recruiter ama w/glenn stovall and production ready

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What's going on podcast listeners? Thank you, thank you, thank you for tuning in to Guidance Counselor 2.0. The point of this podcast is to allow individuals a resource in their careers when they need it the most. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school, we had Guidance Counselors in high school, but yet now in the real world, we don't have anything or any resource to listen to, to turn to, to learn from others. And so that is what this podcast is for. I interview real people who have had real challenges in their career in hopes that you can take a little bit out of it and to apply within your own career.

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Hey everyone, I'm here with Taylor Dessen. He's a developer recruiter advocate for Vaco Technologies. What's going to be the very first AMA episode of production ready? How How you doing today, Taylor? Pretty good, man. Hey, thanks for having me. Super stoked. Ready for some AMA. What does that even mean? I see that a lot. Where's AMA meeting in? Oh, it stands for Ask Me Anything. There it is. I'm old. Yeah, I guess it should be A-Y-A. You have some Reddit people would say. I love it. Hey, I'm so-and-so. Ask me anything. And it used to be something like what we were doing, where it's like, hey, I'm a tech recruiter.

Ask me anything. I love it. Then it was good marketing, and it turned into, I'm Woody Harrelson assistant, but I'm with the 10th party. That's awesome. Woody Harrelson. That's awesome. Yeah, so Taylor, could you tell us just a little bit about your background and how you got into being a technical recruiter? Yeah, absolutely. I moved up to Nashville for music like everyone else. I went to the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. I'm a big Gamecock fan. For those of you who are listening, reach out to me on Twitter. We can talk about college football all day. But moved up here to do music.

did the whole studio row thing, Honky Tonks, just in touring, played till 3 a.m. downtown. And I realized after going on one last tour, we broke down in the middle of South Carolina, in the middle of August. And if there's one place where you do not want to break down in the middle of August, it is South Carolina. And it was on a Sunday, we had driven 12, 13 hours from New York City with no shower, no sleep, and was sitting outside of advance to Otto and I go, I am done, I am finished, I'm not doing this anymore. And so I leveraged my network, which is obviously very indicative of what I do now, and was able to find Vaco through a friend of a friend.

And I've been there ever since. I've been at Vaco for nine years. We are privately held, but we are pretty big now. We're $600, $700 million. To put it in perspective, I think when I joined, we were only $200 million. So I've seen this thing almost go 4X everywhere. I've been upgrown teams, 3X size at Vaco. I started out national recruiting. So your typical recruiter that would cold call you and have no idea what I was talking about. Still don't. I just lie better now. But that moved to Raleigh as in the research triangle area for a year got really more invested on the dev side of things And then my mentor and Nashville called me back and goes hey I'm moving into a new world you want to come fill my spot I go absolutely and so ever since I've been in Nashville for six years recruiting engineers Front to back no matter what language I want to be your friends I mean I've met I've ran the numbers I've met close to four thousand engineers now at this point in my career.

Wow Yeah, man, that's crazy. Yep So that's a little bit about me at a very high level. Yeah, so you did music. What did you play? So I am a drummer. I am was still I am a drummer. Yep. Very cool. Yep. All right, yeah. So for this episode, I went on dev.to. I went on Twitter. I went on my mailing list, which I don't think you should be on for things like this. But yeah, so I have questions from a lot of different people about saying what if you always wanted to ask your recruiters but didn't feel like you could. So yeah. Yeah. And then welcome to the next 30 minutes of it for however long we go therapy session.

So just go ahead and lay down on a couch. I will sing you to sleep. Well, first question I have comes from Natalie over at Dev2. She says, what's a day to day workload look like for a recruiter? What's the day in the life of a recruiter? Yeah, Natalie, great question. I think this is one of the biggest kind of myths. Not many people know what a recruiter does. most people, maybe my mom doesn't know what a recruiter would I do. My mom just sees me at lunches and she's, do you ever work? And we do work. We work a lot. And so the typical daylife recruiter is to meet people.

