the art of interviewing (company edition) w/ matt walsh co-founder of talgo.io

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Matt, let's get to people what they want, man. Who are you, what are you doing? We'll go from there. Yeah, thanks for having me on Taylor. It's a lot of fun to be here. I'm a co-founder of a sort of a small two-person training company called Talago.io. We specialize in helping companies get better at hiring. And specifically, we really focus on interviewer training. We believe that a company figuring out who's good for the role is obviously one of the most crucial business processes there is in the world and business leaders consistently agree with that. We've asked this question to thousands of investors, managers, founders, hey, how important is it for you to be able to accurately assess and hire a great talent?

Is this a top five skill? Is it a top three, top two, top number one? Basically, everyone agrees it's a top three skill. A lot will say that it's number one or number two. How many have had actual legit training on it? Only about 10% of people. So it's this massively important thing, and yet we've kind of almost given up on thinking that we could learn to do it. Well, everyone's just kind of winging it. Everyone's just sort of having a casual conversation and hoping that they can make an accurate, non-biased decision. The results from most interviewing are quite bad. Our goal is to change that.

And my personal passion here is I want someone to find the job that's actually the right job for them, where they're actually set up for success. I think it's not good if you get hired for a job that you shouldn't have gotten hired for. That leads to paying two years down the road in a lot of cases. So I want to help people sort of through the indirect path of helping these companies. And plus I want to help founders, right? I want to help people that are building these companies hire the right people for the right rules. I love that. A lot to talk about obviously, I do want to talk both sides today.

I want to talk company and candidates, right? A lot of people that watch us are candidates, but I have a lot of hiring managers in my DMs. That's awesome. Yo, I love that show. Can you give me some information? So like I have both parties watching. It's just the job seekers are a little bit more active, obviously, obviously. Of course. Talk about hiring right now. Where are people really missing the mark? Like if I was a hiring manager, I sat down with you and said, Matt, give me three ways I can immediately prove my interview process, what would you say? Okay. One of them will be a little bit of a cheating answer because it'll have other things packed into it.

And I'm gonna go in chronological, sort of logical order here. The first thing you should do is assume that you have not defined the role well. Just make that assumption right away. It'll, by the way, happen to 99% of the time. Absolutely. And the reason why I say that is you have defined the role somewhat. You have a job description. Everyone's got a job description and they think that's checked the box on defining the role. Your job description may be good, it may not be good, you know, externally in terms of persuading a candidate to apply to your company. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about do you have a document that will facilitate an accurate, logical, efficient, hiring process where you can internally make a good decision with you and your teammates?

99% of the time we work with a company, the answer is no, it could be better. Either they don't have one at all because I don't count the job description for that or they have one but it could be a lot better. So we can get into like what I think the good components that are, but get a document that you can make in, we call it a target. Basically, the real quick version is you should have like the five or six key results that this person needs to get done within a certain time frame. After all, there's a business reason why you're hiring this person.

You're not just hiring them for fun, right? There's a reason you need them to hire. And then what are the five or six non-obvious cultural competencies that really determine whether or not someone will thrive at your company, not just a generic startup, but specifically what makes someone work or not work in your culture. So that's the first mistake. Second mistake is got to be bad interviewing and there's so much I can get into there. I think if I had to boil it down to a couple of things in category number two of bad interviewing, people are not, they're not establishing great rapport with the candidate.

There are tons of rapport mistakes that interviewers make. And the reason why that's so important is one, it obviously leads to a bad candidate experience. And you might have a high performer opt out of your process or not say yes to your offer. But two, high rapport is the foundation of getting someone to open up. And when I say open up, I mean, every candidate starts the interview a little bit nervous and in spin performance mode. They want the job. They're trying to please you. They're trying to answer the questions well. We fundamentally believe an interview should not be a performance. It should be a data gathering exercise.

It should not be the, oh, this person did well in my interview. No, you should be learning about this person's past accomplishments, past mistakes, what they've actually done in the past. That's highly predictive of whether or not they will succeed or fail at the next job, assuming you do your mapping well in terms of the data. Right, so lots of mistake reports, lots of bad questions that are asked, I'm gonna cut myself off. There's a ton I could go into. No, you're fine, dude. Oh, you're good. And then I would say the third mistake is that people are not making high quality decisions with the data they gather.

