Technical Recruitment Tips: Insights from Tech Talent Experts

Are you struggling to find and hire exceptional IT professionals?

Sioux Logan is our special guest on this episode of the Hire Calling Podcast! She is the visionary founder and president of RedStream Technology, an IT staffing firm located in New York City. Immediately, you will be whisked into Sioux's world, revealing the raw, unfiltered experiences of launching a tech staffing firm from the ground up. 

Pete and Sioux begin by discussing the job market's post-pandemic seismic shifts, which have left many professionals uncertain, but they share their optimism for the future. They analyze the effects of tech giant layoffs and the constriction of venture capital on the fragile ecosystem of startups. It's a candid discourse on the importance of innovation in hiring practices during adjustment periods, packed with actionable insights for both companies and candidates. 

But success in recruitment isn't just about embracing change—it's also about mastering the fundamentals. Sioux imparts her wisdom to new recruiters, emphasizing the indispensable role of personal interaction in a digitalized world. This episode peels back the curtain on the strategies that distinguish exceptional recruiters from the rest, from tapping into the goldmine of internal databases to the quick yet profound decision-making akin to Malcolm Gladwell's 'Blink.' 

Tune in and arm yourself with the knowledge to navigate the modern recruitment landscape with confidence and finesse!

Additional Resources:

• RedStream Technology
• Tech Terms You Need to Know as an IT Recruiter
• The Challenges of IT Recruiting and How to Overcome Them
• The Best Interview Questions to Ask IT Candidates

🧠 WANT TO LEARN MORE? Be sure to subscribe and check out 4 Corner Resources at https://www.4cornerresources.com/

👋 FOLLOW PETE NEWSOME ONLINE:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petenewsome/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@PeteNewsome

👋 FOLLOW SIOUX LOGAN ONLINE:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sioux-logan/

Transcript

Pete Newsome: 0:00

You're listening to the Hire Calling podcast. I'm Pete Newsome, and my guest today is Sioux Logan, founder and president of RedStream Technology. Sioux, how are you today? I'm fine, hi Pete, it is so nice to have you. We've been friends and colleagues for what? Four, five years now, and finally, here we are getting a chance to talk on camera about technical recruiting today.

Sioux Logan: 0:22

This is so fun. I love it.

Pete Newsome: 0:24

Well, thanks for doing it. So RedStream, your company, is headquartered in Manhattan. Why don't you just if you would just take a minute to introduce your background and tell us a little bit about RedStream?

Sioux Logan: 0:34

Yeah, so I started the company in 2007. I had been, I started my career as a technical recruiter and then I moved into account management and did business all over the New York City state, dry state area, New Jersey, Connecticut. My client base consisted of financial services companies. It consists of big management consulting, a lot of smattering of other other flavors genres, and in 2007, I just thought I needed a change and I needed to try it on my own. So I left my job.

Sioux Logan: 1:11

I sat down in a second bedroom of my freezing cold apartment in February, practically wearing gloves, and I sat in front of a blank screen and said, okay, it's time to mind my non-compete and dredge up new business. So it took about. I had to write out a non-compete and I had to cold call and I had to do all the really good old behavior that. You know what that's like. Calling people was prior to the days of LinkedIn, so you had to try and get phone numbers for people and call people and make people to meet with you. But after about a year I had hired a first employee and we started opening new business and clients were good to me and introduced me to their teams. And here we are, 17 years later.

Pete Newsome: 1:57

That's wonderful. Congratulations on that. I know what a big step that is. I'm curious, though what was? Was there a catalyst for you deciding to to take the plunge initially, or was it something you thought about doing for a long time?

Sioux Logan: 2:10

No, I actually always said I would never own my own business.

Sioux Logan: 2:14

My dad owned a dairy distribution business when I was growing up and he worked and he was up really early in the morning, came home late, he worked weekends, and so I said, oh, I would actually never, never, never, own a business. And when I was, a lot of stuff has changed. You with my client base. It was the end of 2006. And I needed to recreate a client base that the company I was working for, industry, had changed and we were going to lose one of our big clients potentially. And I got up every day and I went to work and I said I really need to recreate myself, I really need to make some cold calls, I need to find new business. And I couldn't do it, pete. I just I love the people I worked with. I worked with some of the greatest people I've ever worked with in my career, but I couldn't make myself do it.

