scenic city summit 2018

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What is going on podcast listeners? Super, super excited to bring this episode to everyone. I apologize for the lateness on this episode. This is actually from Scenic City Summit, a tech conference out of Chattanooga, Tennessee, a few weeks ago. It has been absolutely nuts here in the Vaco Nashville office, continually growing our team, and the tech market has just been booming. And so I have been crazy busy with work. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Also, if anyone is attending DevSpace in Huntsville in October, I will be there. So hope to see everyone there. Few other housekeeping things. As always, I would absolutely love it.

If you guys could rate this podcast in the App Store, would love for this podcast, again, a little traction in the market and be discoverable for other individuals whenever they are on the job hunt. If you need to reach me, My email is gonna be best, that's tailor at vaco.com. And if you wanna hit me up over social media, it's gonna be at T. Decin, T-D-E-S-S-E-Y-N. Hope you guys enjoy this podcast. Thanks. All right, so I'm gonna go get started from the few people in here. I'm gonna quickly introduce myself. Again, thank you so much. I'm always extremely humbled anybody shows up to a recruiter talk at a tech conference.

I think it's the absolute contradiction and so I'm extremely grateful that you're sitting in here especially during lunch. So I'm gonna run in basically so I have zero power point slots. So this whole thing is yeah. Move on up. So this whole thing is Q&A. There is absolutely involvement from everyone in here. If you guys literally sit here and don't ask questions, it's gonna get real weird real fast. I can deal with awkwardness, but it just is a lot more fun if everybody involved if you ask questions. Nothing is off the table in this talk. Nothing. I will answer any questions you have. I will not deflect.

I talk about pricing for recruiters. If we wanna go there, I can talk about what questions to ask recruiters to stump them. And so I will go over everything. But first, I'm going to give you a quick rundown of who I am, just so you know kind of where I'm coming from with this talk. So my name is Taylor Dessen. I work for a tech solution company. So we do the consulting and the direct hire out of a national called Beiko. We are privately held. Not many people have heard of us. But for those of you who have, awesome. I know there's one person here that at least because he and I have the opportunity to work together recently.

So, Andrew. So, a little bit about me. So, I grew up in South Carolina. I went to the University of South Carolina. I am a marching band nerd. My high school career set me up perfectly. I was the band president in high school. So, I was the president of all the band nerds set me up for success later on in life and I didn't know it at the time. And so, I went to South Carolina. I was in the drum line at University of South Carolina, did music, loved it, went to all the football games, and it was fantastic. And then, so I was in a band.

And at the time, we were kind of drawing about 200 people or so in my hometown, which is decent, whatever. And my late singer was like, hey, let's move to Nashville. And I said, absolutely, let's do it. I told my parents out, hey, I'm moving in three months. Obviously, my parents, I had a lot of conversations about moving, but ultimately I wanted to go pursue music. So fast forward, move to Nashville. I played in the hockey tongs, I am a drummer, like I said, so I played until 3 a.m. at the hockey tongs, I did some studio stuff on Music Row, and then I obviously did a little bit of touring with the band, I was in three months into it.

I was working six nights a week serving tables, losing money, and looking at picking up another job. I was like, man, something has got to change. And so I was like, you know what? I'm going to leverage my network and see what else is out there. And so a friend or a friend introduced me to my first boss. And I guess you could say the rest is history. So I went on one more tour when I started at Vaco. My boss was very willing to give me two weeks off, went up to the northeast, drove overnight from New York City back to South Carolina, and broke down on a Sunday.

So if you're born in the south, nothing's open on Sunday until noon until church gets out. So broke down, millenover South Carolina got towed and was sitting outside with no AC in the middle of August in South Carolina summers. And I said, I am done with this. And so I ended up pursuing recruiting full time. I barely know how to turn on a computer. And I still really don't know how to work a computer. And so that's kind of another kind of contradiction to who I am. I started recruiting in our junior practice, so basically I was recruiting admin assistance positions all the way up to CFO, CEO level, roles anywhere from 10 to an hour to place a guy at $220,000 a year.

I was recruiting into Fortune 500 clients like Yahoo Disney and Sony the Bay Area and I had a lot of people hang up on me. I knew at the time I needed to make a change. I needed to be able to interact with people face to face. So I interviewed for our Charlotte Raleigh and Tampa office, got the offer from Charlotte Raleigh, ended up choosing Raleigh just because the infrastructure in the office was really awesome. And went out there for a year, was in research trying and got super invested. Daught that was long term for me. I was going to really kind of have roots in Raleigh and got super invested and then a year later my mentor who I admire, Tom Scott Gordon in Nashville.