This is a little bit related to process setup, but basically the average company is sort of giving each interviewer an impossible task. They just grab five people, they say, oh yeah, go interview. Yeah. Like there's no coordination, there's no specialization, there's no planning of who's gonna ask what questions. people actually coordinate in a bad way and that they like share their opinions on the candidate as it goes through the process. So that can actually bias people. So there's just a lot of process mistakes that are made in terms of, you know, we wanna increase accuracy, we wanna minimize bias. And there's honestly just a lot of low hanging fruit here.

None of the things, I mean, very few of the things that I'll say will be like jaw-droppingly revolutionary. It's just there are like seven years. That's the thing, yeah. But in my experience is that interviewing from a company side, nothing's jaw dropping. The problem is, is no one's intentional to actually execute on the small things, right? Everything you said is not hard, right? So for the people who are watching this morning, if you are watching, you have questions, please ask them. Obviously, Matt is, you know, very good at interviewing and coaching and whatnot. Let's talk on the Canada experience, right? Canada's right now, they're overwhelmed, they're mass applying, seven rounds of interviews, blah, blah, blah, blah, I know it's a lot right now.

What would be some advice to job seekers right now? Okay, this is a... Oh, and by the way, what's your Twitter app because you're a great follow? I definitely want to plug that. I appreciate that. At Matt N. Walsh. Okay, and that's Anna's in Nancy. Yeah, correct, thank you. Yeah, so let's see, let's start on like reverse engineers. What would I do as a job seeker? Number one thing is I would not put too many eggs in the mass apply through the standard channels. In fact, I don't wanna be too blunt and say that that's worthless. I think it's close to worthless. What I would really try and do is I would try and network my way into a job.

I think you get an unfair advantage. Whether it's right or wrong, it's just the reality. You get an unfair advantage if you know someone who knows someone in the company, and at the very least, a lot of companies how have you be able to like software first someone in and you kind of get to cut the standard resume CV line, you're still going to have to do a great job interviewing, at least you should, right? But you it will help you sort of like it also you'll get a chance to know the see part of the problem is when you when you apply they get to see your resume and you get to see their job posting and the resume is full of BS and the job posting might be full of BS, right?

When you actually talk to a real person that's highly credible that you can trust to find out what's what about this company, you save both sides a lot of time because they can be honest with you, you can be more honest with them, you can kind of get a sense of if it might be a reasonable fit. So we tell companies, hey, you should be using a network of network sourcing strategy. Like, I shouldn't just go and talk to my 10 friends because that has a whole bunch of bias and diversity problems. But I should be thinking about the highest performing people in my network, reaching out to the diversity pockets that I've got access to in my network, right?

And asking who they know. Okay, that's sort of like this sweet spot where you get the best of both worlds. I think as a candidate, you should do the same thing. I would take two lenses. I would think, okay, who are my smartest friends and just pick their brain for advice and for people they think I should talk to you, because your friends often will know where you're strong, where you're weak, you know, in a lens that you might not have access to, right? Right. That's one lens. That's sort of like that. Don't worry about the job. just focus on your network. Okay, that will yield some possibilities.

The other one is what jobs or what companies are you excited about? And then like reverse your way on LinkedIn and say, oh, I noticed that I've got a second degree connection. Oh, hey, I really should really rewarm up my relationship or my friendship with the first degree connection that knows that person. And I would just be honest with people. I also think it's good to let people know that you're like looking for advice, be open, honest and vulnerable, right? Try to make the ask simple and easy. I think these are all like good things to do. So that's what I would do on the, like the sourcing, if you will.

I've got a bunch of advice for what you should do as a candidate when you actually are in the interview. Yeah, yeah, let's definitely move into that for sure. So I think what I just did right there, I sensed as the candidate, if you will, that I would like had given more than a long enough answer on that part. And so I paused to sort of check in with my interviewer and see if they wanted me to love that. Now, why is that so important? Okay, of all of the skills that people do not have as interviewers, one of the number one skills is the ability to interrupt.

