Evan Sohn - CEO of Recruiter.com | The Secret To Retaining Talent

Welcome to success story, the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host, Scott D. Clary. The success story podcast is part of the Blue Wire podcast network as well as the HubSpot podcast network. HubSpot podcast network has other great podcasts like marketing made simple hosted by Dr. J.J. Peterson. Now marketing made simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly make it work. If you like any of these topics, you definitely want to go check out the show, how to write and deliver a captivating speech, how to market yourself into a new job, how design can help and also hurt your revenue, creating a social media ad strategy that actually works. If these topics resonate with you, go check out marketing made simple wherever you get your podcast. Today my guest is Evan Sone, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Recruiter.com which is an on-demand recruiting platform that combines AI and video job matching technology with the world's largest network of independent recruiters. Evan is a frequent contributor to CNBC and Yahoo Finance, most notably for his diverse set of experiences, growing and building companies in various industries. He's worked in Wi-Fi, instant messaging, data security, customer relationship management and many more. He started his first company, his own mobile computing company in the 1990s. That was acquired by Dunn and Bradstreet. He's aided a number of venture backed companies in growing their businesses. These companies have been acquired by the likes of Simentech and Verifone to name a few. He is also the co-founder and vice president of the Sone conference foundation cause that aims to fight pediatric cancer as well as other childhood diseases. He has an incredible track record of building a ton of different companies in various industries and what he's done is he's taken his experience in tech and innovation and used it to disrupt the recruiting industry with Recruiter.com. Some of the things we spoke about, the great resignation, why workers were leaving en masse despite high unemployment and the changes employers can make to come out on top and find new talent, recruit new talent or retain talent. We spoke about the talent pool shuffle. The changes companies have to make if they want to reach the best talent they want to have the best people in the job. They have to start reaching out to the under employee. They have to start reaching out to high school and college educated workers. It can't just all be the traditional hiring process, the traditional job candidate for certain roles. We spoke about the disruption that Evan deployed at Recruiter.com, disrupting the recruiting and talent acquisition world and how he built at Recruiter.com successfully to be the largest independent network of recruiting talent combined with the technology play. We also spoke about the new world of work. How recruiters and job candidates are seeing a totally different type of employer employee relationship in a post-COVID world and lastly the tenderization of the recruiting industry and why you should be swiping right on gig economy or on demand recruiting and what it means for businesses as well as the financial impact that this new norm of recruiting and talent acquisition is having on businesses in the US and globally. So we went into a lot of recruiting conversation for businesses, very tactical recruiting tips as well as some commentary and some thoughts on what happened to the recruiting and talent industry throughout COVID. Considering the fact that five years ago we were having the conversation is remote work right for us and we'll never be forward, we'll always be against it fast forward to 2022, a complete 180 on that stance obviously. So a lot of changes have happened. Let's jump right into it. This is Evan Sone. He is the chairman and chief executive officer of Recruiter.com. Hey, so thanks again Scott for having me on your show. My story is actually pretty fine. I've been very privileged and honored to work with some incredible people. I started my first company in 1989 right out of NYU Business School in mobile computing. So I'm old or certainly older, mobile in the 90s looked very very different than what mobile looks like today and grew that company over a decade with clients like Merck and Bristol-Mire Squib and Apple Laboratories, American Express, TD Ameritrade, NASA, AT&T and all these really cool clients. And we got acquired by Dunn and Bradstreet in 1998. A lot of fun. Stay there for a little while, got pulled out by a venture capital company to go into the security space. That eventually led to another company that was acquired by message labs, a UK based company that was stayed there for a little bit. That company actually eventually got acquired by Symantec. Then left there went to a mobile company that got acquired by Verifone, spent some time in the payment space, left there, went to a Silicon Valley company called Point POINT and Point was acquired by GoDaddy about a year ago. So that's my origin story. Usually on the operation side, my background really is sales. I recall sales, product strategy, corporate strategy. I have a really good sense of where I try to have a good sense of where the hockey puck is going. When I say hockey, I actually mean Canadian hockey, given that you're from Toronto. And then being able to run the ball down the field, set the plays on the ball down the field. That's my background. Then I got involved with accrued.com about three years ago by one of the original investors. Recruit.com really was a media company. So you think of a media company. You think of lots of social media, a lot of touch points. It had a rate card for selling advertisements, etc. So companies like Indeed and LinkedIn actually paid Recruit.com to market their services to the overall network. We run four of the 10 largest LinkedIn groups. And I got involved to really transform a media company like Recruit.com into a technology platform. That's really what we've done in the last three years. So a lot of fun. In June of 20, I know I'm getting long-winded here, Scott. It's a lot of fun. No, no, no, no. I don't need to talk. This is your story. You go for it. You talk as much as you want. I'll tell you a quick story later. In June of 2020, really at the height of the pandemic, may have, sorry, may have 2020 at the height of the pandemic sat down with the board and basically said, hey, look, when this pandemic is