If you ever have, if you are a developer and you have ever tried to get to Nashville in last 15 years, you probably have talked to Scott Gordon. Scott said, hey listen, I know with your brother here, my brother's a product owner, a ticket master. He goes, you know, do you want to come back and basically work under me and train under me because I'm moving on to a different role with Invaco. I said, absolutely. When your mentor calls you obviously listen. So I moved back and I've been at Nashville ever since for the last five years. I only recruit software developers. We're actually, let me refer you as, I recruit all things development.

So the database side, all the way to the front end, and everything in between. Still really don't know what I'm talking about. I just kind of fake it really well. And what this talk is, is one of my good friends who actually is speaking this afternoon, Kyle Welch. I placed him down here. He's doing all React stuff now. He said, man, you've got to start speaking at these conferences because there's like 12 talks on react at these conferences and there's only so many components on the reactions a lot of overlap. What us developers need and what us tech people need is basically to know how to navigate the job search process, right?

How to deal with recruiters because there's a ton of us out there. How to deal with negotiating salary, all of that. And so I I got really bullish about submitting my talk this year. I've submitted, I spoke at Code Stock in Knoxville a few months ago. I spoke at Music City Code this year. Obviously, I've seen it sitting now, and I'm speaking at Dev Space in Huntsville in October. So that's a little about me on a super high level. If you want to follow me, all social media for me is at T. Destin, that's T-D-E-S-S-D-Y-N. I'm going to shamelessly self-plug all the way through because I forgot my business cards, and I also don't have any power points.

So there's literally no way for me to obviously get my, get word out of who I am. So I'm gonna say it a few times. Also, I have a podcast, which is what I'm recording right now for. So all your questions are gonna be on my podcast. And the reason why I do podcasts, and have a lot of developers come up to me after my talk and go, hey, listen, that was fantastic. Do you have slides? No, I don't have slides. Like, great, how do I get that information? And I go, I have, I don't know, just come to my talk next time. So I've started a podcast, basically what the podcast are for me is I interview hiring managers, senior developers, or actually any developers all the way down to recent code school graduates on how they found a job.

And so that way you can learn different bits of pieces. That podcast is called Guidance Counselor 2.0. And that is found in any app store utilizing any app. So again, at T-Destin and again, my podcast is guidance counselor 2.0. That's enough about me. I'm tired of talking. So I want to hear from you all. What questions do you have for recruiters? If you don't have any questions, I can continue to talk up here for the next 30, 45 minutes. But ultimately, it's a lot more fun when people are involved. I also have T-shirts and hats. So the first six people who ask me questions can get a T-shirt and hat.

You can find me afterwards. That's outside. Yes, sir. What's your name? I think Russell will. Russ, awesome. So I'm hiring a former developer. I have had mixed results with recruiters only because of current sheriffs growing sheriffs along with the most of us. And I'd like to know what you can do for yourself to be able to make that not a thing. Absolutely. I can't imagine who could work out as opposed to and who will not work out or maybe one or more would have to give you 10. Absolutely. So everybody here had a question in the back, for the people sitting in the back, which I said move to the front.

Everybody heard that? Yeah, okay, great. So basically, I'll tell you this. So with us at BayCo, we pride ourselves on basically being a one shot, one kill type of environment, right? So for example, and I'm probably gonna pick on Andrew a lot during this talk because it's pretty cool to have somebody to eye place in a different city, while I'm speaking at a code conference. So basically, Andrew's situation, we had a client Nashville that was looking for a React guy. And with some obviously a little note on the back here, of course, Andrew gets started, and he's not doing that right now. But basically, the hiring manager goes, this is what we need, I said, okay, we sent him three people.

One didn't work out on the interview and one took another job. So what happened was, is they were like, hey, we wanted to put a hold on Andrew. We love for that person to be in Nashville. We said, okay. And after the two bombed out, we said, hey, listen, Andrew's still available. They're like, okay, get us this little bit of information. This client wanted some payment processing stuff. So I got Andrew to summarize that in a text for me. One phone call later, higher. So right there, one out of three, right? So what we do is try to do a reference, we do testing. We're actually in current process of re-evaluating our testing.

We come with the, basically the ability to bring 15 plus years of market intel to the hiring manager, right? So you're not hiring us necessarily for us sending your resume, you're hiring us for our network, right? And so what I would advise hiring managers to do, And hiring managers and people in the market alike is evaluate which recruiting firm you're using, how long they've been in the market, is the account manager or recruiter been there for a certain amount of time, right? So this is actually, I'm glad you asked this question, because this is one of the things I'm most bullish about and how to evaluate recruiters.

