music city code 2018

full transcript

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Hey everyone super pumped to bring this podcast episode to you. This is actually from my talk over the weekend at Music City Code Which is Nashville's premiere technology conference? Hope you guys enjoy just a few other housekeeping things again as always if you can rate this podcast In the app store that'll be awesome would love for this to gain a little traction the market allow other people to find this podcast and use it whenever they're on the job hunt. Also if you want to reach me, best way to do that is through social media. My handle on all platforms is at tdes and that's t-d-e-s-s-e-y-n.

And if you want to reach me not through social shoot me an email. Taylor at Vaco V-A-C-O.com. Hope you guys enjoy. Alright so I'm going to go ahead and introduce myself and we're going to get the sink kicked off and then we go from there. Basically, my name is Taylor. I am a recruiter. Everybody else. Hey, look, two more people. Let's say those are five round of applause. Yeah. Yeah. But you have to come sit up in the front. Nobody can sit further back than the gentleman with the green shirt. So come on. Come on. Come on. Awesome. So I'm Taylor. I work for Vaco.

Vaco, we are located here in Nashville. We also have 40 offices across the country. Basically this talk is a tell-all with recruiters. So we are kind of a necessary evil in today's market. A lot of individuals don't know how to work with us. They don't know what questions to ask. And what my goal here is to basically give you guys all the questions to prepare yourself on how to work with recruiters. But I can also talk on a few other things too. The main thing is how to scale teams. So in every single division I've been in at VACO for the last. So I've been with VACOR for seven years.

I've been recruiting for seven years. I talk to developers and I say basically recruiting for seven years is like dog years. A lot older in my experience in just seven years. And so I've also scaled teams, every single division. VACOR has experienced exponential growth since I've been there for seven years. We've gone from, when I started my division, my sole division, we were $2 million in revenue. We're gonna hit 5.5 this year after four years. So a little bit about me, I grew up in South Carolina, moved up here for music, like everyone else. I did the Honky Tongues, I played at Tequila Cowboy, if anybody knows that bar.

I did some studio stuff. And after six quick months, I was working six nights a week at Alpeque Steakhouse on West End that is closed now, and I was making $0, and I needed to find another job. And so basically, I leveraged my network, which is another thing I'll probably talk a lot about. And a friend introduced me to Vaco. I had no idea what a recruiter was. I interviewed. I said, yes, I'll do it. And then three days later, I got the offer. And I've been at Vaco ever since. So I started Vaco in our National Accounts Division. So I was your typical recruiter that would cold call you across the country for an enterprise client.

That you've already been called for 15 times. And that you really don't want to be submitted to. I did that. Some of the clients that I called was Yahoo, Disney, Pacific and electric T-Mobile in Seattle. After a lot of people hanging up on me and people getting mad at me and asking people what a MySQL DBA was, I then realized that I needed to meet individuals like yourself and build relationships. So at the end of the day, the developers in town are only going to trust the people that you can meet face to face. So I had the opportunity to interview with a few offices.

I interviewed with our Tampa Charlotte in Raleigh office. I ended up going with our Raleigh office because the tech out there obviously is absolutely fantastic and the team out there I was a part of was incredible as well So I went out to Raleigh for a year and I got really invested within the within the within the local tech community at the time I was recruiting all the things infrastructure BAPM's developers. I was recruiting everything. Yeah You all have to sit up here. You can't sit in the back come on you can't sit past the guy in the green shirt So come on come on I love it.

Everyone's like, I regret coming to this now. So, as I was saying, I was in Raleigh, and basically I was like, man, I really like developers. Like, I feel like developers do the cool things. And so I started getting invested in the .NET user group in Raleigh. Basically, they meet every week, which is a pretty incredible feat now, knowing being a part of the user group here in Nashville, the .NET user group, and doing once a month is already enough work. props to the team in Raleigh for going every single week. Got really invested, got involved, didn't say a word. When I went to the user groups three months later, a guy came up to me and goes, hey, man, where do you work?

And I was like, they could. I was like, Graham, never heard of it. What do you code? And I was like, I'm a recruiter. And he goes, what? And I go, I'm a recruiter. And he goes. So anyways, I got to become great friends with a lot of developers out there. And then my mentor here, Nashville, some of you know him, Scott Gordon. Scott is a dear friend of mine and he was my mentor for the first five years at BayCo. He called me up with my brother, moved to Nashville to be in tech as well. And so between my mentor calling me and my brother being in tech and Nashville, I decided to come back.

I trained under my mentor for about a year, learned a ton. He moved on to more of a traveling director role where he implement best practices. And so now I only work with developers in Nashville day in day out. I don't do BAPM recruiting and I don't do infrastructure recruiting. If you mention the word server, I don't know what that is. So basically that's all about me. I am the VP of Adonai user group. I work with these two gentlemen. I find a gentleman up here, Carl and Eric. So we help organize that meet up about 60 active members every month. I've spoken at a few code conferences already I spoke with Code Stock three weeks ago.

I'm speaking at Seeming City Summits in Chattanooga and then hopefully if enough people bail on Code on the Beach I'll be there with Chris drinking some sugary drinks with umbrellas. So this talk I have no slides. I know that baffles some of you. There are zero slides in this talk. I know it weirds when people out like Chris but basically I want to go and dive into Q&A, right? So there are some things that I can talk about for for like the next 50 minutes and not get y'all's feedback. But I think at the end of the day, I wanna hear y'all's four stories. I wanna hear your success stories.