Sioux Logan: 3:02

And one day it just seemed clear to me that the only thing that I could get excited about was to do it all over again. And you know how terrifying that is to start a company. You have no back office, you don't have no recruiting team, you can't take your clients with you because you have a non compete. When I did decide to do it, it was the most freeing, exciting thing I'd ever decided to do in my entire career. I mean, it really was. Then I have a funny story for you the when I decided to leave my company, I came in the next. I decided on a weekend, that I came in the next Monday and I hit seeing. You remember the movie Borat.

Pete Newsome: 3:45

Of course.

Sioux Logan: 3:46

I had been to the movies and the people knew that I was a crazy workaholic and I was really serious and all that stuff and telling my coworkers that. I had been to see the movie Borat and they're like, huh, that's really interesting. And later in the day, when I announced that I was leaving, they were like now I get why you went to the movies to see Borat, that's so not you. You did something fun and anyway so that was it.

Pete Newsome: 4:08

You're great. You can blame or thank Borat.

Sioux Logan: 4:11

Borat's responsible for me doing this.

Pete Newsome: 4:14

I'm sure you've had this thought, like I have over the years, that some of the biggest things you could do in life having a child, getting married, your profession, starting a job there's no roadmap for it and the world doesn't really encourage you to go out on your own. It's kind of just a secret thing that you have to figure out on your own by taking the step. It's like jumping out of the plane and then figuring out how to work a parachute Right.

Sioux Logan: 4:38

Yeah, that is true. Well, I would tell you also, Peter, there were a lot of people. I had a couple of months from the time I left my job and I started actually started the company. I was keeping a little bit private about what I was going to do and when I told people, I cannot tell you how many people tried to scare me.

Pete Newsome: 4:55

You don't want to do this.

Sioux Logan: 4:57

You don't want to worry about the back office finance. You don't want to worry about running payroll. You don't want to do this. There's a lot of people who not only is there not a roadmap, there's also a lot of people who are really scared of what you and I do.

Pete Newsome: 5:09

Yes, and that's okay, I understand. I'm not going to convince them otherwise, right? Because you and I both have learned that it's scarier the thought of taking the step is scarier than actually taking it. At least it was for me.

Sioux Logan: 5:23

And.

Pete Newsome: 5:23

I think that's pretty common and I also had those warnings as well. A lot of fun right Fear, uncertainty and doubt, Because, again, the world doesn't really encourage you anyone to do that right. It's not the safe choice, and you also find out who your friends are, don't you? Oh yeah, you do yeah that's an interesting comment.

Sioux Logan: 5:45

You do find out who your friends are. I can't tell you how many people, when I was starting the business, actually took me out to lunch. You know old contacts, not clients, not violating my non-compete but you know people that I knew who I said I started my company. I can't tell you how many people were super kind and actually said oh, you just started a business, Let me take you out to lunch. And then there are a lot of people who disappear, Same, Same.

Pete Newsome: 6:13

Yes, and I never could have predicted who would have done what in that situation, and it was. It was so eyeopening and some of the people who I never would have expected any help from went out of their way to lend assistance, and others who I would have thought would be given didn't, didn't really step up, and so it's a fascinating thing that you almost have to go through that experience to know what it feels like. You can't really describe it, but here you are, here I am, we did it.

Sioux Logan: 6:45

And we're born up. Now we're not lonely. We have friends in this business because we've been at it long enough.

Pete Newsome: 6:51

Yeah, it's funny that you would mention that word, because lonely was, was a great is a great way to describe it, because one of the things that I missed that was hardest for me about going on my own was not having a manager, not having anyone to turn to and ask for advice or help, not having a peer. Even that, that, that was a very lonely feeling and that lasted for years for me.

