversation for another. But I do expect that I'm going to care for people if I'm hiring them. That's the big part of what we do. And so I'm not going to approach somebody like they're they're just, they're here for me to benefit from them. I'm bringing them in to a business. There is a job to do, but it's a person doing that job. And so caring for that person is going to result in them doing their job better. And that works out much better than just driving home on, I don't know, hardline on like, just give me the answers.

We're just talking tech. Don't tell me anything about yourself, that sort of stuff. In my past, I have made mistakes not with that aspect of it, but in Ignoring what I saw were signs of somebody who wouldn't be comfortable or trusted and It has always As far as I can remember every time I've gone through doing interviews And if I've seen a sign of something and ignored it that has come back to bite me later and that has typically turned into not necessarily HR problems, but just poor fit. It's been me who is not the right person to be on the team, and it just made things more difficult.

It made it harder to care for them, made it harder to get them the right opportunities, and it made it harder for the teams that they worked with to get their jobs done. There's a whole cascading effect of that, and ignoring those signs of someone who's not interested in being that kind of real vulnerable person that's experiencing a spectrum of things beyond their day-to-day tasks that shows up. Yeah. So we got a lot of people that chimed in with questions to get to those and Jake, it's good to see you, Jake. So Bill comes in as a self-taught dev on the job hunt and I had my first actual interview with a recruiter and had a hard time articulating even my own projects.

This happens a lot, Bill, you're not alone. Are there any tips for learning to communicate effectively about tech? Something that I think that I've seen, you know, this isn't always applicable with an interface necessarily, but if you're building an interface, starting, that's usually where somebody is going to connect with you initially. You're visually experiencing something. I tried to, you know, if we have an interface, deliverable as part of our evaluation process. That's usually where I like to have people start because we can all see something together. We can talk about it. We can relate. many things more than just here's the lines of code I wrote.

So in communicating your own project, if you have that as part of it, a deliverable that is visual in some way, or I would suggest even finding a way to have that, even if it's with Postman or you're doing a back end kind of situation, there's ways to sort of bring it to a point where it's like we are seeing something together, here's how I can articulate something that we can both experience visually. Now, to tying that back to the impaired thing, that's a different conversation entirely. I'm not trying to suggest that if you're visually impaired, you shouldn't, you're going to be hindered in this, there's a particular thing.

But in this case, if you can do that, and that's a commonality you have, that's a great way to start. I also think too, Bill, my suggestion is to actually, So I say journal, I use the word journal a lot, and then you can use that different ways, right? Journaling for me is tweeting that helps, but I think a lot of people in the interview process, I would take notes, I would pre-write notes running into it, right? You know, Bill, I would say for you is, when you talk to recruiters, I would literally have, I would almost write yourself a cover letter, right? And I'm not gonna get into cover letters because that is a whole another topic in and of itself.

But basically the cover letters is like the super high level of what you've done and what you've accomplished. And so I would do that, right? Any projects that you have done on your own, write about it, you know, on a cover letter, or journal about it, or Microsoft word it, or whatever. And then have that when you go into a recruiter in an interview, so you have it in front of you. I always say when you interview, I would have your resume in front of you. I would have a list of success stories or tasks that you've accomplished that applies to the job and an independent paper.

because a lot of times you may have things pop in your head that you can write down, you have everything in front of you because at the end of the day, like, JM's been at it for a bit, I've been at it for a bit, we still don't remember everything we've done. And so coming prepared is incredibly important. I didn't know, JM, if you had any more thoughts on that. No, I think that's a great idea. If you think about much the way that like test-driven development, you're sort of saying what it is that you're gonna do before you do it. You could actually even approach a cover layer for a project that same way.

Like here's what I'm going to be accomplishing with this. There's my expectations with this. You can kind of pre-articulate what you're intending with it and then you can really connect back to somebody by pointing it out that way. Yeah, 100%. Chris, good morning. Another question for J.M. What would you expect a software engineer who just took their first software role be able to do? imposter syndrome is hitting me hard and have several interviews lined up this week. I get this question a ton. So jam interest of your thoughts. Yeah. I mean, imposter syndrome hits at all levels. There's no, I don't know that anyone's safe from it, but, um, I would expect a software engineer in their first role to be able to ask a lot of good questions, connect with a lot of the right people that are making an effort to be doing that, uh, and be able to take direction, then somewhat independently dig into the point where they just have more questions.

There's, I think, a distinction between hand-holding, where I literally can't do anything. I'm just, you're just dictating to me what to type, versus, okay, I know enough to be able to go do some independent research, come back to you, and then have another conversation that's more informed as I hit roadblocks. And that's what I would look for for somebody to know, somebody who has a the passion to be digging in at that level and then forming that relationship that kind of naturally becomes like a mentor mentee sort of thing with a more senior person. I love it, I love it. Yeah, and Zach, I mean, my thing is too, and I've interviewed a lot of engineering leads on the show.