I wanna hear, we can talk about pricing, we can talk about contract to hire, we can talk about contract, we can talk about what it looks like working with the recruiter, what to look for. So basically, I'm gonna open up to Q&A. If nobody raises their hand, I'll keep talking, but I really, really wanna use this time to get very basically down and dirty with how to work with recruiters. And so that being said, you know what I'm gonna want to ask the first question. Usually once the first question's asked, like then the flood gate's open, but. I'll go for it. Yeah, go ahead. All right, I'll turn this up.

I've done that. I'll turn this to you, done that. Or you can just like, I'll turn this to you, some of you software. No. I'll ask what. Anybody else, any of you, I'll turn this to you. Anyway, what's the alternatives to recruiting? You got this recruiting. You told me just find it a job? Yeah, just lay out the landscape of your whole thing for a little while. Absolutely. Yeah, so, everybody here that question, basically, what does it look like to find a job? So you can obviously go on your own, right? But I usually tell developers, if you want to go on your own, that's a full-time job.

Hence why I have a job. They're obviously you can submit your resume to job postings. There's two types of recruiters. There's the agency recruiters, and then there's the corporate recruiters. corporate recruiters, other recruiters that work directly for the end client. They are the ones that post the jobs. If you submit your resume to a client and their job posting, that was posted by their internal HR. And then you have agency recruiters like myself. The agency recruiters are the tech systems, the Robert Haffs, the Bay Cows, the Kinexuses, the IDRs. Those are agency recruiters. Agency recruiters are a little bit more salesy and a little bit more annoying because we are more commission based as far as I know than corporate recruiters.

And so, but that gives us a more sense of urgency and hence why we annoy you to death. So that's kind of the landscape from that perspective. Does that answer your question? I have a whole other thing. I have a whole other thing that we always talk about in the other hand of the spectrum. Yeah, so, 10th agency, so it depends what people call 10th agency. Are you talking about admin assistance and like? Quick half bodies for some of it. So we are technically a temp agency. So temp agency is basically, we have a CTO call. It goes, hey, we need a senior Angular 2 guy for a three month project here you have.

And then we call up a guy, they interview with our client, and then goes to work in three days. Now, a lot of people when they think of the down and dirty, staff up 15 people at one time and get them started. We have that division at VACO. We call it VACO staffing and what they do is they do more like admin assistance, APAR, entry level, not entry level, they go all the way up to senior sales. But basically they're a little bit more volume based than we are. So VACO, we are kind of more, what I say, a consulting practice. So like right now I have six developer jobs I'm working on and they're They're looking for senior level people, and they go through the interview steps, and then they get hired.

So it's a little bit more of a sniper approach to the machine approach for how we do things. Does that answer your question? I think the first question. There you go. Who else? Yeah. What would you say are the main disability mentioned time, if not supposed, if you do it yourself? Yeah. What would other mean disability? Of not going through a recruiter? Right. right here that disadvantage is going to recruit her. I would say we can wear you out and we can waste your time and we can have a lot of false promises and we can make you emotionally unstable. I mean I'm serious. So how many people in here raise your hand?

I've had at least one bad experience with a recruiter. So like 80% of you have had, has anybody not worked with the recruiter, raise your hands. So like 10%, okay, that makes sense. So, yeah, the crowd participation, yell out some things real fast that you've had in experience with the bad recruiter. Like what is the main thing that you have it? Okay, mismatching. Okay. So what? Wrong technique. So basically you're a dot net guy, but you have Java once and he tries to, like sell you on a job position. We have co-ball, she worked on 20 years ago, and they're like, hey, I have a great co-ball job.

That's my favorite. That was me. Say what? Zero feedback? What else? They try to keep here to be a senior position. OK. Not a senior. OK. So not listening? Not getting you. Not getting you a senior position, OK? OK. Brandon, what was your experience? I'm a Scottish product, and I'm just proud of the product here. But I actually came from an agency world, and I didn't have really any group-product experience, but I was interviewing to take a master for a product role in data sciences. And I worked with an internal corporate recruiter like she talked about. And she had, like you guys all said, I had no idea what she was talking about.

But additionally, it was very much in it for some sort of kickback. So whenever I would ask for more money, she would like scoff on the phone and go back and be like, well, I'm going to have to ask. And then within five minutes, I would hear back and say, well, I guess they've approved it. So you wanted to know how long it was just very, like, a very impersonal, like very rude. I haven't spoken to her since then. I have no idea if she's at the company. I know that that's not, you know, like, I know there are some corporate recruiters. I like how they created your corporate recruiter.

But mine had just been able to care for a little time. So there you go. There's your answer right there. I mean, at the end of the day, there's a lot of bad ones out there. So I have a really good friend. He's an architect in Raleigh. He works for Deutsche Bank. He's a Java guy. And we were having lunch. And he was like, I really feel like recruiters right now are what developers were at the dot.com boom. So basically, everybody read how to code in 90 days. There's an influx of developers in the market. It basically ruined it for the people who wanted to do it.

And that's kind of where we're at right now with recruiters. So you get a bunch of college grads. You don't know what they're doing. You promise them on huge compensation packages. And then basically then you have Sally Sue calling you and have no idea what's going on. Chris was just talking to me before everyone showed up about his experience talking to a recruiter last night. Fortunately, it was not at my company. But literally, she sounded clueless what she was doing. And so that's in a nutshell what everybody said is kind of what I hear as well. Yeah. So what is a good recruiters job? Which should we expect?