Sioux Logan: 7:13

Yeah, same for years. And now I think that's one of the things I constantly, my own way, fight against is who are my peers? What is my network? That's how you and I became friends, part of professional networking group. Who is it that you trust to give you advice? Where do you find that? Because you can't go to a manager. The buck stops with you and I are doing. That's right.

Pete Newsome: 7:36

That's right it does, and that's well. That's a good thing. I like being an employee too, into some degree. It'd be nice to have days where the buck stops with someone else, but we're not going to solve that one today. We're going to solve some of the mystery, which I think is a lot more tangible, of how to recruit, improve your technical recruiting, and that's why I asked you really to come on today, although I think we should probably do an episode about going out on your own to start a staffing company that, if you'll come back, that would be, worth happening.

Pete Newsome: 8:07

Yeah, we could probably grab a couple of our other friends too who have similar stories. But the the market is evolving rapidly and I'm hoping that we can share advice and and guidance for those who are struggling with, and want to improve at, technical recruiting. But what do you think the state of the market is right now? How would you describe it? It's, it's a moving target of sorts.

Sioux Logan: 8:28

The market's really weird. I'm glad you asked me that question because I was just talking to my recruiting team about that this morning. You think back to four years ago, right at this time, 2020, when Pandemic was just coming on, we didn't know what was going to happen, and so I would say, for March on of 2020, it was gangbusters. Everybody needed technology people, everybody needed recruiters, everybody. As soon as we settled into what the Business model, the pandemic was going to be, technology recruiting was gangbusters. It was gangbusters all of 2021, all 2020-2010.

Sioux Logan: 9:09

Then it started to slow Right and and I've seen this before I was through 01, the dot-com crash. I was through 0809, which you and I were talking about earlier, where the financial services blew up mortgage, world Mortgage back securities flew up. This is, in a lot of ways, no different. It's not fun. Particularly, I can look back to 01 or 0809 and I can say, okay, that wasn't so fun, but I, we came out of it. We're in that same mode right now. It's difficult. We have been. We slowed. September of 2022, all of 23, was pretty slow for us. The In 2023, there were still we still really, really hard to find candidates.

Sioux Logan: 9:57

That is just started to shift now, in the last couple of months, it's getting a little bit easier. We have a time period P where my gold standard is you, hiring manager, give me a job requirement. I'm gonna present you at three very precise, very targeted Candidates. No one's perfect, but as close to perfect as we're gonna get we're gonna get. I'm gonna send you three. Sure, we're. In the last few years I was lucky if I could show two and I was really happy when I had one, and that is starting to ease a little bit. We're coming back to the point where we're able to show three candidates, some of who will do the hybrid model, whatever those intangibles that we've been looking at for years with recruiting, where all those things stick. But it's it's a rough market right now.

Pete Newsome: 10:45

It's a, it's, yeah, it's a market that's hard to pinpoint exactly what's happening with it and I think from Industry to industry it varies greatly. Skill set, skill set it varies greatly market to market. Geographically it's, it's really all over the board. I I thought Pre-covid we would always be in a candidate's market and then, and then things shifted quickly.

Pete Newsome: 11:08

Now I just I wouldn't even know how to describe it, but what? One of the things it's that I think we're seeing a lot and maybe you are too is it? Candidates aren't? Well they're. They're hesitant to change jobs because they've seen so many people jump and then lose their job because of a layoff, or Grass wasn't as green as I thought. There were a lot of huge salaries being thrown out post COVID. As we know, that really affected the recruiting industry in particular, and now People are afraid of. They don't, and that's the sentiment that I latch on to the most the general Population doesn't trust what's going on in the market right now.

Sioux Logan: 11:43

Yeah, and they shouldn't, because it's very strange. I just I'm trying to Trying to feed you what it feels like from the candidate perspective. You know we, when the market is hot and Chugging along like it was 2020-21-22, you really had no idea what candidates were gonna do. They had six options. They had four offers on the table already, right. At the same time, it's starting to shift again.