over, the job market's going to be an absolute shambles, this array, whatever. I didn't know it would be this bad. We're going to be the company that really helps get things back on track. And I quit my day job. And I became the CEO, the CEO, the co-founder of the company, shipped it over to the right. He became the CEO president. And I became the CEO and the CEO. And we marched away up to NASDAQ. We uplisted on NASDAQ this past July, our first day trading with July 2nd on NASDAQ. And we've been growing ever since. A lot of fun. So what is it? So what is the current state of recruiter.com? So what the hell do we do? Right? Yeah. What do you do now? What do you do now? So you said exactly what the hell did you do now? So you did, you did the media pieces. Yeah. And that was when you joined. And then now, obviously, it's, it's evolved since. So yeah. So recruiter.com has this incredible, huge network of recruiters, lots of small and independent recruiters. And our thesis was let's take these recruiters and get them on assignments specifically for companies that these recruiters have skills that companies are going to have access to either on a full-time basis or on a gig basis. And we call it on demand recruiting. So we started this path of on demand recruiting. And we now have, you know, hundreds of recruiters out on assignment, none of whom actually work for us. You can think of us like Uber for recruiting or Upwork for recruiting, all, all levels of talent acquisition. And when you get into the talent acquisition space, it's highly, highly specialized. You know, your recruiter that's going to do work for you over in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, specifically for media is not the scientific recruiter that Pfizer would use to help find junior scientists to work in their location in Massachusetts. It's a very, very, very, very specialized area. And it's getting even more specialized in this whole remote work and work from anywhere and higher from anywhere and all these other things tied to it. So we had this on-demand platform. And then we recognized that, you know, every company that comes to us really has an appetite for candidates. That's really what they're looking for. They're having a hard time hiring. Big and small, hard time, different challenges. The bigger you are, it's a different challenge than if you're small. And we realized that the best way to make sure that the recruiters actually can do their jobs better than anybody else was to give them tools. And we invested millions of dollars into an incredible technology stack. So we have full-on AI search and engagement tools, 170 million profiles in our database are really amazing. So we have on-demand recruiting software and on-demand recruiters. We have some clients that self-service on our platform. We have some clients that just use our tools. Some clients that just use our recruiters. And then clients that use both recruiters and our software. So if our software is used to help build a candidate pipeline, then you can hand that pipeline over to different levels of recruiters to do the full sort of hiring there. I understand. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So you've gigafied basically the recruiter economy. So let's talk about some of the things that have come out of the past two years and some of the things that I'm assuming companies hire recruiter.com to actually solve for. So what is a current job market like? How many people are leaving their jobs? Is it just as volatile as it was at the beginning? You hear about the great resignation. Everybody leaving on mass, everybody going virtual. What's the current state? Because you're in this. So you have a pretty good perspective on it. It's yes. So there are three macro events going on today in the US. Two of them are episodic and one is systemic. So the first one is really talent shortage. Right? You had all these companies that furloughed their people or shut down totally. And now you have 4% unemployment. You have 10 and a half million open jobs. Hard to get people to come back to work, salary increases, wage inflation, ghosting, all these other things that you're sort of hearing about. And that's episodic because that actually will get resolved probably in the next year, 18 months. The notion that this restaurant can't open on after 10 o'clock as they can't staff. They'll find the staff. They'll figure that out. They'll get that balance between wage and quality life and all these other things. The second, and by the way, we have a lot of clients in that manufacturing space and hospitality space, etc. That are in that hourly economy side of things, the working work collar. The second really is the great resignation. Now what most people don't recognize is that the US churn, right? There are 160 million working adults in the US, something like that. The annual turnover is somewhere between 22 and 25 percent. So that means that every month people quit, voluntarily quit. Forget the layoffs, right? Volunteerly quit. That was pretty cool. That was just regular. Pre-COVID, always. So in 2019, I think the average was 3.5 million people quit every month. 3.3 to 3.5 million people quit every month. This is just a regular number. So what's interesting is that, you know, and we reported this, we do a recruiter index every month. In November, in October, we said, the great resignation is upon us. And about two weeks later, they announced that 4.5 million people quit in August. And it was like, oh my god, 4.5. The reality is, it's greater. The greater resignation, right? More people quit in August than before. Not that much more. No, it's a million more. It's a lot. But still it's more. But what's interesting is that it's the who was quitting that, right? Let's break out those numbers, right? So what you started to see is the knowledge worker start to leave, right? In other words, why? Well, guess what? I moved to Florida. I worked for Bank in New York. I moved to Florida because of COVID. The bank says you have to come back full time. I said, I'm never going back full time. There are a lot of reasons. Grandma used to wash the children. Grandma doesn't want to. She's too scared. I can't work from I have to work remotely. I like working remotely. I want to work life balance. There are a lot of reasons why this is all happening. But we're seeing these things like it's never happened before. This notion of work from anywhere is really fostering this great resignation of why people are leaving. I want my