So good recruiters job. First off, that they meet you in person. So how many people have actually gone to a recruiter's office to meet them in person? I've never met him like. So like 30% of y'all. They first need to meet you, right? So I'm really bullish about this. And I understand people's time is precious. Everybody has crazy busy lives. I do a lot of Skype's and Google Hangouts. If you can't come to meet me down in Brentwood, I know it's a little bit of a hike for some people. I'm more than welcome to hop on a video call and say, hey. But why wouldn't you not meet the person who's responsible for the next step in your career?

That's my biggest thing. And that's what I'm really bullish about. If a recruiter is not willing to meet you face to face shake your hand and say, I have your back, I would not work with them. 100%. So that's the first thing. The second thing is I would say that recruiter needs to be knowing of what's going on. So I understand that recruiters, a lot of them aren't going to know the interkits of microservice architecture or the new DevOps trends. But at the end of the day, Lord have You know the difference between Java and JavaScript. Right? I mean, I think that's kind of the biggest thing I hear in today's market.

And so, you know, what? Here's an email that I got from the literature. I'm from it. Yeah. Read it out. My name is Priyanka and I'm an IT Recruiter at East Solutions Inc. Our record shows that you are an experienced IT professional with experience in IT professional. Yes. Yes, yes. This experience is relevant to one of my current openings. Just send me your name. Where are you located? Hold on a second, I think it's an offshore recruiter. Oh, and that's another thing too. So I didn't answer your question as well. There's offshore recruiters that we have to go up against too. And if I could show you, I'd probably get like 30 emails a day from offshore recruiters emailing me to send them candidates.

I mean it just is absolutely ridiculous. And so... That sounds like the making of a concrete scheme. Oh yeah, right. It's all pyramid schemes, stuff like that. So basically knowledge of technology, right? I mean I think at the end of the day, like I don't think any of you guys really expect recruiter to know like the you know different syntax of C sharp 7.1 but if but you probably expect them to know I don't know that was just one of the talks that's one pulling that out from so but I think a day today you still want a recruiter who's knowledgeable right so if they're clueless I would move on because they don't care about their craft right my wife back there she makes fun of me all the time she goes you listen to anything other than podcast because that's all I listen to I actually like tech I want to know tech I want to know what's going on, I want to be able to talk to you about like, hey, listen, like, here's where things are going.

I have a lot of architects in town where Nashville's a heavy Microsoft town. I have a lot of dot net architects go, hey, where's the market heading? It's really cool when you get to the point where senior level individuals come to you and ask what you're seeing in the market, right? And so that's one thing I would say. I'd say another thing too is they're just tenacious, right? So they're always going to be sending you positions. I always tell people, I'm never going to be the gatekeeper. So what I want is I want your absolute minimum salary. I want your ideal. And I want to know what you want to do.

And then I'm going to send you everything within that range. And you're going to tell me yes or no. And that recruiters don't get huffy and puffy like Brandon's corporate recruiter. Literally, my job, this set me up great. My wife said yes to me. but like I got a lot of nose when I was dating, right? Like my life set me up to be a recruiter. I said it was forced. So I mean at the end of the day, like recruiters don't need to get like bitchy with you because you said no, right? Okay, let's just keep moving on. I'm gonna send you another opportunity, right?

And so that's another thing I would look for. And also being involved. The one thing I would ask your recruiter, Hey, what are you involved with in the local community? If that recruiter says nothing, don't work with them. Reality check, you're probably not going to be able to work with a lot of them. There's not a lot of recruiters out there, at least in the National Market that I know of, that are going to meetups. And here's another thing. If you see a recruiter at that meetup, check to see if they're still there at the very end. Usually recruiters just show up, shake some hands, try to get your information, and leave when the talk happens.

don't work with them. Flat handed. Huh? Flat handed. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I would say those are a few things. You know, also, so I'm really big on the 51-49 rule. I was a guy named Gary Vaynerchuk. I don't know if anybody knows that guy. He's really big on 51-49 recruiters and today's mark in take, take, take, take. They never give, right? And so I try to flip that on his head. That's why I do these conferences. I tell all my secrets. I also help write people's resumes. resumes. If I can't place you, I'm still going to help you with whatever you need help with.

For the most part, y'all's resume sucks. Alright, I'm just going to put that out there. Like, there's really bad resumes out there. But I'm willing to help. If a recruiter isn't even willing to help you from that perspective, don't work with them. And also, a little shameless self-plug. I have a podcast that basically I interview senior software engineers and hiring managers on their job hunt experience and hire me to learn what they look for. That podcast is Guidance Counselor 2.0. The reason why I call it Guidance Counselor 2.0 is because I only kick the Guidance Counselor into Shin who told everybody to write a one page resume.

If you're a senior in today's market, give me three, four, or five pages. What's up, Chris? Any other four, five pages for me? Yeah, no. No. Chris, go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead and shame what's self-life. Go ahead and shame what's self-life. It's good. Go ahead. Chris has got a great one. Chris has got a great one. So check out his, what's it called again? Tails on the script. Nice. It's really good. It's really good. So that's just a few things I look for. Right at the end of the day, you have to have somebody who's willing to help you beyond just sending you a job.

And then start with the following one. Yep. And recently, I heard learning the term ghosting. Ghosting? Yeah, what will it be in my dating life? Yeah, Ghosting happens often. I understand. You may even get through some interviews and you know, hair work from the employers. Is that acceptable for our ever career? So yes and no. I'm morally on the no, but let me explain myself real fast. I'm going to defend recruiters for a second, but then I'm also going to say in the most part, no, it's not acceptable. I'm not perfect. I sometimes miss on follow up. I'm not going to say if you're going to say I follow up with every single person.