Sioux Logan: 12:10

I don't think anybody Feels like there's nothing out there. I also feel, pete, like there's a shift in you. Look at all the people who work for big tech companies your metas, your Google's. They really staffed up over the last few years and they snapped up a lot of good, expensive talent and now those people are flooding on the market. But then, where the jobs are, and also you had your people going into VC backed startups there's a lot of interesting work going on out there. That money is dried up so that population pulls, also feeding out into the, into the candidate pool.

Sioux Logan: 12:50

Well, a lot of those people don't necessarily want to go work for, let's say, a met life or a JP Morgan. They want maybe a tech company or and I feel like we're in this place where you go to LinkedIn and you do scroll and you see the green circles and you see so many people saying I've been, I've sent out a hundred and fifty Applications, I've had no interviews. There is a lot of that. But there's also this shift where I think companies are starting to realize Okay, I need to be a little more open to who I'm hiring.

Sioux Logan: 13:21

I used to say that, like hires, like financial services companies hire finance people out of financial services. Insurance companies hire people out of a chair. They like that because they like the domain knowledge right, so they love that. We're coming into a market where I feel like, if we're going to make that that leveling of Candidate to job opening, we have to be more open-minded. Our clients have to be a little bit more open-minded. Okay, that guy's out of Google. He might do extremely well a JP Morgan. He might be a great fit from the past. I didn't want to look at that guy because he's only a tech company guy. So I think we're coming to the next six months, in my opinion, are going to be a I I don't know a reckoning of Candidates into what jobs are out there and I don't think that's a bad thing.

Pete Newsome: 14:14

No, it's, it's not. It's not. I don't think it's bad either. I think it's uncertain and and hard to plan, and that's that's where I think you know, individuals are struggling, companies are struggling, both Companies like ours who are doing the staffing, but also our clients are trying to read the tea leaves, whether it's what they can expect from interest rates and expect the election and all that's surrounding that. I mean this is, you know, global war is going on. I mean there are so many things to Wonder and worry about right now. Unfortunately, that means you know, indecision a lot, and that's what. That's what that's bad for us, right? We don't want that.

Pete Newsome: 14:55

We want you confidence in the market, so it seems to be trending right. Some of the numbers are good. I look at the employment data constantly, but right now it seems to be getting a little bit better, albeit slowly. Unemployment still large. Inflation is still a big problem. That's not, I don't think, is going to go away anytime soon. So I think our clients are going to everyone's going to need to start increasing salaries more. Are you seeing that up in New York yet? Are you seeing prices or salaries rates going up yet?

Sioux Logan: 15:29

No, I'm not. I you know and I can give you historical. I have my own historical anecdotal evidence in my brain. So it was a terrible year in New York that lasted into two. It started in 08,. 09 was terrible. 2010 was bad. By midway through 2011, we had a massive job swap in New York city and all the people in financial services who had not been bonus for a couple of years because the market was terrible. People lost jobs, whatever. There was a massive job swap. People moved all over industries, but that, if you think about it, that's two years out from the bottom of the market. We're not there yet and if history tells us anything, we're not there yet. So I think 2024 is not going to necessarily be a great year for us.

Pete Newsome: 16:21

Well, you were at the same conference. I was back in November, where we heard a well-known economist speaking about the year and said that it's. His prediction was that things weren't going to pick back up until the very end of the year, and I think the conference was in November. He said about a year from now. So we're still.

Sioux Logan: 16:39

We still have a long road ahead and yeah, yeah, but I want to ask in this can we go back to the salary thing for a second? So are you feeling like salaries dipped in the last year and so you're waiting for it to come back?

Pete Newsome: 16:53

I think there's a normalization that's going on right now and that's a struggle because every company is looking considers that to be something different for their situation. So post COVID, we saw a lot of unnatural hiring big salaries, limitless flexibility on working conditions, work wherever you want.

Pete Newsome: 17:12

We're happy to have anyone that we can. We saw it in the recruiting space. We saw it in technical jobs alike. It almost, they almost mirrored each other. Because there was so much pent up demand, companies were doing whatever they had to do, and now we've seen the pendulum swing back, which happens, and so now everyone's treating it differently. Who's making employees work from home come back to the office and who's not? Who's paying a higher salaries and who's not? And so, as you know, of course, supply and demand ultimately will drive everything, and that's what I think is normalizing right now. I think, yeah, the return to office policy. I don't know, but there's gonna be. The companies that are more flexible are going to have a bigger candidate pool. The companies that pay more are going to have a bigger candidate pool. They just have to acknowledge it. That's what we haven't caught up to yet.