priorities have changed. You know, we call it the great re-evaluation. Why companies are changing what they're thinking, employees are changing what they're thinking. That too is actually episodic, right? We believe the greatest resignation will really slow up probably by the summer. So you'll start to see those numbers come down of how many people are quitting, slightly ticket down. What's not changing is what we call the job hopper economy. So pre-pandemic, if you went to Silicon Valley and you saw resume of someone for 12 years and they were at three or four companies in 12 years, you would say, oh my god, that software engineer is awesome. That's an awesome software engineer. If you saw, and again, I'm generalizing to prove a point, but like 60% of all millennials now have no problem leaving a company within six months. We're hearing clients say, yeah, an employee started and two weeks later, they left because they got a better job from someplace else. Like, incredible. So, you know, we might have had parents or grandparents that said, oh, you got to stay your employer for at least two years or four years. That's out the door now. So this job hopper economy is really fueling so much craziness on the actual hiring and talent acquisition side of things. And I'll let me explain. So five years ago, I don't know where you were working five years ago, but let's assume you work for a company five years ago, right? And now you were going for an interview. Let's think about what was the year that you like five years ago? You brought a suit to the office, right? And you lied, right? And you told your manager, well, it's my uncle's wife's die. And I got to go to a funeral. It's really sad, et cetera. And you took off the afternoon. The next day, there's a head hunter calling you up. And you're like, your boss is like, who is that? Oh, it's my mother. She's really upset about my uncle's wife's like, it's a whole cloak and dagger. And by the way, you can tell when somebody's leaving a company because they start, they start taking, they start taking days and they start walking out of the office or out of the cubicle to take the phone calls and whatnot. That's right. That's right. That's right. You know, and look, we, we knew that, right? Oh, someone's getting sick a lot. Gee, maybe they're actually interviewing, right? So the expression finding a job as a full time job was would not be offered in February of 22, right? It would just would not be offered now. Why? Because what's interviewing today? Interview today is a 15 minute video interview, right? It's a zoom screen for 15 minutes. So let me get this right. If I could interview anytime I want, if I'm home or I'm working remotely or hybrid, if geographically undesirable jobs don't exist anymore, right? Think about that, Scott. Think about how many jobs you didn't even look because it was geographically undesirable. So here's the thing. Everyone in this country today is more valuable than they were three years ago. Everybody. And the reason is that again, it's the, it's the factory worker, the dishwasher at a restaurant, the waiter, the job developer. Everyone's more valuable. The reason is that let's assume you, you want to work remotely, right? But if I want you to work for my company, it doesn't matter to me where you work because I want your skills. So think about all of a sudden now I could work from anywhere. I could work at any company I want. I can interview anytime I want. By the way, how easy is it to apply for a job now? It's clicking on on a, you know, indeed, it's like piece of cake. So the only thing that was holding you back from leaving was the stigma of, oh, I can't just leave that company. I've only been there for a year. Once that's removed, holy crap. And by the way, it's gone now. It's absolutely gone. There is no, there is no longer a stigma of leaving a company. You know, Kevin O'Leary, Mr. Wonderful, wrote an article about three months ago, baking employees, please stay at your company for at least 24 months, 24 months. That's nuts. So you're going to see now people leaving companies at a far more rapid basis. So by the way, if the number, if the number of the annual churn in the US, the annual turnover is 22%. If it goes up to 30%, and I actually think it's going to go further, 30% increase will actually cost the US economy $50 billion more in 22 than in 2019. And I, we, we blogged about it. I presented it on CNBC a couple of weeks ago. You know, that's an incredible investment that companies are now making into these things. And what this is really doing is really driving a tremendous demand for recruiters and for HR tech is now hot. You know, but I'll give you what my sound bite is. You know, if it used to be that finding a job was a full time job, the today's response is finding people is a full time job. It is no longer something that if you're running a company with 30 or 40 people in it and used to hire three people a year or four people a year, you're now going to be hiring eight to 12 people a year. And that's just to keep up with the people that are leaving. Now, if you're hiring one person a month, that's a job. That's an actual, someone's going to have to be doing that. And I actually predict the same way that we all take, we all outsource, you know, every company has something doing with security, whether it's email security, desktop security, hosted VPN services, managed service providers, all the way up to achieve security officer. I believe every company of a certain size will be allocating money towards something in talent acquisition and retention. Amazing. So that's obviously a massive shift. And companies deal with the different ways, right? Of course, now, like you mentioned, recruiting, recruiting as a service, finding some sort of way to spend money so that they don't have to manage to task themselves because as somebody who hires people, that's incredibly time consuming task. Also, there's like, you know, gig economy and part time and contractors are getting more popular as well. But I think that the thing that companies are probably thinking as they're hearing you walk through all these points is, okay, so how do I retain? How do I, what's the, what's the way that I actually keep people around? Because yeah, I can't be a shitty company anymore because there's so many other options that they're in like all the reasons you just mentioned, there's a lot of ways people to jump ship. Is there anything you seen work in retaining talent so that because like, you