I literally have a few people I need to follow up with that I haven't checked in with in probably three weeks. I'm by no means sitting up here saying I'm perfect, but recruiters, our responsibility is to meet 15 new people every week. week new, not existing, not people we placed. So to put it in perspective, I've been in the National Market for five years. I'm bad at math, so let's say 10. So I've met 520 people times five. So I've met over 2,500 people in the last five years. Sometimes our follow-up doesn't happen because of the sheer volume that we have to handle on our side.

Now, a lot of people, listen to this. If my mentor is listening to this, he's going to be mad at me. He said, that should be your excuse. And I agree, but sometimes it just happens. So what I would do, I always tell every single developer I work with, please check in with me. Call me. Text me. Email me. You're not going to bother me. Because at the end of the day, the people who stay top of mind for me are going to be most successful working with me. So I'm really big on that because a lot of times recruit is good about a wrap but not many people know how we have to do our jobs and our job is literally to meet everybody in Nashville or everybody in Detroit or everybody in Chicago.

Right? And so like that can be kind of tiresome and also very mind-numbing and we and sometimes we just forget to follow up. Yep. So from an employer, can I make some? From a employer's perspective, just getting your job posted up there. Yep. recruiters are good ways to do that but do you know like stats on what you can find to recruiters versus what's not fun I mean because that might affect something. For sure yeah I mean at the end of the day I so I don't I don't know stats. I mean there are a lot of people in town that don't use recruiters and are successful staffing up for teams.

I think in probably every market that's represented here in every city there's probably a lack of talent for the amount on a job that are available. And so I think the one thing with the recruiter is you hire us to leverage our network. So a lot of clients that we meet with are like, why should we use you guys? We had one client in Brentwood. They were looking for a .NET architect, 150, 160. And basically, they were like, we've literally searched. We've literally interviewed every architect in Nashville. My Vaco submitted three people that have not been interviewed and all three are going to final out.

And so at the end of the day, you hire us for our networking, you hire us for our network, and you hire us for our years of experience, right? There's no way to meet everybody in town. If you think you've interviewed everybody, you're wrong. And so that's where you lever just. But at the end of the day, we are expensive. So just to let you know if anybody's hiring managers in here or in charge of hiring and dealing with recruiters, I mean, to put it perspective, our fee structure, the way we get paid for permanent salaries, we're 25% a first year salary. So if you're 100K, the client is paying us basically 125 to find that person.

It gets a little expensive. They coast more pricey, but literally, we sent, you know, if you're hurting for people, like this one company is in Brentwood, we send you three people, and all three go to the final rounds, I feel like that's a pretty good deal. Because they've been doing it without architect now for a year, and they've been using one recruiting firm. And we come in in 30 days and send them three people that are going to the final round. Hopefully my guy gets it. So that's kind of how we work. But like I said, there's a lot of companies out there that do their own thing, and they're very successful with it.

So I mean, I'm not sitting up here that saying that you have to use recruiters in a really only way, but we do help a ton. What else? This is good stuff. I love this. Yes, you're next. And then you're next. After her. Okay, so my question, I have not worked with a lot of recruiters. That works with two, but both of them have a junior cell. Okay. And on the phone, they were like, oh, I have a great condition. You know, talking about federally, of this and I never go back for them. So it sounds like maybe they weren't great recruiters, but how do you find a good recruiter?

Yes. Hey, high five on that one. Literally, that was like the perfect segue on the one I want to do next. So how to find a good recruiter. So here's kind of what my guidelines look like. And this is kind of my secret sauce. And I feel like if there's anything you should write down in this entire talk, this is it. So I've been recruiting for Vaco for seven years now. There are a ton of people that have already left Vaco. The average recruiter is kind of the same as a developer, right, so like 18 months. Because what happens is the recruiter jumps to a new company.

They want to get a pay raise. They stay there for a year and a half. They realize that they don't have the work ethic to make extra money. So then they jump again to try to get a little higher base. And then they keep doing it. They keep doing it. There was one guy that he used to work at Vaco. And he's no longer there anymore. And if you look at his LinkedIn, everything is one year, nine months, two years, one month, one year, eight months, one year, eleven months, and literally just hops around. So first off, I would look for recruiters, been with the same company for, and these are bare minimum at least two years, at least, same company two years.

I would then look for a recruiter that's been in the local market for at least two years. The reason why I say two years is because I've been a national now for five and I still don't know really anything. I'm still learning the companies. I'm still learning trends. If you've been with recruiters that's been in the local market for three months, they have no idea what's going on. Zero. And to let you know my profile, because I feel like I'm doing it okay, I've been with Baker for seven years, I've been in the local national market for five, and I'm still learning. And I still mess up.

But at the end of the day, you need continuity with those recruiters and being in the same place for a long time to show they care. Because here's the deal. When you hear the word Taylor deaths in the national market, I know my reputation is out there. For a Ford Bayco and for myself, and so if there's a recruiter that keeps bouncing around, they don't have a lot of loyalty to their company, they'd be quite frank, I doubt they have a lot of loyalty to their name in the market. So that's what I would look for. And that's the key thing I'm extremely bullish about, because if you search for recruiters on LinkedIn, everybody's been there for about six months.