Typically recruiters are type A individuals that graduate college have no idea what to do. They're promised high commission and low base. And so they're super incentivized so they blow you up over the phone. I mean, that's pretty much just a recruiter these days. So what I say to look for is I would look for a recruiter that's been in the market for at least two years. I've been in the Nashville market for five years, and I still am learning things. I would also look for a recruiter that's been with the same company for more than two years. The reason why I say that is because typically, most recruiters who are bad at their jobs jump for commission or for a bump in base salary because they're not great at their jobs so they don't get the commission that they need.

And so what you end up doing is you have recruiters that bounce around every 18 months. And so that's just signal to you with a hiring manager, oh, this person may not be the best, that's why they're jumping, right? I've been with Vaco for seven, seven years now. I'm not great at what I do, but I feel like I can figure it out. Okay. And so that's one thing I would advise hiring managers to look for. You know, it has, how long has a firm been in town? How long has an individual been in the market that you're working with? And finally, what methods do they use to screen individuals?

I make sure to lay eyes on everybody I meet. So I Skype with the address. I said, hey, man, can you hop on a video call for like five minutes? Like I just want to say, hey, put a face with a resume. So then we see him face to face. What then we do with Andrew, I knocked out a reference for him. And then we send him over. And so right then and there, you know that I've met him. I can vouch for he's cool and fit to your environment. And also that I've spoken with somebody who can bounce first technical skill sets. So ultimately you have to have a phone call and you pull the trigger.

That's the answer you're question. Cool, Andrew. What's the results when you work with educators? I don't know what's going to feel like I got assigned your recruiter from the company. Right. I didn't really pick that person. What kind of use to make that relationship work better for people? So I would still use those criteria for What to look like what to look for when using a recruiter if a recruiter contacts you let's say from XYZ company Let's just say Vaco and they haven't been there that long Need to do a little research and you see a recruiter has been there for three times as long as that person who contact you That would be something would say hey listen like I appreciate you reaching out to me I did a little research what does so-and-so do?

Because I see he's been at the company longer no offense at all but want to work with somebody who's been there a while Just so we don't waste each other's time. I will tell you this blatant honesty is going to be the key with working with recruiters Recruiters are like like that terrible girlfriend or ex-girlfriend or boyfriend who just doesn't get the hint like literally like you're like Hey, I'm off the market and we still call you the reason why we do that is because we have to meet some sort of metrics on call Quotas or email or whatever and so we're just gonna blow you up like we don't listen a lot of times and so So if you can find a recruiting firm who has senior tenured individuals, they're a little bit more lax on that.

They co, we don't have really metrics to work on. Like we have tentative metrics that we have to hold ourselves to, to just keep moving forward. But essentially, like if I tell my boss, hey man, I only met three people in person, but they're all local. He goes, that's fine. He goes, your end goal is to meet everybody in Nashville. And so that's what I would look for. I would also ask how they do business. Like, hey, man, hey, girl, how do you do business? Like if they don't offer to Skype or meet you, I would absolutely not work with them. Why in the world would you trust somebody for the next step in your career if they're not willing to meet face to face with you?

Like to me, that's an absolute no-brainer. Now, obviously with like everybody's busy as this, I get it. You don't have time to maybe drive across town meet with that recruiter, but like just say, hey, I don't have time to come across town. Are you open just to doing like a Skype call or FaceTime or Google Hangout? Because what that does is that allows the builder port, right? How many people in here like answer their phones like when their mom calls, like nobody in here, right? And so what I'm saying is is you're going to like talk to the person who actually wants to meet you face to face instead of just doing a phone call.

Yeah. But like I would say expectations on the front end, right? So for you, I was like, hey, shoot me over reference. Hey, listen, what's guys? Here's the interview steps. Boom, boom, boom. Another thing I want to talk about too, job descriptions. If a recruiter sends you a long, long job description, and it's like an HR job description with a bunch of word vomit, they don't have a relationship with the hiring manager. I don't know if you remember what I sent you for Capra, but it basically was like three sentences. It was like, this is a payment processing, the clients in South America, and that's it.

And a lot of people go, hey, do you have any more? And I go, nope, that's what the manager said. And what I would tell you is if a recruiter can't name the hiring manager, if the recruiter sends you a stock job description, move on. Don't waste your time. Yes. Is that a hand raise or you flexing your biceps? Have both. Value. And I put value in the mail. Yeah. So again, we'd kind of go off those guidelines, right? Two years at the same company, at least a solid year in the local market. what I would look at more, see if the recruiter has references on their LinkedIn.