Developers have release dates and sprint cycles and we need to push this feature by this time. Recruiters, we have to meet anywhere between 10 to 15 new people a week. So new people, we not to mention maintaining the existing relationships you have. So if you, that's why I've met 4,000 people. So I basically have to figure out some way to maintain 4,000 relationships. And so that's why I've brought out a lot of different things with text messaging platform and email newsletters and all that. But all that being said, we meet people. And then what really gets overlooked is after you meet people, we have, there's a lot of administrative work you have to do.

Glen, let's say you and I hang out. I get to know about you for about 15, 30 minutes. I go back to my computer. I plug in all this information about you to our CRM. Then what I have to do is I have to send you all the jobs that could be a fit. Then I have to submit you to those jobs. Then I have to light up interviews for those jobs. And then I have to rely on a second-run interviews for those jobs, but not only am I doing that for you, Glen. I'm doing that for up to 10 other people at one time.

So it is just, and it is a massive amount of project management, communication administrative assistant, and just overall networking, which is why I am very loud on social media that I really think you need to follow up with a recruiter if you are actively working with he or she, you need to follow up with recruiters almost every single day because we can give you a very rundown. Yeah, so I'm curious to say you're meeting 10 to 15 new people a week. So where are you finding these people? What are some of the strategies you found to continually meet new people like that? Yeah, and again, I've been starting to be really loud at a social media about where you put your resume and what are people seeing.

I think the market's really shifted. So since I got into recruiting, your main sites were like, career builder and dice and monster. So if you don't know about dice, a lot of people don't know what dice.com is. Glenn, do you know what dice.com is? I do remember this from a while. It was like a job board. It was. Yeah, but it's tech specific, right? So now many people realize that like dice.com Thomas Tech specific. So when I started those with a big three, now the big three are indeed LinkedIn and DICE. With DICE really being the third biggest. So LinkedIn and DETA really take in the hold on the job search process.

And so every single day, recruiters every single morning, log on to all these job sites, blindly email people, blindly email you Glenn, and hopefully Glenn, you get back to us because we have metrics we have to hit, which is why So many people get emails from recruiters because we have to essentially spray and pray because we have to hit these metrics. Fortunately at VACO, we don't hold those people. We don't hold at least, so my team, I manage team and non-recruiter, I don't hold my team and non-recruiter those metrics. We do have metrics in place, but it's more for an organic conversation on the back end of things.

But yeah, that's where we find our people. Indeed, dice.com and LinkedIn. Yeah, that is really interesting because I've always wondered that too, where I occasionally I would get the recruiter emails where we were talking a bit before the episode. You said you work with a lot of .NET people and I've never done any .NET work. And I get, hey, do you want to look at this .NET C sharp application? I'm like, there have to be people who have less than zero of this. But I guess it's good to know. I guess in this case, it's just like, hey, no, I don't have that, but I do have these skills.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think too, I think this kind of goes into another thing about how to write a resume, had a right to LinkedIn, I mean, you don't want to put skill sets on your resume and your LinkedIn that you haven't used and you want to use because that can be misinterpreted. I think a lot of recruiters who are very young in their career have a very like narrow mindset, right? So if they see angular on your resume, they're like, oh my gosh, this person's got a ton of angular, but they didn't look at the fact that angular was listed in like side projects, you know what I'm saying, or wants to learn.

And so you have to be careful on how to not take your resume and your LinkedIn to where it's well written, and you can still communicate what you want to get into, but that recruiters are not misled on what skills you have or don't have. Makes sense. Yeah, you're talking about the developer skills and how you represent yourself. That leads in pretty well to the next question I have also from. Good, I plan that. I'm just kidding. Yeah, so it's from a unique on DevTuity, says should a developer apply to jobs where they don't meet all the requirements on the job posting? Yes, so that is a really good question.

I think right now, especially too, I think you need to submit your resume. Let me rephrase that, Glenn. So I did a post about two and a half weeks ago on LinkedIn about not submitting your resume to job postings and it blew up. And I'm going to answer this question in a way. But I think right now, I think everybody's submitting their resume everywhere and you're not going to stand out. So for me, what I did, what I said in my video, and you can check it out if you connect to on LinkedIn is I think you should, when you see a job posting that looks interesting, look at that job posting and then take, search that company name on LinkedIn, connect with those individuals on LinkedIn, message the individuals within your, obviously kind of area.