And they're usually recent college grads. So LinkedIn is a recruiter tool, right? So how many of you guys get hit? So let me add, so raise your hand if you can hit up on LinkedIn, at least once a day by recruiter, raise your hand. Alright, once a week. Sadly, they're not. We're just really bad at composing messages. It's his message. Hey, you're a great fit for the senior developer email template job. Right, we're so bad at it, right? So I'm not gonna lie, I leverage LinkedIn and ton. I think LinkedIn would be a great way for you just to immediately go to that recruiters' profile and check them out before you respond.

Because if they call you, if your resume's on dice, and this is the main job where I want people to use this dice, You have to be in technology to use dice. I've spoken to a few conferences now. There are tech guys that have no idea what dice is. I would absolutely leverage dice. I think career builder is a little busy. I could search developer on career builder, and I could get construction developers. So it gets a little busy. I don't even use career builder. I primarily use dice, and then I also use LinkedIn as well. But it is a big tool. and every single recruiter is leveraging it, and the recruiting company pays a ton of money to use it, and everybody gets licenses, and everybody messages you want it.

And so, my thing is, is I would say, so literally my title of my LinkedIn message is your typical recruiter message. Like literally that's my title. And I said, literally I say in the email, I know you get a ton of these things. If you're ever on the job hunt, I love to buy coffee, hit me up, period, send. That's all I do. Yep. What's the best thing about working with back right now? Yeah. Do you want to work with me? Yeah. Yeah. This talk's working. Yeah. That's going to be like, should I have told you I'm going to live with your website or like, or back, go to your website?

Yeah. So what I would do, and it's kind of a two-fold question, right? So I'm kind of, for those people on the job search, I would absolutely not submit your resume to a blanket job posted on the website no matter what. here's the deal, if you submit your resume to XYZ company, that resume goes in a database with a corporate recruiter has to search a ton of resumes. I literally get people submit their resume to a 125 Java architect in Nashville that are help desk people. I can't imagine what the corporate side gets. I just had to that. I think this is probably the most important part of my conversation earlier, but the internal recruiter declined my resume as soon as she got it, and then I got the job two weeks later.

So that kind of goes in and avoids it. Yeah, I have seen like when I was a little bit too little, I'm like, you think about playing games all the time. Yeah, absolutely. What's that called? How do you guys feel like these balls are not too ball? So I want to first answer your first question. So what I would do if I were you, I would search the word recruiter on LinkedIn. And I would, it's going to be a little cumbersome. But I would just like, every day, search it on LinkedIn. look at fiber accruers information and if they don't check off what I told you with criteria don't use them and if they do ping them big thing is I would also look at references on LinkedIn if you've got a my LinkedIn I have 12 references from software architects and developers in town because I know that I'm already at uphill battle working with you guys and I want to be able to show that hey I know what I'm talking about so I would also look for references as well if the recruiters are really good, they will have references.

And then the next thing, so if I have a job posting up, and you submit your resume to my job posting, basically it goes into this like, really wish I had a screenshot. Maybe this is where slides could come in handy. Oh my gosh, you know what, this is great. Maybe when we hang out code at the beach, I'll do it if I get in. So basically it comes into this database, and it's pretty easy to read. And basically we were able to pull up the resume, look at it. I literally look at a resume for five seconds. That's it. And then I go yes or no.

And so if I don't see the necessary keywords, like keywords just from a visual perspective, I go ahead and decline your resume. And so when I mark your resume as green, as go, whatever, I then call you or shoot your email. Let me ask you this, and this is for my data points and people in the back that came in. Thanks for joining me, by the way. I appreciate you all very much. Raise your hand. How many of you answer the phone when you don't know the number, raise your hand? All right, so like 15, 20%. Cool, that means I'm doing the right thing. Basically, so I start off by emailing everybody.

Because here's the deal. Basically my email is like, hey, I'd love to meet you, let me know when you're free. But like, I don't know about you, but like when my mom calls me and bombards me, like I just shut down and don't do well. And like, so I don't call people initially. I email you, because I want you to check your counter and get back to me on your own time. Because the last thing you needed to feel is bullied by a recruiter on when to come in. So that's kind of how I work. You shoot me an email back. I usually send two emails, I send a follow up, and then I call.

So then when I call you, I have a reference point. Hey, a shot you two emails, just wanted to see for still looking, if you don't answer my call, I leave you alone. And then I move on. So that's kind of how that works. What I do then is I ask you to come in and meet with me. If you're across town, I usually maybe try to grab lunch with you at a halfway point. We catch up real fast, and then I basically start sending you jobs. So I would do this. If you like the recruiter, please be lenient, and please be willing to send them references or take a test.

And I'm saying this from my perspective. And the reason why I say this is because we are consulting company at the end of the day, so what we try to do is we try to get as much data points before we submit that candidate's resume. And so I usually like to either do a reference or take a test. So if you're, you know, if you're like an angular guy, I'll send you an angular test and knock that out. And then I do a reference and then basically I submit a little packet with your resume and we skip about two or three steps in the interview process.

I usually tell people, if you're willing to jump through the hoops with me, I'll make this thing really painless. I move and I'm not bragging. I move so fast with jobs that people hesitate to take them because they move so fast. Ours move pretty quick, isn't it? Yeah, it was a week. So, we try to like, now I got Kyle's resume from a friend of mine, so that was already kind of a reference, so I did that. I think Kyle knocked out like a C-sharp test or something like that for me. And then two interviews later he got the offer. How long have you been there now for?