Sioux Logan: 18:09

And I think normalization is the exact word, that's the correct word for this. I don't see that. So I think that the candidate pool is now just starting to realize that they can't make endless demands, like I think that in the last couple of months has just happened and they're not expecting the moon on salaries anymore, and I don't feel like my clients have dropped their salaries and rates. I definitely don't see that. I see that they're hanging tight where they were, but they have more candidates available to them and candidates are a little bit more reasonable. They're like oh yeah, I'll work for that.

Pete Newsome: 18:47

And that's hard, though, to go backwards. We don't expect to do that in our professional career. I had a great conversation with a very experienced recruiter a couple of days ago and she had gone to jump for just a giant salary at one of the tech companies. And she came back and now is real, I have to go back to normal. Like her feet are back on the ground, but that's hard, I mean, and the number she was telling me almost hard to believe. I mean, I believe them because we saw it happening, but almost 100% increase from what she had been making pre COVID, and now it's coming back to normal. So that's the hard part, because when you start making a lot more money, you don't wanna go backwards.

Sioux Logan: 19:31

None of us. Yeah, that's a stark reality. I'll paint a picture here. I'll differentiate, that is for sure. What's going on in recruiting In technology land. It's not quite as harsh for technical candidates, for recruiters very painful right now. We lost a recruiter, pete, in July of last year and if it had been the year before and I posted a job on LinkedIn, I would have had two applications, neither of which would have been right. We had 1200 applications in 48 hours and we work remote. My team is mainly remote, so we got 1200, it was posted as remote. We got 1200 applications in 48 hours for a remote recruiting job.

Pete Newsome: 20:13

That's how much has changed. Let's talk about that for a minute. If you can.

Pete Newsome: 20:17

How you recruit today, how anyone recruits today, needs to shift for that reason. What's your take on the I call it the one click apply disaster that's happened out there. Where it's so easy to it, doesn't matter how thorough or detailed your job description is, how many requirements you put on, people are going to apply right and there's career coaches out there saying apply, apply, apply. I get it. I understand why, but it's making a bad source. What's your take on all of that? Is there a way to solve it?

Sioux Logan: 20:51

Your recruiters is second brain. So what happens as recruiters if you go in? You come in in the morning and there's 600 resumes that came in overnight. You're going to blink through, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do and you're going to get your first 20, you're going to discard 100, 200 out of the first 300, but you're only going to make it partway through those problems. So it's problematic because resume number 422 could be the perfect one out there and you're not going to see it because you know, and we can take this down with the line of artificial intelligence and we do we use all these tools that highlight keywords to us and all that stuff. But it is very problematic. The volume because of the one click application, the volume we get is enormously problematic and that could lead me down a whole conversation to talk about fake resumes and all that also nonsense that we have to plow through when you're looking through resumes and comparing against LinkedIn profiles and all that stuff. It's the volume is very difficult and it's very fatiguing to recruiter.

Pete Newsome: 22:02

It almost so I never. We didn't used to run ads years ago. This is old school me coming out, where the only way you could run ads was to do it in the newspaper.

Pete Newsome: 22:14

They're fast in I don't know if you ever see weekly that's what we started using back you know contract employment weekly where you had to have your hat in by Thursday at noon or whatever it was and that it would come out on Monday in the mail and it was literally a magazine kind of looking book of just jobs that were available right In the technical space at that time this was called the engineering world back then and I learned to recruit by being proactive and because I didn't know where the next resume was going to come from, and I think that made me a better recruiter than I would be today, by having a what seems like a limitless supply of candidates but but like you hit my favorite subject, Pete Newsom.

Pete Newsome: 22:59

Oh really.