know, you're working recruiting, right? You know how long, how much money and time and energy takes to onboard anybody. Yeah. Yeah, it's exhausting. And by the way, you look at Starbucks's recent earnings numbers were down because they spent more money in onboarding. Why? Because they used to onboard someone and they would say, X number of months, now they're staying less than X months. Yeah. The, you know, the answer is two things. One is, I think, I think every business owner needs to be thinking about their supply chain and pipeline and they got to be looking at candidates on a regular basis and building a bench of them. The other is figuring out a way to get more entry level folks. Hey, so if you can have a role that is someone college, because you'll be able to get a college grad, you know, to stay a little bit longer because you're going to provide them the skills and training, etc. Then the, the, from a candidate perspective, I think you got to show progression much, much more rapidly, right? You got to sit down with, you know, Scott, the employee and say, okay, Scott, here's where you are today. Here's where I want you to be a year from now and here the steps towards getting there because I don't want you thinking about, I want you thinking that if you look to leave, you're going to miss that next milestone. And what I'm really trying to do is to keep you to the next milestone. See, if you know that, that you're getting your promotion every six months and you're at month four, gee, I'll wait two months, so I'll get a step up there before I start looking elsewhere. Now that's really for the small business. You know, one of our, one of our clients, I was sitting down with the global head of talent and I said, you know, you guys, you're in position where you should be all marketing that this is a 24 month position. Hey, Scott, work for my company. It's a 24 month role. I'm going to pay you a boatload of money to work for me for 24 months, but when the 24 months are over, you know, you're free to go and do whatever you want. You know, so changing the language, you know, this is not a, you're not coming to work at a call center for a career. You're going to come and learn something. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of two months ago. No one wants to be an assistant manager anymore, right? No one wants to be called the assistant manager. Now, what does that mean? I don't know, but it means that we need to change the language of how we treat our employees. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot. Now security is one of the major issues big tech is currently facing from AI scrapes to data leaks, starting your business solidly can be just as difficult as growing it securely. HubSpot is on a mission to help your business grow better with a CRM platform that grows with you. Start your venture with HubSpots, either to use secure website builder that scales with your business. As you grow, ensure your team of two is just as secure as your team of two hundred with secure sign-on, content, and asset petitioning and scalable team permissions. Whatever comes next, make sure your business is ready for it. Learn how your business can grow better at HubSpot.com. Now, what I find very interesting is how like recruiting.com is is feeling the gap that has manifested because of COVID, but it's interesting because you didn't come from a recruiting background. So I want to talk about the model that you implemented at recruiting.com because your brain and how you think through innovation and disruption, I think is probably position recruiter.com, excuse me, to to fill some of these gaps that we're seeing now. Yeah, and I want you to I want you to walk through it in comparing the traditional agency like I don't want to name names because you're a good direct competitor with some of these probably, but you know the large the larger recruiting agencies and why and why they aren't. Yeah, totally great. So A, you know, fundamentally hiring hasn't changed, I don't know, ever. You know, you post a job, you collect resumes, you screen the candidates, you interview them, you hire them. That is the process for hiring. Whether you put an ad in the New York Times, you know, 30 years ago or you post a job on LinkedIn, right? That's how you got the job. Whether you mailed in your resume or emailed it or downloaded it or got to be a fax, right? Then you screen the candidates, you interview them and you hire them. That process hasn't changed and I think it's due for change and we'll deal with that two years from now. And the fundamentally, there are two ways to do that. You either do it yourself. So Scott, the business owner will post the job, collect the resumes, you know, screen the candidates, interview the candidates, or historically you hired a head hunter or a recruiter and the recruiter got paid 20 to 30% of the salary for getting that done. Now that made a lot of sense when hiring Scott was akin to your, the rest of your career is going to be working for me. So I'll pay someone to 30% of your first year salary because you're going to be here forever. Okay, so 30 years, that's easy. Ten years, I could still amortize it. But what if you're only going to be at this company for a year? How in the world am I paying 30% of a salary for someone who may or may not last a year to, you know, a year to 24 months? So I think that model needs to change. And what we started to do was to really capitalize on the gig economy from a recruiting perspective and say, you know what Scott, you actually need, if you're trying to hire people in your company, why don't you bring on a recruiter who works for you 10 hours a week, 10 hours a day, whatever you want in your specialty and let them do the hiring for you, but pay them on a, on a narrowly basis. And that's what we're delivering on an on demand basis. You know, you could hire a driver and pay the guy, pay your driver an annual salary in a bonus or you can go to Uber and say, hey, take me from point A to point B, right? So, you know, you could do the same thing. And by the way, think of all the other models that are doing that today. You have upwork doing that and fiber is doing it and freelancer.com is doing it. And by, by the way, we do that in our professional world. Right, you have a, let's assume you have a bookkeeper or an accountant. Does that account work for you full time or to use an accountant that you pay on a project by a project basis? Get even more granular. You're doing the real estate