One or two years. There you go. And again, you have to know the client, right? So I knew this client at the end of the day, it's in the healthcare space, but it's like a startup, right? So I was able to tell Kyle, hey man, this place is pretty cool. It's a startup feel. You're within the HCA umbrella. So you have the backing, but you have the vibe of a startup. up and quite frankly you guys have probably one of the better engineer teams in Nashville. So it's just it's knowing what works right and then knowing and again going through the steps with the recruiter and looking at that criteria.

What else? It's good stuff. Yeah? I'm just curious, what is your ratio of, I don't want to say cold calls, but trying to contact people via LinkedIn or like different from their experiences, getting after references from people who work with people. Like which one's a higher hit rate? Yeah. Yeah. So everybody here had a question, which is a higher hit rate, references or LinkedIn or calling, just calling people? So it's pretty cool. I've got some reports that I can get, so I've got about 50% hit rate for people getting back to me. So if I send out 100 in-mails, I get about 50 people that at least respond to me, not necessarily want to work with me.

I would say even then it's half of that. People don't know this. There is a feature on LinkedIn that was recently rolled out where you could select if you were open to opportunities. If you're open to opportunities, select that. You will get hit up by recruiters more. If you're not looking, do not select that because you will get worn out. I actually hit up one of my friends who I placed at a previous position. I go, hey, your LinkedIn says you're looking. I know you just slanted up the spot. He goes, I didn't know about that feature. That's kind of weird. He goes, no, I'm not looking.

Thanks for looking out for me. So I'm just telling everybody now what that looks what that feature is. But honestly, I leverage my network, right? It's like I hit you up and I go, hey, who do you know? You know, Brian Rutledge introduced me to a few other guys. But I think at the end of the day, it's like taking care of people, right? I take so many people to lunch. I take so many people to coffees. I take people to dinners. I take people to the press games when we have the box. Because I know at the end of the day, when Kyle has a buddy looking, I want him to like hit me up.

And so I would say that's the best success rate. Like when anybody sends me a candidate they've worked with, I almost always play something. So what else? I saw another hand, yeah. What are the strategies that I guess people might expect to establish with what those words are telling you? So you're talking about you go through the interview steps and then you get the offer and the salary is different? or do you think the calibration is fit, but the... Yeah, it happens. So a lot of times, so the biggest thing to ideal, and I'm gonna make sure you answer your questions, I've already done an interesting question, let me know.

But basically, I post positions every day, and I put the ideal salary. But I do tell people, I can submit you at half a million dollars, but at the end of the day, the client's gonna decide what you're worth. So what I try to do is I really try to get what you'd be really happy with, and you're bare minimum, and I submit you at what you'd be really happy with, but knowing that what's your bare minimum, so I can kind of coach you, like you do a phone call. Hey, you know, we really like, what's your name? Odey. Odey. Hey, Teo, really like Odey.

I think he's got the technical chops, but he's a little light in this area. So we don't think we can do 95K, we may be able to do 90K, right? And so then what I do is I call you up and go, hey man, they really like you, they wanna move forward, but what do you think of 90? Is that going to be a nine? And so that's, but again, that's where we get a recruit that educates you, right? I mean, how many people in here that have gone through the interview process got to the final salary offer, and it's way lower than what you wanted?

Okay, do you agree? Just do it. Yeah. Do you agree? Yeah. Really? I blame the recruiter. Yeah. I think the recruiter's all the things. My view on that is, one of the things I like about recruiters I don't have to discuss that. Correct. Correct. That is correct. Now it's just about who I'm not going to do. And you're still sad and all that. It makes it so much easier. And after the smell issue, it smells funny. Well, they don't really want to pay you unless you can't say that they were off. And you know it's not your amount. So why you can't back about that, because you can make it new that way at the beginning.

We just didn't have a call by a guy. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm just pessimistic and I'm bad. Dude, that's why I'm giving this talk, because I know all y'all are pessimistic towards us. I mean, listen, don't be, I get it, right? And so, yeah, I mean, it happens. And I listen, all I would tell you is how I do business, and that would be 100% completely transparent with you. Hey, what's your name? Lincoln. Hey, Lincoln, listen, here's the deal, man. Actually, wait, do we work together? No? OK. All right. I know you're the team. OK, cool. I worked with them. You were Scott?

OK, awesome. It didn't work out, but I've always had a good job putting in the playing game. Awesome. Cool, man. Good, good, good. So yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, I always try to be as transparent as possible. And I'm not afraid to be like, I don't think you're going to be a fit. But we can try. And I usually are like, hey, listen, keep the, you know, I don't think you have the skills here, here, and here. But we'll give it a shot. that may affect right. And I think it's all about being transparent. It's literally all about being transparent.

Well, and on that subject, since I got your attention, what's the feeling? It's good. Hey, everything's looking good. I just talked to them. I'm just waiting to hear something. Yes. And I was gonna put that in your phone. Yeah. You know? I'm just waiting. I took a few relatives for a federal job. I don't know what happened. Yeah, I mean, so I'll tell you this. So I had a UI UX guy get an offer from a client in Brentwood three weeks ago and he finally just now got the offer. It took three weeks. That's why I do, I like contract to hire a contract versus perm because perm just does It's slow.

It's very, very slow. And then I'll kind of segue in this because I want to talk about this before we finish up. But with you, that's a shitty thing that happened, and I'm sorry on behalf of all recruiters. But I do think that recruiters get bad raps because companies mess it up. There's a lot of times companies can jerk recruiters around because they don't have to deal with. at the end of the day, you probably remember that recruiters' company's name because of the bad experience, right? But at the end of the day, that recruiter probably was so ashamed he didn't pick up your call and just say, hey man, like that company just withdrew the position.