So like I'm not saying go message a bunch of admin assistants to go talk to developers, I'll offer a developer job, but message developers on the dev team say, hey listen, I see this posting, who do I need to speak to? Can you get me connected? Absolutely. Here's my senior lead, the connections made. There you have an organic conversation. I think that's the way you should navigate the jobs for it right now, because the amount of job seekers right now that are on the market have five X, right? I tell people at any given point, I was working with 10 developers at one time pre-COVID.

Now I'm up to 50 developers at one time that I'm working with. And so it's just just a massive amount of people in the markets, you have to try to differentiate yourself. And the only way, the best way I know how, is to network with people over LinkedIn. So that is my two cents on applying to job postings. But if you do want to apply to job postings, as you aren't a fit for, yes, do it as long as it's, now if you're a junior developer applying for a principal architect, don't do that. But ultimately, you obviously want to keep it within the range that you're in, but I would absolutely submit your resume.

Yeah, that totally tracks. I've, anytime I've been job hunting, I've never, I like the strategy of reaching out to them. I've done it with people already in my network, but I've always just felt like, A, most jobs aren't posted online anywhere. And B, just like everyone goes directly to the application form, so it doesn't actually do that good. And you'll see people online on Reddit and dev2. They'll say, hey, I filled out like 200 applications and I've got two or three interviews and stuff. Yeah, it's a lot. Right, I see on Twitter all these devs, Like I submitted your resume and I submit, oh my gosh, the job search is so exhausting.

Listen, the job search is absolutely exhausting. I'm not gonna diminish that whatsoever. But the man has submitted my resume in 700 applications. I'm like, well, how the heck do you think it's exhausting? Why do you think you're not getting it? Where you're doing the same dang thing 700 times? Stop it. Yeah, I think you really need to reverse engineer the job search process. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I had a couple of questions too, some people were wondering about how much technical expertise recruiters have. One of the questions at David K. Piano on Twitter, one of me asked Taylor, what's the difference between Java and JavaScript?

I love that. That's all that. I do know they're different. I do know one is a little bit more of a back-end language. I guess you'd tell you to say JavaScript's a back-end language too. At the end of the day, one is Java and one is JavaScript and they're very different. That's all I know. Now, that being said, I do try to take pride in my, in training my team of nine recruiters to make sure we do not sound incompetent at what we do. I think a lot of times recruiters are, recruiters couldn't even tell you, you know, the difference between net corn, net NBC.

And I think the biggest thing is I don't even know the major differences, but I don't, I know they're different. And I think recruiters need to be, what is it, a mile wide and steep to be very successful. But unfortunately, Most recruiters aren't even an inch wide and inch deep. And we're just like, oh, I don't see Angular. I don't see Angular. I don't see Angular 9 on your resume. Well, most developers aren't going to write they have Angular 9 experience. They're just going to write Angular. Most recruiters don't know the difference in AngularJS. Right? Essentially, AngularJS is 1.x in Angular is 2+. And so all that being said, most recruiters are not technical.

There is not really a training program for recruiters. A lot of recruiting firms only care about volume and cash money in the door. quickly. And unfortunately, as a recruit, you can be pretty bad at your job and still like, do okay in regards to a living perspective. But it's, I try to take pride, my team tries to take pride in knowing a lot. I go to conferences, I speak at conferences, I listen to a ton of podcast, my interview developers to learn about different things and the latest features. But I will tell you most recruiters are not educated. And the ones that are educated, and you can tell they're educated stay really close to them because those are the one that's going to make you a lot of money down the long run.

Yeah, that's good to know. And something else I've seen in my experience is that sometimes I've had experience with our cruisers. I don't understand that two things could be closely related and skills are transferable. Like it's right. I feel like one example where I had done some work with a view, a JavaScript framework. Yep. And they're looking for someone who was doing react, which was a JavaScript framework. And they are very similar frameworks where yeah, or someone I've been writing JavaScript for 10 years and like, I don't see node on your resume. That's just JavaScript on the backend. Right. Do you have it? Yeah. It's yeah.