In order to be, so I'm gonna explain why this one. Whoa, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm kinda curious who are gonna go with this. The average interviewer is atrocious at interrupting. They are really bad at it. So they interrupt too much? No, the opposite, the opposite. They are, they are, yeah. Yeah, okay. Really good. So what will happen, because I've coached tons and tons of hiring managers. So I know exactly what their internal monologue is. They are perceiving the candidate as rambling or responding for too long, which by the way is a very natural response when the other person's not talking. How do you make someone talk more in a debate?

You just shut up and the awkward silence makes the person talk. So the whole dynamic is kind of messed up. So the average person is not jumping in with enough follow up questions, right? As a result, the standard thing is I ask an initial question and I sit back and I just let the candidate go on for like three or four minutes, okay? Now, if you were really well spoken and you've got your tight package story, all of which we blow up in our interview training, like this is not how an interview should be, but it is how it will be when you apply to 99% of jobs, right?

So as the candidate, you have to be ready for this. You have to be ready for them to lobby your question and you give sort of a tight, compelling, 90 second to three minute story that hits all the right notes. That's what you should be prepared for as the candidate. One technique though that you can use is to check in with the interviewer, to basically give them the executive summary and then to offer to go deep on any of the markers that you've left. So you're basically helping them interview you. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I got a question on TikTok. It's kind of like a right term, but that's okay.

User, brand NISC 360. How important is Cisco DevNet certification? So let's talk about certifications in general. Cisco is like on the hardware networking side. I don't really recruit that much on the hardware networking side. But in my experience, I think certifications actually play more, have more weight on like the infrastructure networking side. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, our thoughts on qualifications broadly. Look, I'm not gonna tell that someone that they like shouldn't get certified in something. I'm not an expert in that particular deal. Yeah, yeah, I mean either. I think that in general, companies over rely on a certain type of qualification, which is I need, I will say I'm hiring a product manager.

I demand, you know, qualifications are supposed to be like must-haves. I demand five years minimum experience as a product manager or this person needs to have gone to an Ivy League university. We think both of those types of qualifications are largely BS and you should just get rid of them as a company. The reason why is there's a lot of gender bias. Men typically apply when they meet 60% of the requirements. Women wait until they hit 100, several studies have like shown that. I've seen that too. And there's like a high performer bias, an adverse selection. Most high performers are on an upward steep trajectory throughout their careers.

If you demand that someone's basically already done that same job, you're selecting against those high performers. You're gonna get someone that may have done the job at a sort of mediocre level, another making a lateral move, right? So we would say that you don't really want five years' experience. You want someone that can actually do the job that can get these outcomes done, that can sort of operate in this cultural context. So one exception to that though, is if there is a discrete skill, you need to be able to code in Python. That's a legit qualification. You need to know this thing. We don't have the time to teach it to you.

So if this person's Cisco qualification sort of is a very discreet, not easily quickly trainable thing, I think that is the type of thing that would be valuable because by definition, the company's gonna need that discrete skill, right? And they're not gonna be able to easily train someone on it. I would say that's like the first principle's way of thinking about is this certification a real legit discrete skill, or is it just kind of some general vague signal, signaling advice that doesn't really have a skill underneath it? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And the user goes, yeah. And also people forget that people can grow into roles.

Yeah. Again, I mean, that's, that's the biggest flaw. I mean, if a company, and Matt, I'm sure you can attest to this, if companies require a hundred percent of the candidate, then why, why is that candidate go to stay there? I think I'm going to go. That's kind of the crazy thing. Like, like if I was hiring, if a candidate has at least 50% of the skills, that's great. Because that means we're going to teach them the other 50%. They're going to stay here for a longer time. And they're going to be indebted kind of that we've taught them and got them to 100%. Yeah, there's a real sort of art in thinking about, OK, what do I truly need done in this role?

What are the crucial results that need to get done? What are the sort of modalities or the ways of working that need to be sort of like must-haves? And then what are like some nice tabs, right? And I actually completely agree with you. I think if, you know, be aware of the perfect candidate, I think is the title of one of these blogs I wrote, where I was like, if someone literally hits a hundred percent of everything you're looking for, it actually could be a little bit of a red flag that they may be sort of overqualified or are making a lateral move into your company, right?