So, like one thing that I've tried to do is I ask a lot of developers to write references for me because when you look at my LinkedIn, like, I have developed, I mean, let's basically, like you check other people out on LinkedIn, right? It's like, oh, great, you know, they don't have a profile picture. They've been super sketch about the requirements and what they're filling in. All that stuff comes into account, right? like I would see if they have any sort of references. I would also probably ask them about again how they do business, right? Hey, what type of steps you can put me here if you want to meet with me?

Are you gonna send me Cody Bals? Are you gonna do any references? And then what I would say too is like hey, how good a relationship do you have with the manager with this opportunity, right? So like for example with Andrew, I haven't met Nick, the hiring manager, but like I will say hey actually my my director who's the account manager they've gone back like 10 years. So it's it's stuff like that because a lot of times recruiters call you and they're like hello I was calling you about a entry insert job template I mean job developer you know what I'm saying like it just it feels in genuine, right?

You want to, it's like, how do you pick your friend? You pick friends with people that you enjoy being around that you like hanging out with who are genuine. I think a lot of times the genuineness has gone away from the recruiting industry. I think it's finding somebody who makes you feel good. Yeah, that's awful. I mean, like, I have to ask like, and I use this term, typical recruiter questions. Like, how many years of this do you have? How many years of that do you have? Believe it or not, hiring managers still want to see generalized summaries like that. It's not just us. But for the most part, you want to work with people who are just chill.

I mean, I know that sounds kind of just a cop-out answer, but a lot of times people are just so robotic in how they do business that it's just, you can just sense it. Yeah. Oh, I love it. So, on the board chart, so on board chart I can put the fun vote versus the one who's really sharp about it. Yeah, yeah. And if you look at the typical your job, you'll be like, you know, Microsoft office skills, but just really will be a right. In interacting with the recruiting hiring manager, how can you adequately set yourself apart when most of the skills of an analyst are often soft skills at best.

100% Complete sign-up. What are you playing with your own? Oh, quads, ten or sixes, whatever they're called now at this point. So yeah, yeah, it was, and that's not my leadership at that. So everybody get that question. How do you differentiate yourself, not only in your resume, but also during a job interview, if you are more soft skills based from your job interview. So big thing that I talk about all the time is quantitative. Get as quantitative as humanly possible, right? So for example, let's say, and I'm working with analysts right now, so this is good, because I've kind of coached him through it, kind of the process a little bit as well.

Let me ask you this. So I grew up serving tables at Outback Steakhouse. And so if I just told you, someone asked me, like, hey, what did you do in high school? I served tables at Outback Steakhouse. Great. Cool. Everyone knows Outback Steakhouse. Kill a little bit of onion. Also really bad for you. But you get essentially what Outback is. Now what if I told you, I worked at an Outback Steakhouse to average $5.5 million in revenue a year. I was responsible for hitting over $1,000 a night in sales. The average server would do 500, which profile do you think is going to have better luck selling themselves in the market?

So if you support a multi-million dollar application to a user base of 5,000, that is going to go into scream on your resume more than I'm supporting in a software service application for people that does e-commerce. Right, quantitative as possible. Like let's draw that out, what that looks like. I think tooling is important too. So if you're not doing a bunch of tooling, other than just maybe some pivot tables in Excel or VLOOKUPs or whatever, that's fine, put that in there. But I think the big thing is, is like getting as much numbers base as possible. My dad was looking for a job after 25 years.

He's in the restaurant industry. I worked with my dad. He was at Optics Day Cup for years. My dad sent me his resume first and it was like, works well with others. And I go, Dad, you've been doing this for 25 years. Of course you work well with others, like great communication skills. Dad, you literally have fine communication skills. You don't need to put that in there. All that's fluff, right? Take all that out. If you've been doing professional work for any amount of time, that's obviously obvious you do that, but get quantitatively. Right? And that helps a ton. Like my mom, she runs a gift store at a nursing home.

So I tell her, listen, get this quantitative. But compare it. So my dad told me, hey, I run a $5 and a half million store and I go, great, that's absolutely nothing to me. What does that mean? Is that good? Is that bad? Is that middle? He goes, I rank in the top 10% of 500 stores. Great. That's what's got to go in there. It's always making sure you quantify it out for other people who don't know what you do. I usually ask developers, hey, tell me what you develop like I'm your mom or your grandma. Let's face it, we all have to dumb down what we do to our parents.