Sioux Logan: 23:00

You hit my favorite subject. I'm serious, it's. You just touched on my favorite subject. So I started out as a technical recruiter in 1997. We had a DOS blue screen and someone had typed in there COBOL, cics, all these technical terms. We had the ugliest monitor and all this no good gooey, any of that stuff, and we would sit there and we would dial and we had no idea. We couldn't see a resume. There were no pretty pictures, there was no anything about people, it was simply the most flat. And it made me a great recruiter because you didn't know and you know what you got creative and I it was. I started recruiting right before Y2K and for those who are young or watching this, it doesn't mean a fashion line, it doesn't mean a type of clothing, it was actually digits in the mainframe computer.

Sioux Logan: 23:49

I asked my 14 year old the other day if she knew what Y2K was and that follow up boys version of Billie Joel's song.

Pete Newsome: 23:56

We didn't know Right, yeah, she's like, do you?

Sioux Logan: 23:58

know Y2K. She's like a clothing. I know I was like good answer, that's true, but anyway, but we, we had a very good habits because we had to. There was a piece of recruiting. That's faith. And and it's the faith to go into a database and call age, age or aging resumes Right. That's one of the things that makes it incredibly good recruiter. I don't care what year it is, whether it's 1997 or 2024.

Sioux Logan: 24:26

Great recruiting habits are not just waiting to see what comes in off a job post. But I had a meeting with my recruiters this morning and I said we have three main tools by which we technical recruit. We do our recruiting. One is our database, which is 17 years worth of proprietary data. It is resumes that we have screened. We don't have tools that just punt all kinds of resumes from job boards into our database. Ours is a hundred thousand people curated over 17 years and, yeah, some of the emails will be old, some of the phone numbers will be old, but that's a.

Sioux Logan: 25:02

Your predecessors here at Redstream did that homework for you and it's proprietary and it's a great place. But they particularly like to see LinkedIn and oh, and you know what I say too, with Pete you can go to LinkedIn and you can look when nobody by law has to have, let's say, jira or whatever Salesforce on their LinkedIn profile, but our recruiters today they want to see those right on it or they're not calling them and they've lost that element of faith where you have to have just some, you know, just to spend your due to. Maybe faith's not the right word, but you have to suspend your disbelief. You have to just go into a phone call not really knowing. You can't see every last detail of the person's experience.

Sioux Logan: 25:50

We didn't have that years ago and it made us be curious. It made us make phone calls that we might not have made otherwise and you find really good talent that way. So you know, our tools are our databases, they are LinkedIn for sure. When you go and you we all have LinkedIn recruiter licenses and then we have the job post tools. You post a job on LinkedIn, you post it on deed. You get some good stuff that comes in off of it but you got a lot of junk too.

Pete Newsome: 26:17

But I think yeah. For the first 10 years Four Corner was in business, I don't think we posted jobs other than pipeline positions that we just had often, you know, openings for Because I didn't post jobs, because I didn't have time to fill them that way, right.

Pete Newsome: 26:37

It sounds convenient on the surface. You post a job, applicants come to you. How wonderful is that? Right Uber Eats right to your doorstep. If I, you know, I've used Uber Eats enough to know that it's wrong a lot. My 18 year old, my high school senior, ordered something on Saturday night and they left it in our mailbox. Then he did it for 20 minutes later and we kind of laughed about it because they said they left it in a safe space, right, like, I guess? Like safe.

Sioux Logan: 27:02

That's safe.

Pete Newsome: 27:03

Yeah safe.

Sioux Logan: 27:04

The neighbors aren't taking it right.

Pete Newsome: 27:05

That's safe. Safe for bugs? Not at all. But Henry the dog. Right, that's right, that's right. But if you go to the store, you see what you want on the shelf, you grab it. You're going to get it accurate 100% of the time, and so I never thought that posting ads. We used to make fun of companies that would post ads.

Pete Newsome: 27:26

I would be like they post ads, why would you want to use them? That's not how we recruit. We recruit proactively, and one of the way you learn to recruit the way I learned to recruit is because you didn't know where that next resume was coming from, so you had to value that resume to a different degree. So I'd say, okay, here's Sue Logan's resume, and it only appears that Sue has 50% of the qualifications. But I'm not going to assume she doesn't have the other 50%. I'm going to talk to Sue and ask, because, even if you don't, you're the kind of person who knows people who do, and if you're not the right fit for this job.