This is one of these like sort of counterintuitive insights in hiring. So I do think there's a sort of a sweet spot where you're not being permissive on the things that are truly core to the role, but there's room for the candidate to grow, right? 100%. Actually, we're pretty active on TikTok this morning. Psyduck, I think that's a Pokemon, skill sets needed are too broad. Yes, I agree with that. And I think I goes back to the company with job descriptions, how do you write a job description? I'm really big on, so the way, so I'm curious here with us on this. What I say when I speak at conferences, what I say is job descriptions are, I need a mission statement, right?

It's been put out there that Gen Z, the younger generations who you're hiring for now, wants a mission statement. They want to know what the company does. So mission statement, the next thing I would do is overview about the role. Like what's this role going to actually be doing? Like how does it work with the business? What are you gonna be trying to solve? Yes. And then you go into the must haves, which in my opinion should be very small, depending on the role. Yes. Obviously then you can go crazy with the nice to have requirements, right? Sure, sure. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, you definitely want a mission. I think that, and that's something that attracted me to Palantir several years ago, right? It was maybe a little bit ahead of its time on like the being very, very mission focused. I do think that gives you a competitive advantage in hiring. I think you're right. I think a lot of Gen Z does care about that. So I want to add on to what you said is you would ideally like to have a through line between what the company's mission is, what this particular team is doing to further that mission, and then what this particular role is doing to the team.

That way there's like full connectivity between the high level and the granular. But this person's saying that there are too many, just two broad, it's just too broad. You need to understand, you need to understand, all you candidates listening, you need to understand, you need to stop taking these job postings so seriously, okay? It's a kitchen sink approach where a lot of companies are copying and pasting from one to the other, everyone wants to throw their opinion in, they're asking for 20 things, you don't really need all 20 things. This is why I'm saying, I'm not saying the job posting or the job description is worthless, I'm saying you need to have a different lens, you ideally need to find someone inside of that company to tell you what's really going on what's really what the high performers are really getting done there.

Otherwise it's easy to sort of overthink and paralyze yourself and they go, well, I don't have all 20 of these things and basically overconfident candidates will have an advantage because they just like won't care. They'll apply anyway. You want to try and get yourself out of that overthinking loop. 100%. Yeah. Brandness comes back about the certification. It makes his networking API automation, CI, CD pipelines. Well, then I would get it, right? I mean, that that definitely sounds good. he said only 6,000 people have passed the certification. Then yeah, I mean, I would say if it's that good, I would say definitely look into it for sure.

There's another comment too on TikTok right now. Hold on. How can you help data, so this person goes, how can you help data center engineers move into roles like DevOps Cloud? I'm gonna pull this out a little side up for you and kind of ask Matt this question. How can somebody move from a role in an organization like a data center engineer that's not quite a one to one and move into another department. Right. I think the question is, and I talk about this a lot, actually, about right now in this market, I'm sure you could test this, like just get a job, get into the company, whether it's a customer support role, whether it's a marketing role, whether it's an analyst role and then move into development.

Same kind of what Psyduck is asking as well on TikTok. What would be your overarching advice for folks trying to move in an organization? Yeah. I'll sort of answer this from like what I saw work, you know, when I was inside at Palantir and what I've seen some of my friends do because I wouldn't necessarily describe myself as an expert on this exact tactic. Step one, make sure that the move you were describing is not a fantasy. In other words, make sure that you've actually got some evidence that this type of lateral or up into the right move within the given company is possible. If it is, go try and find out how those people did it.

I would also say go try and network and try and make connections with people that are on on the team that you're trying to join. I would also, and maybe this is super obvious, you need to be outperforming in your current role, right? So don't think that you can just sort of do an okay job in your current role. You should also be aware of, so I would view it as my job is to scout the landscape, make sure I'm crushing it in my current role and try and get some sort of commitments. Now here's where it gets tricky. Sometimes there can be political dynamics where your current boss or team does not want you to leave.