What was the old joke? Hey, I see you've painted a lot of blue houses before, but can you paint a greenhouse? I don't see any greenhouse experience on your resume. And they're like, I think I can figure it out. And listen, man, I'm going to be honest with you. It's not sometimes recruiters like clients just don't get it man like we have I'm not kidding you I'll never forget this I think goes but I'm the first me back to Nashville I had a really good data engineer and the client goes hey she has 85% of the skills but we're not hiring her and I'm like what is that now looking back on it I'm like what does that say about your organization that you're not willing to train the last 15% and so it makes us look bad it makes recruiters look bad because we're like, oh, the client said you don't have 15%, but we're still having to deliver the news.

And so I think a lot of times, well, yes, most recruiters don't understand that note is a JavaScript framework. But the client could be saying, no, we need five years of note experience. And so it makes the recruiters look dumb because we're like, oh, it's not on your resume. And so it's just this push-pull thing. I listen, recruiters are pretty terrible what they do, but also companies are pretty terrible at hiring as well. especially when like the number of technologies has just grown and grown over the years. So if you're looking at experience with nine very different things, what are the odds that I've happened to work with like those exact nine chains?

Yeah, and again, company's hired for that, man. They're like, yeah, we need these six things. And it's, do you need these six things? Or do you need two of the six? And the other four would be great. And so that's where you really need to dig in from a recruiting perspective. And our sales team does a really good job at Vaco, where it's okay, listen, you say you want all these skills. give me a percentage breakdown of the specific skills you're using the majority of the day. And they're actually not using the React 75% and no 25%. Okay, then that means to me you really need a React guy or girl.

But again, most recruiting firms don't take the time to train their people. And in my mind, if recruiting firms are just slow the heck down, train your people the way they need to be trained. Oh my gosh, you would make 10x the money. But like everything else, people just want cash in the door quickly and I don't care about training. Yeah, speaking of cash in the door, that was another question I've had. How did the economics of recruiting look like? My understanding is most recruiters, you're paid some percentage of the salary offer that the developers that you recruited in getting by the company. Yeah, yeah, it's we work out a fee.

So it depends. So if it's direct hire full time, time, we pay, so we work out, we negotiate a fee for the year salary, right? So let's say you're at 100k, we typically get 20% let's just say that. But if it's contracted higher, we're given a bill rate, we make sure our candidates are happy. So they get paid what they want to get paid. I walk through the process with the candidates to make sure, you know, They understand where the benefits are coming from, why the margin is the way it is, and have that organic conversation. I think the natural argument is that recruiters try to jack down your hourly rate, and that's true because a lot of recruiters try to make that margin up on the contract side of things.

But Veko, we position more ourselves more as a consulting company. So the more you get, the more I get because the bill rate goes up. But again, it is a sticky slope. I think you really need to. This is where I put a post out the other day on LinkedIn. It was like a poll and it said, do you have a phone call or video call with a recruiter the first time you meet with them right now? 97% of the people that voted said they do a phone call. It's like why in the heck would you not do a video call with a recruiter who could potentially be responsible for the next step in your career?

Like to me, that's mind blowing. So that's where you really need to like meet the recruiter face to face continue to do face to face with them. We're all doing video now. I think COVID everybody's comfortable doing video calls now before COVID was like, oh, do I got to do a Skype call? I barely even knew how to do zoom pre COVID. Now that's all I do. And so it's you need to make sure you build a relationship with a recruiter because when it comes to money man, you need to make sure they have your back. Mm hmm. Yeah, it's always wild to me. I remember watching the Jetsons cartoon growing up.

You know, the new call sounded like this amazing future thing. Yeah, I know we're all doing it. That's an annoyance. I'm like, yeah, I mean, with a recruiter, I have to put a button down shirt on over my pajamas. Exactly. Seriously. This is a bit of a tangent. I don't know. Have you seen the this new app? No, I haven't. What is that? So it's from the founder of Evernote. They're trying to come up with just the better ways to do video calls because we're still in the stone age of this Jetson's technology. But sure if you have you ever watched the John Oliver show where he has I have not man I have not and so I apologize.