They all say the same thing. They view engineers, junior engineers, and damn, if you don't agree with me, please let me know. But a lot of the senior, the leaderships I've talked to on the show have said, Hey, we view every junior developer the same in that they all kind of have the same skill level for the most part. And, but what we're curious about is their communication. Why they've done something the way they've done something. And, and a lot of engineering leads say that's where the hangup is. If you've done something in Capstone Project, if you've done something for a volunteer project and you can't say why you've done a certain thing, that's where people fall short.

J.M., I don't know if you agree or disagree. Yeah. I think you, it's true you should be able to say why I've done something. I think the depth to that answer might be lacking. You know, maybe I just saw that you should do it this way or I heard about this or whatever. But that's a fine answer. Just having something there, not just I randomly thought of this in the moment. That's probably not the right place to be. Yeah. Yeah. So Casey has kind of a two-sided question. Casey is great to hear from you, man. I'm interviewing for a job that once can serve me more experience that I have in a field, but my recruiter in system a good fit even though I'm a little bit more green.

How do I communicate that I want the job? I like the challenge but I want to be realistic and forthright about my limitations. Now I'm curious it sounded like in that there's a fault that you're the right fit but then you're saying you have limitations. So I don't know how to be the recruiter. I think the recruiter's pressing maybe a little bit, which I'm a little concerned about, but also too. So Dan, Dan, what up Dan, commented here, listen to your recruiter, they may know a bit more about the role than the job description. You may have the skills that can really help and ramp up, ramp you up on the other things along the way, which I was kind of thinking as well.

So, Jam, I didn't know if you had any more thoughts. I guess more for you of how do you communicate to a hiring manager that you are up for the challenge, even if you are a little bit more green. Let's kind of take it from that angle. Yeah, I mean if even just for starters, if the challenge is they want somebody with more experience, you can just be up for it. It's like, I can't make myself have more groups of experience. That doesn't exist at it. You know, I can't just acquire that without going else elsewhere to work. So if that's really all the challenges, then I think it's a different conversation.

But if they say like we want you to have particular experience with a technology or a pattern or methodology or something that you have not yet worked with, I think it's reasonable to do some cursory research on it, understand enough about it to be able to say like hey you know here's how I've approached similar things in the past, here's how long it took me to get up to speed on other things where I didn't know it immediately. A huge amount of what you do as an engineer is learn new things and apply them. So, that should be an expectation of course coming into any job that you aren't going to know 100% of all the things.

You'll be coming up to speed with some things and then applying that. So, something in that realm is probably where I would expect somebody to come with an answer to say, I don't specifically have experience with that thing. Here's what I can tell of it. Here's another thing that I think sounds similar to that and how I came up to speed in that and how I was able to effectively deliver on it. And I wanna highlight some that JM just did that I kind of get on, not hot takes, but I kind of get on rants, depending on kind of what I've seen a lot in the market.

And the big thing I'm kind of a lot about right now is we talk about work on communications skills, work on communications skills, a lot of people like, well, what the heck does that mean? I think that's one thing that JM said that people need to work on the most. And that's, hey, I haven't done this, but I've done something similar. Or, hey, I can't do this, but here's how I would approach it. It's a lot of, and JM, I'm sure you get this, like if you ask, can't, you're like, hey, have you done this? And they go, nope. Yeah, that's not a helpful thing.

And that actually ties back to the whole like human aspect of this too, which is like, but that's not helpful. Like if I was talking to you on a project and I just ask you if you've done this, all you had to say was no, like that doesn't bode well for us being able to work together on this. I would like to hear enough from you to know like what do we even do from here. And that goes a really long way in an interview process if you can convey there, you know, the question is not looking for a yes or no answer necessarily even if it's framed that way.

I think it's looking for more than that. Yeah, keep the conversation going. Keep the conversation going. There's so much that comes into play with dating and the job search and if you're on a date that part you keep asking them questions and that other individual goes nope yep nope yep you're gonna want to get out of there ASAP right and that's gonna be the same way the hiring major feels if you approach them that way I have another question a lot of questions say this is great I haven't had a really a fuel a episode fueled by questions this is fantastic Katrina comes in so I have a background in tax and finance and several of those skills are transferable my software engineering.

How do I use examples from that experience in tech interviews without it seem like I'm talking about too much past compared to looking forward to the role of which I'm applying? Cool. Now I like that question. So first of all, if you are working or trying to work for a place that has any involvement with tax law, of course, that's going to be extremely applicable. You'll be able to discern the domain knowledge very well. But if it's not, it's likely that a lot of what you've done with your tax law and finance background is solve problems, maybe with customers or clients or whatever, and that at its core is what we are doing in engineering too.