Okay, that would be bad, right? If they will champion you for the move, because they care about you as a human being, they want you to thrive in your career arc, which is like hopefully the sort of manager and team that you're on, then what you can do is you can use that person as a career coach and say, okay, if I wanted to make this transition, and I would get feedback from two people in my like a little mental model here, my current boss who might be an advocate for me, and the team that I wanna join, what thing, what results, Help them build a scorecard for you.

What results over the next six months? What skills over the next six months? What do you need to see from me for me to be able to make the case to do this? When you incorporate people into a partnership with you and you sort of solicit ideas from them, they feel a lot more authorship and ownership over the plan that you've created. This also applies to getting a raise. What would it look like for me to get a 15% raise next year? What would I have to show you? I'm just picking an example, right? If the person authors that with you and you hit those goals, your chance of getting that raises way higher than if you just did a good job silently show up.

And they're like, oh yeah, that's kind of what I expected. It's like, no, it's not. We agreed that this would be outperformance, right? We defined it. I would take that same approach to trying to make that lateral move. I love that. So my side, hopefully it answers your question again. Streaming on TikTok's kind of hard because they can't see it. They only see me. So hopefully that helps. Let's see here. I know my guy comes in here. How do you come through a bad job description to know what they actually want from a candidate? Shh, I'm just wondering. I'm just as good as mine. Yeah, so again, I would, the frame I wanna break is that you're using the job description as your main way of finding out about a company.

I think it's one data point among several. I would try to talk to someone at that company. Either that used to work at that company recently, that's still at that company. I would try and like, you know, look at your friend network, look at your LinkedIn network, try and figure out a way, like one or two hops away to find out the real scoop because there's just so much jargon. It really is not the best way of figuring out what they're looking for. Yeah, Kelly, my dear friend goes, become a mind reader obviously. I think too, like don't put so much stock in job descriptions.

So if they say, I mean, honestly, like I just wouldn't believe anything. Yeah. I would literally just see a role. Now, my thing is, if you're a junior person and you're submitting to an architect role or staff engineer, maybe don't do that, right? Like I would look at levels. Sure, sure. But I also like, you know, if you're like, well I only have like 50% of the role, submit, right? Like if it's like a level up or, you know, you think you could get into the role, I would submit your resume. But again, it's like what Matt said, I would not be submitting your resume right now.

And again, I have videos on this on my YouTube page. I would go to the jobs jobs page on LinkedIn, message direct hiring manager that you think probably are in that hiring process and give them a quick spiel. Like Kelly's hiring right now. She's not been texting nonstop just with her experience with recruiters right now. Like the more direct and straightforward you can get with the hiring manager in the DMs and let them know what you provide the more response or more responses you're gonna get. So what else, man? I mean, we're kind of, we're technically at time, but I'm willing to chop it up for another minute or two before we kind of get into rapid fire questions that I have.

But anything else that maybe we haven't covered or is kind of top of mind right now. Yeah, I mean, to any of the HMs out there that are wanting to become better at interviewing and hiring, a lot of things you can do, but the super short answer is, define the role well in terms of the results you need, the competencies you're looking for, craft initial questions that largely focused on what this person has done well and has not done well in their past, try to avoid asking a bunch of, how would you handle a difficult colleague? It's very easy to give short, you know, 90 second answers that show that you've learned the quote, right answer to these sort of scenario based questions.

Oftentimes the reason that people are good at those is because they're actually bad at them in real life and they've gotten coaching on what the right answer is. The reason why people struggle to do the right thing in their jobs is often not intellectual in nature. There's an emotional blocker And they're going to consistently keep struggling with that. So lots of things we can go in on the interviewing front. And like we talked about earlier, dividing conquer, do not ask individual interviewers to give holistic up and down yes, no ratings, get them focused on specialized interviews and then combine that data. I say data, combine the data from the interview, right?

From the person's actual past experiences rather than just your gut impression of how much you liked the person during the interview. Tons more we can go into there. So reach out if you have a question. Jason, Jason, what do you mean? Does that detrimentally affect the hiring process? Can you expand on that, please? You've both comes in here and goes, what advice would you give to someone who learns best through hands-on experience rather than relying on certifications? Would showcasing skills through blog posts or live videos? Yes. Yes. Yeah. And when this person says they learn best through hands-on experience, I guess the context there would matter.