I don't know what happens. But the thing is though, is that a lot of recruiters aren't willing to have the hard conversations. It sucks. It's all. I got a group of dollars from a program at the Gophers National Life Board. Really? Oh, alright. Yeah. Brings me in, you know, I go for all the security, she's very engaged. I'm very interested in those. Good. Alright, everything goes, look, don't even have a free decent interview. Alright. I thought it was pretty low. They just, you know, people like me, that talk to people and family ones that I don't know. But anyway, it's all in really really well.

Don't hear anything. I'm not supposed to get it a lot of any competition. Right. So I finally call her. She's very cold. Anything? Tell me? They got somebody in the fall. And I will work. No. That's not. I'll dance. I want to have a detail. I want to know what they hate it, what they love, and why they love it. Preach dude. Preach. Because I will tell you this right now. I look you dead in the eye. Companies do that to us more times than I care for. We get screwed over because you know why the companies aren't recently, the companies at the end of the day, their name isn't on the line for you because they know the name is on us and so they get the cop out saying, wow, we don't like this guy.

And literally I'm like, what? Why? Like literally he has everything that you want, you would find around and then you just tell me he's just not a fit. Now, so my team, we really try to dig. We have great relationships with managers. Is that my five minute? Five minutes. We have a lot of great relationships with managers, but at the end of the day, sometimes I'm not lying to you. They give us cop out answers. Let me hit something real quick. Contract, contract, hire, permit. At the end of the day, you can get fired in all three ways. Right now, the market's really good. I would highly recommend consulting and contracting with a recruiting company.

You get paid a little bit more. You get paid for it. Or you work. You usually get to work on greenfield projects. If it's not a greenfield project, it's usually new enhancements for new technologies on all legacy systems, which is kind of fun in a way to talk into some developers. Recruiting companies offer benefits. Usually, the benefits are a little bit more expensive. You probably have better luck finding stuff on your own at the end of the day. If you've ever wanted to do consulting, go through a bank or a recruiting company, because we are able to be your eyes and ears and you don't have to worry about trying to find a job on your own when your project comes to an end.

I think a lot of people, I actually laid this out on my podcast with actually one of the former presidents of the Dottonay usually who are Daniel Oliver in Knoxville. We talked about contract contract to hire Perm. He started out as a contractor in Knoxville and now he's gone Perm. And I would say if you're hesitant to make that jump, shoot me an email. I have business cards up here if you want it, shoot me an email and say, hey, let's talk me through this a little bit more, we can go from there. Another thing as well, if you want a resume template on how to write a resume, email me, I will send it to you.

It's a very plug and play. My email is Taylor at bakehoe.com. Is there any last questions? Stacy, I saw you about to raise your hand. last questions. Stacy I saw you got to raise your hand. You know like how you say you have a candidate or a perfect for it and then at the end they're like, how do they just make this somebody else? I mean, you know I was just going around here and it's sort of a type of thing but as they see it behind it, of the 25 percent feed, they're not going to blink at that but do you think they're going to find your candidate that's actually going against a small firm where they've I mean, I always tell developers this, don't let me be the only recruit you work for.

Yes, at the end of the day, I would love to be your guy. But I know we price ourselves out of the market a little bit and we don't get all the positions in the market because a lot of companies don't want to use us. So this is another little fun tidbit. I would only work with two recruiters, Max. That's it. Three you start getting a little crazy and your resume starts getting submitted around the market if you can find three solid ones That like are all respectful of your time and treat you the same way. Yes, definitely do it But typically it's it's really hard to find three recruiters Yeah How to break up your career, I'm just not that in I mean here's the other day like listen, it's not working out I really I want to move forward with somebody else if they're still being annoying you just don't silence the best policy I mean silences the best policy though.

Yeah ghost on that Yeah, hey listen the end of the day you haven't done x y and z I feel like you're you know leading me on I feel like you've been lying to me or I feel like whatever And I'm gonna move on to find somebody else. I appreciate your time I want to add one more thing to the like, don't feedback. Like, you know, it might be because of money or what have you, but my company is a quality we can't give them a whole lot of feedback. There's so much that to navigate, and for like, HR or what have you, someone who maybe is a right person to stay the right way, says the wrong thing, you owe yourself up for litigation and what have you.

like that might be why it's not necessarily your fault. Right. Because it is the law. I can't. There's a way to be specific to not be specific. You're right. I mean, not everybody does that. One of the different things I think you can say, even if it may not be true, is we don't want to be a wide need to help. Yeah. It is more, well, I think it fits horrible things. I think that's from a whole other perspective. It is, wouldn't it? It's not a thing altogether. We have a certain environment where I work right now. We're very careful to make sure that we interview people that we feel like they're going to build a third time in.

Yeah. Real quick. So this is why I love it. I know when the first question gets asked, we start asking questions. I know technically my time is up real quick. First off, please fill out your feedback cards for me. I really take this stuff into account and try to hone my craft and really try to bring value. If you hated the Q&A, write it down. If you hated my talk, give me a one. Honestly, that kind of is my oxygen. I love it. The people who kind of beat me up a little bit more is what I love. But definitely get specific feedback on why you beat me up and just say, I'm not a culture fit.