transaction, right? You're not going to hire a full-time attorney to do that one real estate transaction. You're going to find the right attorney for that location who knows it, who's licensed, et cetera. You're going to engage them for that assignment and when the assignment's over, it's done. That is where we see the, the world going in talent acquisition. And we're doing that. We're capitalizing on this giant network of recruiters, getting them on assignments on a regular basis through subscription models, et cetera. And then adding the software to really make, you know, give them, you know, the proverbial superpowers, right? Give them the tools, you know, multi-multimillion dollar tools. Now, not just that, we're now able to do that from, you know, Fortune 50 companies down to small businesses. So we actually launched a program called My Recruiter. You can go to start.recruiter.com slash My Recruiter. And it is a full on subscription start set, like I think a thousand dollars a month. There's no placement fees, nothing. You get a talent, you know, a talent advisor working for you to handle your specific job and it's a monthly service. So it's a, it's a new service that we're offering. And no one else does that on the planet today. No, okay. So this is what you, when, you know, I'm reading through some of these, some of these talking points, the tenderization of the recruiting industry. Is that, is that what this is? Is this like the, is this like the, you're getting matched? Yeah. So that's going to happen probably next year. So right now, you're in a very, very candidate centric market, right? You don't want to do anything that inhibits companies don't want to slow that process up. They don't want to change anything right now, right? So the example I use in the tenderization of recruiting is if you were going to hire a comedian, right? You're going to hire a comedian for an event. You don't read, right? You're not actually reading the paperwork. You don't want to read the resumes of the, of the comedians, right? You basically want to say, you know what? Show me all the comedians that are available in my area, at this time, that are not raunchy because here's my audience. And you're going to get five, five comedians. And you're going to see 30 second or one minute clip of their comedy. And then you're going to choose that comedian based on which one you like the most. And you'll look at their paperwork. Because by the way, their paperwork probably also is the same thing. Oh, they were starring here. They won these award. You know, their resume looked exactly the same. Well, if you were going to hire someone for a frontline customer facing role, why go through the process of getting your paperwork, reviewing the resume that that all looks the same to screen them, to see what they are. Meanwhile, what you really want to do is say, you know what? I need a fill in the blank. I need this sort of customer facing role. Show me all the people that align with my requirements. Let me see a 30 second clip on who I want. And then, hey, I'm going to short list, you know, 10 of them. And then I'll go into the paperwork side of things. And I think that is going to expedite this overall process. Hey, by the way, you know, you know, the the resume, the resume was invented by Leonardo da Vinci. And other than the font, and the fact that we put our email and mobile number, it might not have changed much since Leonardo da Vinci. Since when is a one page, since when is a one page summary of who you are? You know, since when does that really make a lot of sense? It never does. But it's a way, it's a way to, it's a way to, so this is what I never understood about recruiting. I never understood how a one page resume could encapsulate an entire person's professional life and personal life. And, and it just acts as like a screening tool when you have like ATS and all these other tools that look for these keywords. And then that sort of like filters everything out. But still, I mean, there's probably there's much better ways to do this. I love this. So this is the has to be a better way. Right. Right. Because by way, you know, it's, it's like it went from the personal's like, let's go put an ad up in the New York Times. Personal to, hey, here's my photo. Here's a little bit about me, but only show the people that are interested in me anyway. Like in other words, there's a ready of filtering process. Why are you looking at people who aren't screened already? Like, why are you doing that? Why are you? And again, you know, there's so much data out there on individuals. And so the other thing that's really, really fascinating is, you know, if we're in a job hopper economy, that actually means that more people are actually open to looking for a job than not looking for a job. And there's some statistics now of how many people four out of 10 people are looking for you know, so that does that mean that everyone is a passive candidate or an active candidate? Like in other words, it's, it's pretty incredible to watch that, right? That means that for the right opportunity, I can get you to leave your job because there's no longer any stigma. And by the way, I was talking about this the other day with somebody. Imagine you love Charlotte, North Carolina, right? You don't live there, but you love it there. Why not work for a company in Charlotte? That is, hey, Scott, you get to come here every six weeks. Oh, I love that. My best friend lives there are my in-laws live. Right? So obviously, now we're going to leverage the hybrid environment to our benefit. So, so if you were going to, if you were going to set up the perfect recruiting process, what would what would that look like? Like if you could do it, if you could do it differently, then the standard de facto way that we do it right now. What do you think that perfect process is? I think let's break it up. First of all, you know, I grew up in an either or world, you know, Sony or beta max HBO or Showtime. You know, now it's really a or Mac versus, you know, PC. Now it's really, we're in an and both world, right? So there's no longer either or it's an and both. I think for customer facing roles, I would actually start with the video. I would, I would hands down, start with video, with data on the video and analytics on the video. And I would say, only let me just see the people that align with what I'm looking for. I want friendly, you know, friendly, friendly people with this experience, you know, who could do X and Y and Z use