If the context is you're learning in a job you currently have, yeah, you should be outperforming in that job and either getting promoted or having strong references from the top you can leverage. And if it's the sort of thing where you're self studying, then I definitely think showcasing it sort of learning in public becomes even more important because there's not a neat package that someone can just look at and say, Oh, they accomplished this. They people have easy bundles. This off. Think about it. That's where you having your own blog, your own YouTube, something like that where you're doing it publicly can be really helpful.

I love it. I love it. Um, yeah, the large, the large amount of technically unqualified applicants that overflows hiring funnels. Detrimently affect the hiring process. I mean, yeah, because I think, so again, I don't, I mean, I'm going to plug endorsed AI here. That's why I think using endorsed AI actually helps a lot. Because again, all, all of these resumes that are coming at you, you only sort through when it's, when they submit. And so endorsed uses AI and then like flips the script. And it's like, all right, Jason submitted his resume two days ago. He's technically in the middle of 300 applicants, but AI is bumping him to the top because he's the most applicable, right?

So again, like, obviously I got to plug in Dorson in this situation, but yes, I would say, does that detrimentally affect the hiring process 100%? One of the things that's about companies is that like the flood of candidates coming in, if you don't have a strong filter at both, let's say the resume level, basically the top of funnel sourcing level, and your first interview screen, you hurt the hiring accuracy later on. Because candidates that should have never made it deep into the process, you just start getting overwhelmed and just start picking. Totally. And you're like, oh, I saw five terrible candidates. Now this person that's still kind of mediocre, looks like a superstar in comparison, because you've got way too many people.

Did you take the proper offers? And hiring is to become like just numb to it. Brand Nisk back here, 360. Thanks for all the comments, man. I appreciate it. What do you think of these seven round interviews as of late? Seven rounds is probably overkill except for like really like a thing. And I get it. I get, I understand. Yeah, I think if you're like an exec, so there's two dimensions that a company needs to think about the number of interviews. The data elicitation, okay, so we're just focused on making a high quality decision. Are you really learning new information that's gonna change the higher, no higher decision?

And then there's the number of touch points that you think the candidate needs so that like the team has met the candidate, right? Cause it'd be kind of weird to do one interview and you learn everything in a contract role, pure contracting and you work with a recruiter, they've met the candidate and the higher measure pulls it. That happens and that's fine, but. Right. So I would just say in general, think about optimizing for those two things. You want an accurate decision. You want the person to meet enough of the team to feel like they got a chance to meet the team. Sometimes though, something like the right number of interviews plus lunch with four or five other people can sort of accomplish that virtual launch.

Yeah. Whatever. Just realize those are the two different variables you can start getting creative and not feel like you need to overstuff the interview queue because that can lead to lots of problems. And for the record, if you do go to lunch for the interview process, don't get a burger, get something that's very light that you can eat with a fork and it's not messy. Just heads up and don't like the most expensive thing on the menu either, right? Probably a good like salmon or like a chicken or something like that. No one talks about that but like don't, because again, like listen, listen, I talk about biases that are formed all the time interviewing.

If you're, I've actually never talked about this. I'm glad you brought it up. If you go to a lunch interview and you're out here ordering like the most expensive thing or really messy thing and you're out there looking like a slob bro, like you're out, you're out. Yeah, yeah. Don't be a slob, don't overspend, don't drink. Don't just don't do, your goal is not to like, matter of the day. I wouldn't even eat. Yeah, you're mostly there to like socialize and show a little cool chill person. Yeah, get a salad with some chicken on it and call it a day. And then if you're still hungry afterwards.

Yeah, go eat your burrito after the, after the, after the, And that's exactly what I do. That's exactly what I do. Cool. Awesome. Good ship. Thanks again for you all for hanging out with us this morning. Any last questions throw it up. I want to get to my rapid fire with Matt. Matt, again, where can people find you? Say your Twitter handle one more time. Sure. It's at Matt and Walsh. And you guys can also go to the website, Talgo.io. I love that. I love that. First question. If you woke up tomorrow and I told you you can't do what you do now, but money is the same or if not better and you can't do anything in the hiring tech space.