It's probably still won't go as well as you wanted it to but oh It's fine, but this the same way you could basically have a screen behind you that you can change and give presentations and I Don't know. Yes, and so that's what mmm-hmm supposed to be mm-hmm. Yes Nice nice. I need to check it out. I need check it out Yeah. So I guess if companies are paying you, if you said somewhere in the rate of 20% for a year of salary, which seems pretty high to me, like why don't, why not just do it in house or conversely, if I'm a developer, could I just go talk to a company directly and maybe negotiate a higher salary because I'd be cheaper to hire to.

Sure. Yeah. And I've seen this as well. So first off, so I'll try to answer this many if I don't answer all of it, please let me know. But so first off, most developers have enough on their plates. They don't want to go out and actively sell themselves. And let's face it, you're a developer for a reason. You probably don't want to be out in front of people selling. And so sure, if you want to go out and get networked and get in with companies, yeah, you're probably going to make a higher rate because essentially you don't, you wouldn't have to work within our rates.

They would essentially pay you what our bill rate would be. But that takes a lot of work on your end. So if you like networking and cold calling in to companies and doing all that, yeah, absolutely. I know a lot of developers that just make bank because they're good enough and they're networked in enough where they don't need to use a recruiter. However, most developers, 90, 95% of developers don't want to do that. And so that's why you work with us. Cause then we just send you leave all around town. I'm working with two or three senior engineers right now and I just literally, they don't even let me, they don't even, I don't even have to send them job descriptions.

They trust me enough or they're like, listen, just line up interviews. Just line up interviews here. I want to be paid in the range and let's just do it. And so that's the way it needs to be. I would say why don't companies just do it themselves? Because recruiting is very hard. And if you are tied to companies within their HR, listen, I've never been a corporate recruiter before because I've been very blessed. My entire career has been with ACO. But from what I've been told and what I've pieced together, there's more to corporate recruiting than just finding people. You have to work about onboarding, you have to make sure paperwork's done in I9s and W2s and other internal processes that at the end of the day we don't have to deal with.

My job single handling is to meet as many developers as humanly possible and then try to match those individuals with people. That's it. So it sounds like corporate recruiting. It's almost like the difference between sales and enterprise sales. It's just with Pete. Yeah. Yeah. The volume I have to deal with is absurd compared to corporate recruiting. And also too, like a lot of corporate recruiting, Melissa, if you're in corporate recruiting and I'm wrong, please, you know, find me on Twitter and DM me. But like corporate recruiting doesn't get commissioned based off of the people they play. So there's no incentive for us. There is a low base, high commission for what I do.

So literally I am, I am, I am, I think I'm right. Then I was like, I'm like 60% commissioned. Most of my salary, 60% is commission. Wow. And so, you know, when they weren't talking about dang COVID times, it's, it's a lot. And that's, so that's why companies don't just go within. That's why they hire us because that's just all we do. So hopefully I answered those, all those layers of questions. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. And you mentioned like recruited during COVID-19. How, how has that changed? both for you as a recruiter and in your experience with the developers that you're able to work with.

Yeah, I think it's changed and also Glenn, great questions, man. I really appreciate it. But I changed because I now see the importance of digital content and strategy. I think there is, I think now, and I think now and quite frankly, probably for the next three to five years, let's face it, right? Like we're not like this isn't going away in a year, this whole working from home thing and quite frankly there's murmurs with companies in town. We've had one client shut down their entire office and it was a big office and they are fully remote now and Vaco and we don't have a policy yet about coming back in an office after COVID but that's the thing when is COVID end and so COVID right now is completely changing recruiting game for me because the only way I'm able to get my name out there is by marketing and content strategy.

I've really doubled down. I've hired a marketing guy that I went to college with. Actually, he was a music major and switched to content marketing. He owns a small marketing agency up in Lexington, Kentucky. He does all my content strategy. So I'm doing that. I'm doing a lot more videos. I mean a lot more cool people. Let's be honest, Glenn. I don't know if we would have necessarily met. Maybe we would have met. I think I'm meeting a lot of cool people like yourself to during this time because everything's remote, right? I'm talking to software development shops in Knoxville, Tennessee who wants to work with me to staff up their teams.