That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. My mom's probably going to listen to this and shoot me a text after she listens to this podcast episode. But there's nothing wrong with that. The thing is, if you write your resume that way, that's a game changer. So I have a resume template. If anybody wants it, shoot me an email. My email is tailor at vaco.com. I can send it to you. Everybody should be writing this down. Everybody's resumes are terrible. So if you're not writing this down, I'm going to send you the template that's pretty much plug and play. And so yeah. This answer question, my answers are super long.

I'm a little ADD, not diagnosed. So let me know if I don't miss the mark. Okay, cool. Taylor at Beiko.com. V-A-C-O. Like Taco but Vaco but Beiko. Other take-home developer recommends that you or tech recruiters in general would kind of just throw out, I mean, I'll call on saying something like that. For sure. So everybody here has got us questioned up in the front. Are there any terms that you would throw out from a dev perspective or a tech perspective? I would say keep the essentials, right? So I don't know tech, so I may over speak here, so bear with me, but there's no reason to put ado.net in your resume.

Great, great, exactly. Nailed it, I got the affirmation from the manager. Thank you so much, Mr. Manager. So, yeah, so it's stuff like that, right? So for example, and I'm gonna kind of bleed this into what I look for in LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is super important. I hazed Andrew last night at the speaker dinner for not having this LinkedIn set up, big fan of LinkedIn. But here's how I would notate it. Two sentences, one, tell me on a 30,000 foot view what you're developing. I developed an e-commerce application that leveraged, I developed an e-commerce application on so and so that you can buy lawn chairs for 50,000 users with a million transactions a minute.

A lot of lawn chairs, right? Then what I would do is I would say technologies utilize, react on the front end, C sharp mid tier, SQL server, and couch based on the back end. And that's it. Cause here's what recruiters do. I'm gonna give you kind of, oh, also another thing, LinkedIn rolled out a feature to mark yourself if you're looking for opportunities or not looking for opportunities. I let people know what coach talk about this, they will go, like, right. If you want us recruiters to call you or contact you or slide in your DMs on LinkedIn, mark that because we will. If you don't want all the recruiters to above-art you, check that off because here's how we search, and I really need to work this into PowerPoints, but I'm so anti-against PowerPoints, it's ridiculous to echo conferences, that's all you guys look out at the screen.

But basically when I search on LinkedIn, there are three or four columns, and one of them is based off all the searches on my search string, which is based off of main keywords. So for example, when I say react, C sharp, and SQL on the back end, what I'm going to do is I'm going to search for developer and react. And so your browser, your profile is going to get tagged because you have to react, put in your LinkedIn. And then what I do is then I go over to three columns over where it says open to opportunities, and then I just DM those people.

First, because those people I know are actively looking. And so that's another feature on LinkedIn to be aware of. But to answer your question, keep it simple, right? Give me one technology or two technologies on the front end. Give me your main mid-tier language. Give me your main back-end or two languages that you're working on. And if you're using CI, CD tools, whatever, throw those in there. But you don't have to give me all the flavors of Linux using or you know the versionings of Windows like I don't meet that right good question I think we're past six people so if you were first six questions answer come find me out for words and I'll hook you up with the t-shirt and or hat there's only three so good luck what else this is good stuff hope you guys are I'm gonna be learning something.

15 minutes already? Man. Alright, what else? Yep. I'm gonna go ahead and finish my session. Yep. You said the general is both a recruiter and a consultancy which seems like it might be competing with parents like when you're looking at a developer pool you're saying it's not a pool, say it's like still. And then there's like cream on the top of the mill and the cream. I do like cream. And then the rest is kind of left for recruiting. Right. I mean, can you speak to that a little bit? How does that get? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to hear that question basically consulting versus recruiting.

What does that look like? How do we differentiate? So the way we differentiate at Beiko, consulting is people who want to do consulting. Recruiting is more of the direct hire of hermplacement. Does that make sense? So here's the reason why I do that, because there's a lot of people that even though consulting is sexy, like you get to work on new stuff, there are still people out there and it's fine, that still want the comfortability of perm full-time salary positions. You have big families, insurance is important. That's what you're targeting. So when I say consulting versus recruiting, the recruiting is full-time perm salary positions. One off two offs, the consulting is, hey, we have this $30 million project.

we need help staffing it up. Like we're doing a huge Azure initiative right now with one of our clients in DeMoye. There's like five positions. They said, T him up, let's go. And so they trust us enough where it's one phone called and an offer. So that's kind of the big difference. Can I answer a question? Sure. Okay. I think it's something I would have a few like it. What are the things about what the person's looking for? Exactly. Yes. So typically, so again, a few questions back. what to look for in recruiters, listening skills, right? I'm not the best listener. I have to work on it.