and that's really what I'm talking about with the tenderization of of interview. And again, you'll start with something nice and simple. But by the way, you would say the same thing looking at a Java developer, right? Not a video, but like, hey, just show me the people that scored over 95 percent on this test, right? You know, don't show me all the people that didn't take the test. So, hey, if you want to work for me, I'm going to build a giant curated pool of developers that have passed this assessment test because that's where I want to fish it. I don't, I don't want to fish in anyone that hasn't done that. So, I think you're going to start seeing because if people are moving around so quickly, there's got to be a way that we're looking at things differently now. By the way, look at, look at, look at colleges. You're a little young that kids in college, but like the schools now, because it's so easy to apply to colleges, they're being inundated with applications. So, clearly they're using some sort of, you know, to think that, you know, that a school's looking at every single application that comes in or reading every essay, like they're just saying, hey, look, anyone that didn't score at least this on their test or this on their index or read these words, don't even look at it. Just get rid of it. And one would say the same thing now. I just want to take a second to thank the sponsor of today's episode swag.com. Now, you know, if you've ever received a corporate gift or swag in the past, how many of those gifts did you actually keep? Probably not many, which is probably because the stuff that you got was not so great, I've gotten like a lot of stuff from great shows and from companies in the past that I've just thrown out the second I get it. So, this is why you need check out swag.com. I've been on the receiving end of getting garbage gifts. I've also worked in companies where I only had access to a really, really small inventory of stuff that I wanted to give my customers and my employees. And I knew that it wasn't going to resonate. I knew that it was going to suck. So, what is swag.com? Well, it's like swag upgraded. It's the best place to buy custom gifts and swag the people will actually want to keep. So, they sent me a box because obviously they're sponsoring the show and I wanted to see what it's all about. You know, I've worked in businesses. I want to make sure that the quality of their stuff actually was up to my standards because I can tell you right now that when I get garbage, it goes right into the trash. It like it really goes right into the trash a second I get back from the trade show or the conference or whatever. So, I received one of the custom swag boxes from swag.com. I loved the unique packaging. So, it was a beautiful unbox and experience. I love the actual products they sent me and there's a whole bunch more that obviously they didn't send me. But the stuff that they did send was absolutely beautiful. It was very high quality. And I can only imagine that if I actually got this when I was working for companies, I probably would have actually used it. And to be honest, I'm going to start using them for people that work on my show and in my company as well because I know this isn't just a novelty gift that somebody's going to throw. It's stuff that they can actually use. They have so many unique and customizable gifts that I've never seen anywhere else. They have custom yoga mats. They have custom apple air pods. They even have branded kayaks, which I did not know was a thing. So, they carry all these premium brands like North Face, Yeti, Nike, and more. And it's all customizable with your company's logo or artwork. With swag.com, they take care of all of your swag at their warehouse and they ship it to individual addresses. Or if you prefer, you can just send it to a bulk location in one single ship. It's easy to manage from their online portal, which you obviously could access to. So, if this is something that you think would benefit you, if you have clients or customers or a team and you want to go the extra mile and you actually want to give gifts that people appreciate, which is the whole point of giving these gifts in the first place. Go to swag.com for the perfect swag and custom gifts. Right now, they're giving everybody who's a success story podcast listener special offer. It's 10% off your entire order. But only when you go to swag.com slash success and enter promo code success 10. Remember, for 10% off, go to swag.com slash success and use promo code success 10. Yeah, no, that makes sense. And then that's that's when companies are trying to hire, but you know, flip the flip the script. When you have all these different candidates, what are candidates looking for? What are the value most in companies that you're seeing? Yeah, so what, you know, what we've seen in the last, you know, three years or two years is really the work life balance becoming a bigger priority for candidates. Now, there's something kind of novel about that, but also as a business owner, you know, we grew up with the expression is probably very little money can't solve. But now, what if what if money can't solve it? Right, I'll pay you more money, but you want to work remote. I'll pay you more money, but you want to, you know, only work four days a week. So I think this work life balance and the prioritization. And that's really what's happening. We're seeing like candidates say, here's what's really important to me. And they're finding companies that are aligned with what's important to them. And by the way, remote work isn't everyone's priority. Some people want to be in person. And I think what we're able to do now in this post-pendemic world is not be all things to all people. Let's do the things that we want to do as a company. We're only going to be virtual or and if you're virtual or you're only virtual, maybe you're not getting entry level people because training entry level people in a virtual environment is actually very difficult. So I think you're seeing that from candidates. That's the next question of where should candidates go? I think from a candidate perspective, figure out what skills you want to have when it's over. Figure out where you want to be when it's over. What does that look like when it's done? Right. If I'm working for Scott, what am I going to learn from Scott in a year or two that I can now take to the next, you know, to my next experience? What's that experience looking like? It's interesting because now with people switching so quickly, now the question of like pensions and you know, in Canada, RRSP contribution and all these different mechanisms for like retirement, that's completely changing too. So have you seen any companies tackle that differently? Yes, so the real, yeah, it's really the biggest inhibitor to the gig economy is actually mortgages. So pensions are usually keen portable, right? 