So here's the deal. We can keep asking questions. Chris, you're next in here, right? So basically, we have 20 minutes. If you guys want to stay here and ask some more questions, we can. If you want to go on, you can. But I think there was one question that needed to be asked. One question. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, I'm just curious. But by the way, thank you guys for coming out. I appreciate it. I think it's as far as people in this field, software developer, who maybe want to go into being an architect or an architect, they want to move into senior management. For people who want to jump, make a crew jump.

What kind of advice do you give or what kind of perspective do you offer to kind of say, hey, you're at this level, you've been at that for a while. Here's some of the things that you maybe go through the like how to have someone a junior, you know, what do they need to do? Right. The senior developer needs to be an architecting to go on to the B.P. Yeah. Or go on to other levels. So I usually say this at the end of the day from a moving up in the, from a moving up perspective, a lot of times I'm not able to help you because clients want somebody who already has experience if they're going to pay a 25% fee.

Does that make sense? Yeah. But what I would do recommend is this, I would say, hey, you know, I, so there, there's a problem, I've talked to a few software developers, there's an issue with management in how once you've come into management, it's hard to find another job, you're kind of siloed. I think there's a bigger issue and I've talked to some of the people who have agreed with me in the tech industry about management and how that kind of black follows you a little bit or at least at least my two-sensities that I've seen. But I would say like get mentored because my thing is I don't think mentorship has talked about enough.

I say what? Yeah I would say like I got to where I'm at by leaving a team of seven now almost ten recruiters because of my time with Scott Ward. I wouldn't be here if I wasn't for him. I wouldn't be here if I wasn't here for my team in Raleigh, Sid Mitzner and Taylor Roberts, who meant for me in Raleigh, so I would highly recommend mentorship. That would kind of be my best thing. Yeah, what's up? Just a good experience. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we started selling through the crap because you've got three months to do this job, right? I think you should get really good and get the crap out of the way and get to know the kind of truth that you want to be able to do.

Yeah, I love it. So I pretty much agree with everything I've been saying. That's good. Thank you for 20 years. Awesome. And I was, right, I'm more of a corporate recruiter coming up with me. I work for a consulting company that will be hired by a whole staff. I did what you do for a number of years. And a lot of them are set, and dealing with clients, and by being unwilling to give you feedback, those kind of things, I'd experience it too. So I'll back you up one time. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. That's one of the most frustrating things. The kids are the point of my thinking, I'm just going to open the trap anymore, and I'm going to do some more and more different things.

but exactly, one of the most frustrating things, you're dealing with the clients who won't get to feed back or afraid you can feed back, and then you have to go back and retail between your legs and say, listen, I don't know what happened. I'll try to feed back, but. Yeah, and what's your name? Larry. And just to piggyback on what Larry said, Vaco, we actually fired a client this week because they were so terrible at jerking us around leading on candidates that we cut a product. We're like, I don't think we're your guys anymore. I think if you can find a recruiting firm that is a little into loot business, that's when they eventually have the advantage.

Because they can dictate on who they want to work with and what type of business they want at the end of the day. That type of business is probably the business you want to work for. Yep. Sorry. Why do you apologize? This is great. My question is, so I've been ghosted in the middle of my I'm sorry. No, it's okay. Okay. So my question is I've heard people say that a lot of kids don't work with future developers because they're salary-rena-high. And so what can I do as a junior developer to make myself more into another phone to make people at home? Yeah. Yeah. So we don't want to work with you now because your salary is high.

We don't want to work with you because, one, I want to work with all junior developers. I feel like you guys have the most tenacity. The thing is, there's so many junior recruiters out there that clients aren't going to pay us a 25% fee to find a junior recruiter, right? So here's a few things. So I was on the career panel for the .NET U group in January, and we had two engineers, me, a dev manager, an architect. And basically, it was a tell-all, basically, what I'm doing now, how to find a job. There's a lot of National Software School students. And basically, I did not plan on this, but this is like one of my finer moments in my life, aside from it from my wife.

But basically, I said, how many of you in here have DM somebody on Twitter that works for that company to try to get it in, and literally the only two people that raise their hands where the two developers are neither side of me from NSS? I got jobs. I think at the end of the day, you got to scrap, and you got to grind, and you got to hit up everybody on every single social media platform, because we don't talk, one of my podcasts says I actually interviewed, I don't know if you went to his talk, Kyle Welch. He talked about Jest. I don't know what that is.

I think it's like a testing JavaScript tool, but we talked about being a social developer in today's tech market. As in coming to conferences, hitting people up on Twitter, hitting people up on LinkedIn, I would make sure you have your GitHub up, have code. I would absolutely try to bring in any projects you've done on your resume. Let's say you volunteer, for example, this one guy wrote his resume, great. He, pro bono, for free the last eight months worked on a .NET React application for free. He's going to find a round out of company here in Nashville. He's in LA and he wasn't getting paid and he was doing it for fun but he notated it on his resume to where it reads wonderfully and literally he got the interview past the first round he's going to find a round on Tuesday and he's a 60k guy, eight months of experience.

So I think at the end of the day I think it's just it's fine to recruit so that I can help you knowing that they're not going to probably be the best but then also leveraging your social media, get on Twitter. Who here is on Twitter? So not everybody should raise their hand. I would highly recommend you on Twitter. Like I've met Chris obviously here, but I've hit up Chris a ton now on Twitter. You know, and I met another guy that works that's up in Kansas City that I'm gonna try to get in with that conference up there. I think leveraging Twitter, getting connected with software engineers in town and software engineers around the country and building that network is invaluable.

Cool, that it? All right guys, thank you so much, appreciate it. Yeah, all right. Yes, absolutely.