My wife can attest to that. But usually when I talk to individuals, I go, hey, listen, what are you looking for? Are you open to consulting or direct hire? And I go, I mean, yeah, I'm open to consulting. Great, have you consulted before? No. Okay, great. Are benefits important to you? Do you have to have benefits? Is there somebody else that holds the benefit in your family? No, benefits are super important to me that that's a must. What does that signify right there? That guy's probably going to be only a direct hire full time. He's never done consulting before, and better for term work. And so what I do then is I make a note.

So there's a sheet I use. I make a note on the sheet, hey, this guy would be open here about opportunities, but just know this isn't his first choice. And then I save all that. It gets uploaded to our CMS. And then when I work with this guy a year from now, I have all that information. You basically have 15 minutes to ask me everything you have wanted to ask a recruiter that we're done. Yes. We were on the job and you evaluated it and then it's done. Yeah, I have a phone phone. Yeah, so how do you know about the situation? Yeah, that's a good situation.

That's a good question. You're interested in the situation. You don't want to have places for you. Yeah, they're going to come back and help you. Correct. Correct. Yeah, and then what we have to do with too is the, and again, I speak from a developer, That's all I do. But then the other developers, you think they're good, and they interview them. And then you bomb everything. So the biggest thing that I do for that is, so take time to meet with them. So I think that's the big thing. Know that individual that you are not some sort of piece of meat, you're not some dollar sign.

I care about you. And that's why it's so important to me. In my mind, the next thing I do. So I don't know if anybody listened to Gary Vayner checking here on a big fan of Gary V. If not, go look him up. This is an awesome scenario, he's fantastic. He talks about the 51-49 rule, adding more value than you take. So for me, if I bring a developer in, and I know immediately they're not good, whatever not good means, old skill sets, whatever. I like talk with them about the resume, hey listen, let's work on your resume a little bit. Let's make this look better.

I don't have any opportunities. Then the developer goes, well, what about this opportunity? I have it. Again, the recruiters set yourself apart from others. I can say, listen, I see how you feel like you're a good fit. I'm going to be honest with you. I don't think you are here's why. And the reason why I know that is because we know our clients really well. Right? So yes, while it does say it's .NET NBC, and the preferred skill set is Angular 2 for us, I know that that preferred is actually a must. because we've had people interview. So I can say, listen, I've had three or four people interview, angler, twos, and must.

I'm sorry, it stinks. And so I think it's just being open and honest. I'm going to be honest with you. I don't bat 1,000. There is one developer who I've said, I don't have anything for him right now. And he keeps blowing me up. And I'm having to manage that day in and day out. But for the most part, it's just open and honest communication, but still providing value. not shutting down the meeting, hearing that person out, maybe sending him to other recruiters, right? So I've developed a friendship with some recruiters in town. If I don't have anything for this person and I know they're gonna have trouble finding a job, I share contact information.

But it's all about helping the person. I know it's kind of stupid, but the goal of the rule really applies to recruiting. Like when your mom, dad, and brother all go through job changes in about a year and a half, two years, you become really sober to the fact that like people have no idea for the most part, how to look for jobs. And that really sobered me up with my dad. My brother called me a ton during his transition to his current job. When that happens, you kind of sit there and you're like, oh, people really are scared to change the job. And I think if you can approach that every single person that way, that kind of sets you apart.

What else? Yeah. I mean, Russ is killing it. I'm giving Russ all the swag, because he's asking all the questions. To your thoughts, you had friends in the industry that you do not work with in your company, but you know the recruiters. Some companies have their own recruiters, right? Yeah, like internally. Yeah, yeah. If you see more of their people, resume pop-up somewhere, do you know that person that they have it? Who am I learning? Okay, so somebody at Coyote. Somebody at Coyote, for example. The internal recruiter or the candidate? The internal recruiter. Has their resume posted? No. So the internal recruiter, do you see a coyote in between?

Yes. Oh, got it. Their resume have a two month order. Correct, yeah. Have you or do you or is it a thing for you all in your industry to communicate back to the first person? So we have that conversation on the front end. So let's say I work, so what's with Coyote, by the way, way if you're hiring, we can hire remotely. So basically, we had that conversation with how you listen. I wanted to know, we never poached from you guys. If you guys are an active client of us, you have protection of us, which is actually a big sale, because in today's tech market, we're pulling from everywhere.