We're solving problems, we're doing it with a team typically, and so if you can correlate that aspect of what you did, I think that would for me would go a really long way, being able to say how you took a problem or figured out what the problem actually was, even if it wasn't stated explicitly, and then converted that into real results by working with your team. That's maybe a little high level, but that's definitely a starting point for me. I love that. A lot of other comments around here. I can't do interviews without a notebook. Yeah, like I said, I mean, I think we as human beings, we like to interrupt people naturally, to I do, at least my family does.

I'm trying to work on that. So having a notebook where you where you don't have to interrupt the interview when you can write down a question. I think it's incredibly important. Let's see here. I'm sure I've asked whether this is else. Let's see here. I'm just thinking of anything else. A lot of people commenting. Dev, no, you're not. Both J.M. and I have the same meetings upcoming. We're actually in another meeting together in eight minutes. And so that's why you're here in the team's notifications. Barrett comes in. Barrett's a former guest of the show. Common from recruiters to over-hyped candidates, but on the other hand, you're never going to match 100% of the requirements, even if you hit 50% go for it.

Jam, I'm curious of your thoughts on this. I mean, I think we can have another episode on job descriptions, but what are your thoughts on this? I mean, do you agree with bear from this perspective? Yeah, I think so. I don't know if those, I do certainly agree, you're not going to match 100% requirements. Correct. I mean, if you, the more you flesh out the particulars of what somebody's coming in to do, there's bound to be something that's not like an exact match. And that's fine. I think that getting a very good match is way better than trying to spend all the time of finding a perfect match because you're probably not going to find one.

Hitting 50%. I don't know if that's necessarily the number, but there is a percentage lower than 100 where it's reasonable to start saying like, yeah, this is, I'm the right or from the hiring perspective. Yeah, this person's probably of the right fit. Sure. I love that. Let's see here. Oh, here's a great question from Jericho. So in my 11 years of recruiting, I've never had a manager ask me for a person's GitHub. JAM, what are your thoughts on GitHub, man? Like, do you like to see the green dots? Do you not like to see the green dots? What are your thoughts? So yeah, from my own experiences, that it's tough because you have a day job typically if you were interviewing for another job and that day job has private repositories most commonly.

Like you're not the work that you're doing in the highest amount of activity is not on your public facing repos. If it did, actually that would be kind of a problem because that means you're spending all your time on personal projects and not your real job. So, you know, there's a lot that could be said about this. think. I don't find it critical that somebody has tons of activity with GitHub. I do like it if I see it or if there's something at some point it's just like yeah they fiddled around with something and they were toying around with the technology but I don't expect that people have an extremely up-to-date current look into all of the things that they know how to do.

It's just it's unrealistic I think. Yeah I agree. Alright so as we wrap up here let's let me ask you this one question. Well first off finally any advice to hiring managers real quick so advice to hiring managers about hiring right now and then I want to ask you one more question. So any general advice to hiring managers right now who are trying to navigate through this market? Sure yeah I mean give it Yeah, this is advice I think I need to take too, but it's basically just don't let the FOMO get a hold of you. There's so much, there has been over the past six months to two years activity coming out of Silicon Valley and then the remote work expanding out.

It's such a frenzy and has felt very hectic at times. It's easy to have a sense of missing out because you are not getting all the top talent or whatever that's flying around and going to other places. I think just chill out, stick to your plan, make sure you have a plan, stick to that plan and execute on it. And I think that that's for me, a reminder I try to give myself because it's easy to fall into that. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Last question that I've started to ask people because this is guidance counselor 2.0. Right, so we had guidance counselors in middle school, we had guidance counselors in high school, but now not so much.

They're just called therapists now. But what is your biggest advice for your younger self just from a career perspective? Yeah, I think taking a bit to actually know what it is that makes me tick. Like, I thought there were times when I was young and very interested in just the money. like I was like, oh yeah, engineering, you can make a lot of money doing that. And that was a, it wasn't appealing part, but for me, I actually like working with the people side of it, at least as much. And I shouldn't have paid much more attention to that, paid much more attention to the fact that like that really made me tick that I got a lot of satisfaction, a lot more satisfaction, in fact, out of coordinating and organizing people into the, getting them the right opportunities.

I'm a nerd at heart, but I'm also, I'm not as good at some of that stuff as other people. And I like working with them to get them the right opportunities to do that. So anyway, I'll just say, I did not pay attention to that aspect that was beating in my heart as closely as I should have. And I did not pursue that initially. And a little too hard on the hard tech side. And just got to a point where I didn't really love what I was doing. It makes sense. It makes sense. Awesome. All right, J.M. Well, I'll let you go. I'll see you in three minutes.

But thanks, y'all, for hanging out with us this morning. We appreciate it. Go connect with J.M. He is fantastic. And J.M., thank you so much, ma'am. I appreciate it. Pleasure. Thanks. All right. Y'all take it easy. Peace. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode. And I am very grateful. Because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes. And I myself rarely finished an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please, like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it.

So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, tailor at vaco.com or at Tdaston on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.