Pete Newsome: 28:01

I've invested time in you, where now I'll know what is the right fit for you and I'll know when to call you. Next To me, that's 101.

Sioux Logan: 28:10

Yeah, it is.

Pete Newsome: 28:11

I don't think that happens very often these days.

Sioux Logan: 28:14

Well you're again. This is my favorite subject because I just did an analysis last week of where all our placements from 2023 came from and I can see by years in the business how my recruiters stack out with that, how where their placements come from, and my longest running recruiters referrals because they use the database. They send out a bunch of emails to people that we know that we've interacted with in the past. Some of those people come back to us and are viable candidates and sometimes they pass them on to their friends and you get referrals, you get word of mouth, and then my most junior recruiters it's a lot of it is waiting to see what comes in off the post, or waiting for stuff in off a job post, or simply LinkedIn searching where they can see everything that they think they can see. Not foolproof.

Pete Newsome: 29:08

Do you think that? Because I would say the same, but what you just described is very similar to my experience in the team at Four Corner. I don't know that. Why do you think the team doesn't trust the database? Your internal database is much because, for exactly what you described a few minutes ago, the notes are in there from the past. That's why we use an applicant tracking system. If you're a third party recruiter, it's not like a corporate entity uses an ATS right when. That's more about funneling and scheduling and checking boxes for legal purposes all of the things that the corporate, the talent acquisition team, has to worry about. For us, it's more about history and notes and being able to go back to that hot list of skill sets so we don't have to start from scratch every time. You said it perfectly you want candidates who you already know. That's the benefit of the database If you use it correctly. Even though Pete may not know the candidate directly, sue knows the candidate. I know them by association. That's the benefit.

Sioux Logan: 30:13

I had a conversation. We're recruiting for a scrum master right now for one of our media clients. I told our recruiting team last week in our applicant tracking system we have a lot of scrum masters from about four years ago. We, four or five years ago, we did a lot of work for one of our clients, one of my best recruiters. If you go and you look at scrum masters under his name, he's no longer working for us but you look for his candidates who are scrum masters, you're going to find stellar people because you have an incredible eye for it.

Sioux Logan: 30:43

This is our proprietary knowledge. I think it's very simple. I think people today love their social media and they love nothing more than to be able to flip through. It says they're open to work in not necessarily the green circle, but in their LinkedIn profile. If it says they're open to work and it changed two weeks ago to open to work and they can see their picture and they can see where they've been working and they don't like to have that suspending your disbelief and going, okay, this resume is three years old, I can't see what they've been doing. They want to see what they've been doing recently. Good recruiting is not that. Good recruiting is having some faith that those candidates that we've engaged with in the past are worthwhile. But it's really difficult to get newer recruiters to see that because they love to just go to LinkedIn and see.

Pete Newsome: 31:35

You said it earlier, being curious is necessary.

Pete Newsome: 31:41

This is an interesting conversation.

Pete Newsome: 31:43

It's a little bit different direction than I think we thought we'd go today, but it's so necessary because to make third-party recruiters better, to make staffing recruiters better, they really need to understand that what seems quick on the surface with applications right, a thousand applicants great, I should definitely find someone in there.

Pete Newsome: 32:06

That's like trying to find the needle in a haystack, versus taking a more targeted approach and talking to the people who know that's what's lost as much as anything else, where, if I have a text relationship with you that may be efficient but it's not going to be deep, in order to ask you for a referral or in order to expect you to give me a referral, I can ask at any time, right. In order to expect you to give me one, I have to invest some time in you first. I believe that and I think you probably do too that I'm going to get to know you and then, if we conclude collectively that you're not a good fit for the job, of course I'm going to ask you for a referral, right? Why wouldn't I? I'd be crazy not to.