So if you have our allegiance, we've been in the market for that long, do you want to know if one of your employees is looking? For the most part, the answer is yes. And so we have one client who's on a ton of hiring this year. Like over 100 people, I think we place 50 in tech. Like it's nuts. The VP of everything says, please let me know if any of our people looking, we want them to stay. And we want to have those conversations to help those people stay. But no, we don't actively pull from people that we have exist in relationships with. So, so you do not see sort of a moral issue with letting them know because let's say I.

Right. Or let's say one of my people came to you and said, hey, you look for Coyote. You now feel like you need to tell. Coyote that they're avoiding everything else. If you have told me you want to know, no. Because essentially like, you seem like a pretty chill guy and a pretty cool manager. like I feel like I'd want to work with you. I feel like you would want to know not to get on that person, but to literally say, hey, man, what's going on? Is everything OK? And so I would have any issues now. What I would have an issue with is if this manager in the market is known as a jerk, that's where it gets weird.

And that's per conversation. But again, another gary of anything, doing the right thing is always the right thing. And so what we try to do is say, hey, less than one of your, maybe we don't name names. One of your employees is posted on dice, just wanted to give you a heads up. Yeah. So real quick, I'm gonna kind of offshoot real fast too with what he said. A lot of people don't know which postings, or which job sites to post on. So let me go over this real quick. Also, if you listen to my podcast, Guys Council 2.0, you can find this out. So big thing dice, big fan of dice.

Who knows what dice is in here, raise your hand. Okay, so some people, yeah. So dice, big fan of that, you have to be in tech to be on dice. That's kind of the big differentiator. If I start to developer on crew builder, I may get construction developers, right? There's a lot of junk on crew builder. I think the UI UX is kind of poor. I really hope crew builder, if somebody from crew builder doesn't listen to this podcast. But the thing is I'm a big fan of dice. It's very clean and you have to be in tech to be on it. I don't really, and again, I'm just one person, right?

So like, don't come out of here and tell all your friends, like, hey, this idiot recruiter said, these are the only sites that work. I'm only one person. You can do whatever you want. I've talked with a few developers here. Indeed is kind of a thing. So I did find out indeed and dice have a contract together. So anybody that posts on Indeed, I think it eventually gets filtered to dice. But I know Indeed is a big thing. I don't use Monster anymore. We need to stop using Monster at Vaco, at least in Nashville. I don't know about the rest of our 40 offices. So big fan of keeping your LinkedIn really up to date and really tight from a tech perspective and dice, and you should be fine.

I would also, a few other things, so the half five minutes left, and we can keep going because lunch happened during my session. So we can keep going over if we need to. But basically another thing too, I would only work with at least two recruiters. I would not work with anything else. but he else are any more than two recruiters. Two should cover you around town. If you are in desperation mode, obviously, work with more. But if you have a job and you're comfortably looking, I would just recommend two, because you're ready to make it submitted all over town. There's duplicate submittals. You start like canceling each other out, and it starts getting messy.

Two recruiters, big fan of just two recruiters. And I tell developers that I work with. What else? You haven't left yet, by the way. big fan, big fan of you. Thank you so much. What's up? Not high enough. Not high enough. I mean so the biggest thing is, so here's where we have to combat and I've started to see this and I need to let my team know about this. The salaries are there, the issue is companies have to pay us a fee and so what they do is then this weird thing I'm starting to see and I don't like what I'm seeing where they only offer a senior engineer out when I know that there's other engineers on that team making $15,000 more.

I don't like that because then what that does is that incentivizes developers not to work with us. But the thing is, is I would recommend working with us. I had a situation I'm recruiting for a data architect in Boston, a guy submitted his resume for a DBA spot. It's been within 60 days and now I can't represent him for anything. He's not happy. not happy. But I can't. It's just a company rule. So what I would also recommend is don't submit your resume all around town. That's another thing. Find a recruiter, don't submit your resume to a website. It's going to get lost. Usually internal recruiters are not the best.

If anyone is in your interim recruiter, I'm sorry. You're probably great in your job. I'm saying in general because there's no basically incentive to be faster, at least that I know of. But the thing is, is this, salaries aren't where they need to be. I think they've come up in the last three years. It all depends on market average, right? So I can only speak to Nashville. I don't know what it looks like down here. The biggest problems that I have is reloading people from the Bay Area in DC. Those are the hardest places to move from. People are so miserable in New York City it's easy to get them out.

But people usually hate the Midwest and the cold winters in Chicago, so it's pretty easy to move them to. It had not appeared. But for the most part, they still need to go up probably another 15,000 to where they're at right now. I would also recommend, if money is super important to you, do the consulting side. The market and the economy is really good right now, specifically in tech. If you find a recruiting company who you trust, who obviously can work with you for multiple months on an engagement, roll you up on another project, that's a great way to make bank pretty quickly and what we could do as a recruiter is find a perm gig in the meantime for you.