That would have never happened pre-COVID. I think from a development perspective, I think it's finally allowing developers to work remote. And I think that's been pretty cool. And it's really leveled the playing field with talent as well. You have San Francisco individuals looking out here now. And so that's a pretty cool trend. And I think that trend's here to stay for a bit at least. Yeah, it's been really interesting where I know a lot of people have a lot of anxiety and justifiably so just to look at everything. Yeah. It does seem that there are some benefits too. Like you said, like there are more remote opportunities.

It's a bigger playing field. There's also more people on the market. Yeah, that's another thing, right? More opportunity more remote, but more people on the market. I think salaries are raising a little bit because I know companies are not like, great. Now we have to compete against the region now. So Nashville's got to compete with Atlanta pricing. And so that's, so I'm seeing the rates go up a little bit, which is good for us with our salary negotiations. But yeah, I think a lot of goods come out of this. I overheard, I'm sure you've listened to him Gary Vaynerchuk. He's listening to him a ton and he was doing his marketing for the now where he brings on some CMOs and stuff.

And one of the CMOs is I feel like pandemics natural disasters either take time back 20 years or fast forward 20 years. And they all agreed that COVID has fast forward the workplace 20 years in regards to fully remote, more flex schedule and that side of things. And so I know it's been good for me. I have a newborn. And so it's been great to be home and near her and watching her for the first six weeks of her life grow up. So, oh yeah, congratulations by the way. Thanks. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. Yeah. So you're talking about digital marketing and stuff and that.

Yeah, so I had some notes here. I was wondering that about developers and creating content and how that helps. I had a list of a few different things and I was wondering we can do lightning around. How do these things help you in your job hunt, if at all? So you don't want if you were a developer. Yeah, as a developer. So sure. First one I'd say is having a portfolio site. Right. So lightning around. So portfolio site needs to be linked in. I think the future section within LinkedIn is incredibly overrated. I did a live session with Danny Thompson, I think is it's DK or Danny Thompson dev.

He's in Memphis. I had a huge following. But I think I know developers love blog sites. They love to have their own portfolio sites. I think you need to, I'm fine if you want to have that up somewhere in the inner webs, but I think you need to drive everything towards LinkedIn right now. LinkedIn is having its renaissance age at the moment. I gave a presentation at National Software School to Code School grads. Last week, and I just got literally right before this podcast session, I got asked to speak in two weeks there about networking over LinkedIn. I think you need to have in the feature section your GitHub and some other links to portfolio sites because employers are all over LinkedIn right now.

Cool. I think you just answered through. Sorry. No, it's fine. Yeah. Oh, yeah. have a really good LinkedIn, there's the LinkedIn feature section, because I was also going to ask about writing and blog articles. Yeah, I think if you're I think you need to be live doc, not live documented, I think you need to be documenting every single day one post a day on a challenge you have faced within your workplace. So man, couldn't get this to deploy to AWS today, been have a lot of problems, anybody else have any thoughts on deploying to s3. I my lead guitar player that played music with. He is now in Buffalo, New York.

He is a data scientist. And he has started to really dive into post on LinkedIn. And he finally had a post that went crazy. And he's been at it for about six months. And he's been messaging me a lot on what to do and posting and why he should post as a developer. And he legitimately messaged me the other day and he goes, Hey, you won't believe this, I got a job interview because of my thoughtful content on LinkedIn. He goes, a hiring manager reached out to me and wanted me to interview. Now, I don't know if that went anywhere, but the thing is though is that everyone is at home.

Everyone can't go to meetups. Everyone can't do any of that. Where's everybody at right now? Everybody's on social media. And I think LinkedIn's really is being hot right now. And so if you're posting one thoughtful piece of content a day on LinkedIn, you are going to turn some heads and get some people noticing you. And what about what's your take on other social media websites? Twitter is pretty crazy. The dev community on Twitter. Do we meet on Twitter? I think it was Nash dev you messaged me. It was the local Slack channel for Nash dev, which is again another tool, right? I'm not on Nash dev as much as I should be because there's a whole jobs community section that I see tons and tons of good conversations going on, but you have to to take and choose your battles.