What would you do? I'd start a, a tech startup designed to teach kids how to think logically for critical thinking, sort of basing it off the LSAT company that I also sort of have on the side and maybe try and spin it in the direction of a resource for homeschooling parents. Cause I think that's going to be a trend. We're going to see increase over time, something in that space. I love that man. That's really, really cool. Second question is, what do you like to do outside of work for fun just in general? So in the last three or four years since I've moved to the Pacific Northwest get outside in nature I'd had no idea how much I liked the forest.

So taking my two boys on hikes, you know, obviously parenting shifts your time allocation a lot So we're working out being outside in nature eating really good food. I'm a big foodie coffee. The coffee here is fantastic huge coffee nerd All right, real quick, real quick, real quick. Best coffee you've had recently, like what coffee shop, when I say best coffee shop, you've had gone recently, what is it? My favorite shop in Portland is Prince Coffee, and they carry my favorite roaster in Portland, which is Hart. They also... Oh, Hart, fantastic. I was Hart. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, everyone kept saying Kova, and I like Kova, but I like Hart more.

I like Kova too. Not bad. Yeah, but I like Hart more. There's also a nice spot in Vancouver, Washington, to sort of like give some props to like the neighboring city next to Portland, a place called relevant. Relevant coffee is great. And so is so is compass. So we have a lot. I mean, we're spoiled for good coffee up here. I know. It's so good. I need to get some recs from you so I can. So I like ordering coffee beans. My favorite right now that I love I'm drinking. Well, I ordered I bought from a place nearby my house, but like beans wise, try hard coffee in Austin.

So I do a lot of decaf for anxiety issues. Today I'm full caffeine because of hockey last night, But try hard coffee has the best decaf beans. It's incredible. So highly recommend if you wanna order beans from try hard, highly recommend the brand-nisk out here goes. That's funny, I'm from Spokane, I love it. Is this drove through Spokane? That's funny. I love it, I love it. Third question here, you know, typically when I interview nerds on the show, I ask like what's, you know, what frameworks are you interviewing or what frameworks are you messing with? Yada yada yada. Any, let's just make it more like high level.

I'm trying to, I'm taking an LLM class right now. So I'm trying to build my own MVB. Oh nice, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We think we can apply our hiring methodology through software. We think a lot of it like maps really well in the LLM world. But I first need to sort of like, you know, learn, learn how to do that. So yeah. Sure. I love that. And then last question, the show is called guidance counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors at middle school, high school and college, but now as adults, we don't really have a guidance counselor or turn to and just ask for general career advice, what would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Matt?

Learn to code, I think for sure that's the, now that's the tactical one, right? Buy Bitcoin, no, I'm kidding. It's like learn to code. I do think I probably over optimized for just getting straight A's and doing the things that I knew I was naturally strong at rather than really sort of challenging myself on the technical side. I think if you can combine two things that people often don't have together, that can make you relatively unique and powerful in the job market. So I do think there's some truth there. I think at a higher level, the advice would be to try to quickly discover what you're strong at, right?

And lean into your strengths. I know those are like a little bit in tension, but I think that's generally very good advice for the question behind the question is like, someone's listening to this. should I do? And I think they should try to lean into their areas of strength, and then realize that passion and meaning often emerge organically, right? Sort of like an emergent property from you just pursuing something that you're really good at and doing a phenomenal job. As opposed to overthinking, oh, do I like this thing or not? Lean into what you're really good at and a lot of good things will naturally tend to happen as a result of that.

I love that. Cool. Well, we all thank you again for hanging out with us today. That was a hell of an episode to end. Guidance Councilor 2.0 for the next 30, 45 days. Again, baby boys do next Thursday technically, but who knows at this point, it could be any day now. So taking off next week in the next really, the whole month of July, I will be back in August. So for those of you watching, I thank you again so much. I appreciate you and we will see you in August. You all have a good one. I'll speak to you. He's having me. 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 finish 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 at T-dastin on all social media handles, and I hope you have a fantastic day.