401K is an app portable. That went portable, you know, years ago. Healthcare benefits now, you have companies saying you start healthcare on day one. I think there's some statistic like 40% of all US adults are on some sort of government healthcare program. Anyway, the real challenge to the gig economy really is mortgage. You know, you can make a million dollars in your business, right? As a gig and I can make $50,000 as a W2 salary and I'll have an easier time getting a mortgage than you will because the banking today, they want to see a W2 as if a W2 is the beyond end all. That's going to have to change because that's a huge inhibitor to the gig economy. I'll give you another statistic, Scott, 35% of all adults in the US have a side hustle. Not surprising at all, yeah. Right, so I think what that really tells you is that whatever industry you're in, you need to sort of make sure that you could all use your word, dignify a segment of your business because it's out there. The other thing that we're working on now even internally is what I call the 4th-5th job. In other words, in this goal of work-life balance, when do you shut down? If I send someone an email 11 o'clock at night, it's not because I'm nuts and crazy because there's something on my head that I want to email and I don't want anyone to feel like they have this responsibility to reply at 11 o'clock at night. And the best way to do that is, hey, look, I want to have a 4th-5th job. So pay me 80% of a salary and I'm going to make sure people work Monday, Tuesday, but then decide your schedule Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. But this way, you know, you could say, hey, I am, I don't work Thursdays. I don't work Thursday afternoon and Friday afternoon. I don't work Fridays. And the expectation is that, hey, I don't work Fridays, and not I'm going to email you and I expect a response immediately. And things like Slack and all these collaborative tools actually are getting people nervous, right? Because, you know, it used to be that you're at your desk. Now, where are you? How come I could Slack you? So we have the freedom to walk around and the freedom to work wherever we want. But yet at the same time, this, this recents of responsibility to replying back, you know, synchronously, as these things are actually happening. So there's some challenges there as well. But the 4th-5th job is not going to solve for that. That's a psychological issue that people have that may have just had to be cognizant of. Yeah. And that's that's something that's the huge and that's why you see all these countries over in Europe that are either trying to stop people from respond or communicating outside of your work hours or making it or protecting rights by, you know, saying, like legally, you don't have to respond after a certain time, right? So that they're almost like instilling like the psychological safety so that people don't feel like a work-life balance. Yeah. No, so I just think that look as a business, being able to attract someone who only wants to work, you know, 4th-5th of a job is actually creating a few things. Why? And you're giving them that built-in flexibility that maybe other companies won't. So you're paying them last, but you're, I think there's a lot of good things in doing it because you're trying to attract people. How do you, how do you build a culture, you know, when, when you're all working remotely? Like how do you do that? I don't know I agree. I agree. You know, I was with another global head of talent and he said to me, you know, Evan, here's the challenge. You know, my office, if I left the company, my office didn't change. My, right? This is my, right now, I'm in a virtual office, but my office hasn't changed. I work for my home. So if I left the company, it's not like I'm leaving friends, it's not like I'm leaving the restaurant down the corner or the best coffee or the best muffin, right? My, my home office isn't changing. My last name is, my email address is changing, but the rest doesn't change. So it makes it just so easy. You know, did you have, I had a job that I stayed in probably six months longer than I wanted to because it was just so, the commute was seven and a half minutes from my home. You know, that, that's, but who would do that now? Right? Who would do that? I also had a company that they wanted me to move to Atlanta and I had a leave. They wanted me to move. Again, these, these are all things that just wouldn't happen in, in 2022. Very good. No, it's very, it's very interesting to just see, and I think that maybe, you know, your comment on this as well, but COVID just moved things along quicker, but like we were already going in this direction anyways. It was just like, it was just a massive accelerate. That's right. Do you remember, you know, five, again, I'll say five years, five years ago, we were talking about the efficacy of remote work. Yeah. Right. Five years ago. Oh, I don't know. We don't allow it. We're vehemently opposed to remote work. You know, all these things are like, we were talking about that five years ago. And now it's like, do I make you even want to? I make it come in maybe one day a week. Like, how do I do that and make it meaningful? Like, we don't want to have zoom days. So come in and it's, you know, it's only, it's, it's pretty incredible. That, that, that's really happened. Okay. Let's, let's, let's wrap this up. I want to do a couple of rapid fire. But before I pivot, closing thoughts on future of work, future of, of talent, recruiting and, and where you, where you think the industry is going to go, what you're working on with recruiting.com in the future, recruitur.com in the future. And then I also want to get from you, like, website, socials, all, all that stuff. You can go check it out. Sure. So look, more money will be invested in hiring talent in 22 than ever before. As the tightness of the labor market, the increase in hourly wages, the flexibility of the working environment, the ease of applying for jobs online, employees desire for new experiences and work-life balance. And, you know, this emergence of this