I think, and here's the deal, I want to preface this too, you don't need to be on all these social media sites to build a brand, right? You don't have to have a brand. My brother is an incredible product manager and owner manager, I don't know, interchangeable. And he has zero brands when it comes to LinkedIn. And when I say zero brand, he doesn't post on LinkedIn and he's not really on Twitter, but legitimately, dude has landed an interview like with Apple recently. And he did that on his own by doing the things I just said earlier about not submitting a resume about finding the posting and then connecting with people linked in.

But it's like he has no brand and he ended up at Ticketmaster on his own. So you don't have to have it. But I think right now you also don't want to be fired from a job and be like, holy crap, I don't have a network. And so the way to network right now is to have a brand. If you're passionate about knitting, talk about knitting. I love floral shirts, right? Big floral shirt guy. I'm passionate about helping people on their job search. My data scientist guy talks about theories of, I don't know, data things. I don't even know what it means. Just post something, make it thoughtful, make it sincere, and you're going to be shocked with how it takes off.

Fascinating. Wow. Yeah, no, it's really good. I did see a joke online where someone talked about how LinkedIn's are you going to get jobs and Twitter's where you go to lose them. Yeah. Listen, Twitter can get kind of crazy. I didn't finish your question, by the way. Twitter is really good. Twitter's dev, it means pretty solid. Twitter is, Twitter and LinkedIn are the only places, so if you're still listening to this, like what are we, 35 minutes through? If you're still listening to this podcast still, Twitter and LinkedIn are the only two social media platforms right now, aside from TikTok is wild, because TikTok's even more crazy organic reach than Twitter and LinkedIn, but I'm not even attempting to get on that right now, at least, just too much.

But for my sanity, rather. But Twitter and LinkedIn are the only places where, Glen, if I like your LinkedIn post, my 5,000 LinkedIn followers see it. Same thing for Twitter. Those are the only two places. If I like Glen's post, all of my, what, 2,500 Twitter followers see it. And it's, wow, like that's huge. And so for me, that's where, if you're a software engineer, developer, or want to get into development and software, and you're listening to this right now, that's where I'd be posting every single day, LinkedIn, Twitter, and people are like, do I have to do I need it? Like I don't have any thoughtful things to say, just document.

People are like, I got to come up with some clever. I just retweet a bunch of developers, get involved in conversations, slide into people's DMs. Like it's not hard. Just engage with people. But you have to be consistent and it takes time. Yeah. And if you're listening to this, I'd also recommend the list. If they haven't already go back a few episodes or I talk to Philip Morgan, he talked about maintaining his daily blog for four years. Yeah, we got that was interesting conversation. Oh, yeah. And everything is done for his he runs his own small consulting business. But yeah, it gets a lot into how, yeah, it's intimidating at first, but it's also like a muscle you start doing it every day it starts getting easier.

It is I've had to completely transform my morning to content strategy, which is completely different from the norm of what I've been taught recruiting for the last eight years. And I've only really dove into LinkedIn and Twitter for last year. And my engagement after years pretty well, like I'm excited to do this for five years to see where it's at. Oh, yeah, of course. And I'm a big believer in that writing is a form of thinking. Like it's sure anything to say, you have to like get to go there and write and say things and try to it's you do that and the work will show you where to go from there.

100%. I agree. But yeah, we are coming up on about a half hour. So we can start wrapping it up. Taylor, where could people find more about what you're doing and see? Or should I reach out to you on social media and see what you're doing? Yeah, I was able to get on the texting community or the app called community and that's the one Gary Vannerchuk uses and a bunch of other people. But basically shoot me a text 615-235-5650 again that's 615-235-5650. I send out daily job tips, general career advice. I think right now everything's moving to concierge things. So concierge, doctors, concierge, I don't know, dentist or workout.

People come to your home and help you work out. Because COVID is everything that is a little bit more is making people in less big rooms and whatnot. I don't know how I'm trying to communicate right now. All I'm trying to say, shoot me a text. And I try to be your guidance counselor on call. Connect me on LinkedIn, connect me on Twitter at tdsnt, d-e-s-e-y-n. They have a bunch of other things, but just connect with me there and then you'll follow the paper trail. All right. Cool. I really appreciate the time to show all this with us. Yeah dude, I appreciate Glenn. Thanks for having me, man.