So be open to consulting if you want to make some money. Yep. Probably not. So, you know, we don't get a bunch of projects to staff up consulting people for like junior devs, right? So, no, but again, that's just me. I'm just one person. I don't know what the rest of the market looks like. Yep. a lot of times there's eight charge generated job descriptions that have no bearing on what they actually want. Here's what I would do, and this is kind of like my big secret sauce, and I got to get props to my dad. He's a dad, so you know, tech skills, you know, just know how to educate a little bit.

He leveraged LinkedIn, was able to find a friend or a friend, DM that friend on LinkedIn, and said, hey, I saw a job posting, are you guys hiring? And goes yes my dad got a job because of that. You basically have to turn yourself into recruiter so what I would do with that if you see an entry-level job that has a bunch just just jargon and that doesn't make sense to experience what I would do is I would search that company find an internal recruiter in DM them on LinkedIn. I'm a big fan of LinkedIn I'm a big fan of Twitter if you're not leveraging those on your on your on your job hunt you're you're already at a at a disadvantage One of my podcast episodes, I talked with Kyle Welch, who again, like I said, is speaking here.

We talked about being a social developer. He's all over Twitter. There's a lot of devs that I've met on Twitter that I'm able to come into these co-conferences and know. Like one guy last night, like he and I had like followed each other and Twitter for a while and I finally met him last night and like we just hit it off. And so I would say from a dev perspective, hit up Twitter, people always like, I don't know what to post. I literally just retweet cat videos and like, gankock football, that's it, that's all I do and it's just a bunch of retweets. So for you, leverage your community from a dev perspective on Twitter, cultivate that community.

And then from a LinkedIn perspective, like DM recruiters at companies, try your best to stop submitting your resume to job postings on the web. If you can't talk to a person immediately, either on LinkedIn or over the phone, don't do it because typically what will happen is if you submit your resume to the entry level posting, recruit or call you the next day, they can't represent you when that recruiter has the direct ties into the hiring manager. Real quick, we keep going. This is great. This is good stuff. I feel like the idea of the court one finally. We have a 15 minute break or 10 minute break between sessions.

It doesn't take you 10 minutes ago anywhere in here. Real quick, fill out these forms for me. If you don't have a pen, let me know. There's pens up here. This is B here. These are my oxygen. This allows me to improve. Be brutally honest. If I suck, put two stars and tell me why. I think the worst thing is what these conferences is if you go in and you mark them one or two stars, and then you don't say any reason why. We don't know how to improve on anything. So I had one guy at Music City Code. He wanted PowerPoint slides and he like razzed me on the fill out form.

Most of the podcasts with him on Monday. But the thing is though, is that he razzed me for not having PowerPoints. Obviously I didn't listen to him, but the thing is I know what to fix next time. So again, real quick, thank you guys for coming. I can still answer questions. We have 10 minutes before and honestly I got a little jip for the lunch thing. So if y'all want to keep asking questions, I will absolutely keep giving answers. Thank you guys for coming. I appreciate it. What's your advantage? Yeah, so can it a screening process? So because the market is so tight in the tech field, I try to move a little faster on the front end and more information on the back end.

So I have now actually transitioned my business a little bit, I'm trying this out for a little bit. I'm doing more phone calls on the front end to screen in or out. And then if I think you're, like, if you're like a complete match, I then try to get you to come into my office because it's more convenient for me. It'll take 15 minutes. We don't have to spend money on coffee that you probably won't drink anyways. And so I try to have you come in. Nope, I'm all about building relationships, right? So I have you come in, we shake hands, you see me face to face.

No, you know, I'm not BS in you. And then afterwards, if our client makes you take some e-vals, I may send you like an e-vow or two and C-sharp or Angular or whatever. And then after that, we usually take out two or three interview steps. So, yeah. What else? This is good stuff again. If you need to leave and grab water, great. Or we can keep asking questions about your job search to help you next time, when it's not as painful. Okay. I think it's a lot for jobs, right? Yeah. It says that you're a match. You know, suggesting jobs that you want to work.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're saying, you know, don't do that. I would search that company on LinkedIn and find the internal recruiters and DM them. Stop submitting your resume to Blanket Postings. Yes, do I need to leave? No, somebody need you to have any hard cuts out. I love those things. All right, never mind. Hard cut. I got cut off. Thanks guys.