job hopper economy. And, you know, as I mentioned before, we estimate that the US will be investing more than $50 billion in 22 over the amount spent in 2019, just a higher talent. And, you know, now really is the time, a little self-promotion, now really is the time for recruitur.com. And, really, for talent acquisition, you know, we are in the golden age of talent acquisition. Yeah, very smart. Okay. Obviously, recruitur.com is the domain, but where else do they go? Social, and also for you too, if they want to connect with you, what are your preferred socials? Evan at recruitur.com. Okay. I'll give my mailing address. Someone could actually send me a card, like a written card. Like my preferred is to type something down with carbon paper and then email it to me. I'll give you my fax number. Oh, jeez. I don't know if you're going to get much on that. I'm not getting much. I give you my telex number and my fax number. Yeah. Evan at recruitur.com. You can go to recruitur.com. You could join our, we have a huge LinkedIn group. The recruitur.com LinkedIn group is like 850,000 people. Twitter. You could follow me. Evan's own is my handle or recruitur.com. I think we have like 49,000 Twitter followers, but really pretty, pretty simple to get in touch with us that way. Amazing. Okay. Let's do a couple of rapid-fire. Just pull it some last insights from your career. Biggest challenge that you've overcome in your personal or professional life. What was it? How'd you overcome it? Oh, that's a really good question. I think the biggest challenge I've had a lot of interesting challenges. I've been fired. You know, so I think recovering from being fired is is never fun. It's a huge blow to your ego, like how dare they. But when you're in the sale, when you're in sales, like it's, you know, an old CEO once told me, you're not really a sales person, so you've been fired. You know, so I think those things all part for the course, but I think that was, you know, the first time that really happened. That was like a very, very serious blow and recovering from that was was pretty challenging. If you had to choose one person, there's obviously been many, but pick one person who's had an incredible impact on your life. Who was it? What did they teach you? So I've had, okay, so let's talk. I had a, you know, a mentor back in the 2000s, who incredibly gracious individual, incredibly seasoned, why he spent time with me. I have no idea. Just really incredible. And, you know, the first time I met with him, he, you know, I walked him through a, a deck, right? You know, here's the deck. Let's walk through it. And he, he said to me, do you value our time together? I said, of course I do. And he goes, you obviously don't because we spent the first 20 minutes walking through a deck. And instead had you emailed it to me, we could have actually spent the time in meaningful conversation. And I think what I really learned from him was really that, like people that want to help get your materials together, don't read from the slides. And then, and then he was very, very into, you know, one of the metrics, like understand what your metrics are, and what is the key thing to drive that metric? And if you don't know what that one thing is, then it's the wrong metric. So find out exactly what the metrics are, and what are you doing to change those metrics? So there, there you go. Very, very smart. A book or podcast, you'd recommend people go check out that has had an impact on your life. Yeah, so I, I was reading other than your podcast. I would say extreme ownership, you know, by Jaco, you know, former Navy SEAL, he does a really good job. There's a lot there. I take that stuff like very, very seriously. So I really like that a lot. I am totally hooked on this week in startups. I only wish he didn't podcast every day because I'm always behind. And then my son loves that he hooked me up on how, how, how, how this was built. Is that it? Yeah, the guy Ross, like NPR show. Yeah, the NPR show, that's great. That's also really, really good. Great podcast. I'm in the gym a lot. So I'll, I'll podcast that I'll listen to podcasts while in the gym. Smart. If you could tell your 20-year-old self one thing, what would it be? 20, 20-year-old self. Wow. Throwing it back. You know, I'm 54 years old. That's a very, very long time ago. I didn't have a beard that. Clearly no gray hair, no beard, not married. I would probably say that make sure that whatever you do, you do a really good partner. You know, one of the companies that I had started, I did it by myself really. And I think that was a real challenge, you know, that you really want to have a partner in business and in life. You know, you need someone to bounce things off of someone that is aligned with you, someone that actually has the same priorities and really the same objectives. And I think that employees are great and they're always good to have employees, but you know, their motivations are different than a true partner in life and in business. So I probably tell that to my 20-year-old self. Very smart. And then last question, what does success mean to you? Success, I really measure success not on the value that I create for myself, but on the value that I create for everyone around me. That if I can make the people around me successful, then I know I'm doing a good job. It's pretty easy to drive ironically, you know, to drive your own success, right? To your own horn. But how do you make everyone else really, really succeed? In fact, you know, what I learned early on was like the great, you know, a, remember I started a company pretty young back in the days where you didn't start a company really young. You know, one of the best, one of the best compliments you can give a CEO is to say to that CEO, your team is amazing, right? Every person I met at this company is amazing. The the management that you've assembled here is just amazing. And when you do that to a CEO, you'll watch their shoulders are dropped and they'll smile because that's the ultimate compliment. The compliment is not your brilliant, you're really smart. It's a look at what you've created around you. So for me, it's really the measurement of success. And by the way, I would probably say, you know, I have a series of rules that I live by and one of them is never work for someone who doesn't want to see you succeed. Like if you're working for someone who cares more about their own success than your success, you're get out. Leave. That's just not the right place for you.