Sioux Logan: 32:46

It's not a transactional business and I also you touched on a really interesting thing about texting. One of the other old school behaviors is the phone call, and I'm adamant with my recruiters. You can never discuss money with candidates on a text because it's not a discussion. You can't understand what they're really striving for if you don't have that conversation. You can't shoot them a text and say where are you at with other jobs you're interviewing for? Are you close on any offers and interviews? They're going to just say no, you need to have conversations.

Sioux Logan: 33:21

We're very very good at what we do, and we're good at what we do because we have conversations with people. It's the only way. It's the most old school, but man do I love the phone, pete.

Pete Newsome: 33:32

I love the phone. It's so effective. I mean, one of the things that I miss about working in the office was being able to hear just half the conversation with new recruiters and you can just tell once you hone your radar for this. You can tell how a conversation is going just by where the pauses are, the tone, the inflection, the answer to a question is there a pause or does it come openly and directly Right? You have to hone it, it's not a natural instinct. Some people pick it up better than others. This is something I honed over years and years and thousands and thousands of conversations where I'm sure, like me, you could hear 30 seconds of a call and know whether a candidate is interested, is going to bail, is whatever. You know. All you need right.

Sioux Logan: 34:29

I do.

Pete Newsome: 34:30

How can you keep I do? Is there any way to do that now that we're virtual?

Sioux Logan: 34:36

Well, one of the nice things about choosing to go on camera with people too, is you can really see the reaction. That's also a nice thing, but if you're just communicating via email and text with your candidates, it's not enough. It's not going to get you what you need.

Pete Newsome: 34:51

And I'm glad you said that, because that's something I'm going to bookmark, because that's important, that's a quote, right, that's what we need. So what advice, then, would you give to your new recruiter today? Let's talk about that a little bit, because we're sharing some of these things and I want to make this our episode, now that we're going to focus on where Hello Б only new recruiter, if you're starting out, what are the core things that a young recruiter, someone new to the space, really needs to know that can help them be better than their peers right now?

Sioux Logan: 35:27

I have such a laundry list. Let me think first. Number one is you need to listen to more experienced recruiters on the phone because you need to learn how they ask questions with nuance. Like in New York, we can't ask salaries, we can't ask what you're currently making. By law we can't ask that. It's like that in a lot of places in the country.

Sioux Logan: 35:49

So we're working on a role right now where we want to ascertain if people are working on a base salary plus bonus, and so I might, with my years of experience, say to you I'm going to ask you a couple of questions about compensation. Let me state here that I'm not asking you what you're currently making. I'm going to ask you what is your target base salary and are you bonus eligible? That's language. That's number one, legal. Number two correct. Number three non-intimidating it's what's your target base salary? And in your next role this role is not bonus eligible Is the role you're in now, is it currently bonus eligible? So we need to understand how we work with somebody to construct with their new employer a compensation package that works. But you don't know how to ask those questions if you don't know anything about compensation. So that's number one spending time with more experienced recruiters to learn language about around that.

Sioux Logan: 36:55

Or when you're talking about consulting I am looking for $80 an hour. The candidate says I'm looking for $80 an hour and you say, ok, are you at all flexible on that? My first boss in the industry taught me to say are you flexible? If I get a job that's only going to pay $70 an hour, should I call you for that? And now you start to understand where they are in their continuum of what's important on compensation. Well, I might. If it's close to home, maybe I'll work for $70 an hour. Then you start eliciting information from them. So number one for me would be sitting with people with more experience.

Sioux Logan: 37:29

Number two learn to use your applicant tracking system. Going back to the conversation we had a little while ago, your applicant tracking system has notes on candidates that might have been in there for 10 years. Flip back and look at them. What happened with it? You saw? You can see. Our app, ats, has what jobs they were submitted to in the past. Zip down, have a look. Ok, we've worked with them five different times in the last six years. That might be a good candidate to re-look at. So that's number two. Number three in technology learn what a fake resume looks like. Big one, learn what it looks like. Go into LinkedIn, pull up, see what your their profile was created. Was it in 2023? Probably not, and they have 16 years of experience. Probably not for real. Should probably pass on that person. Have a secret methodology. Talk to you about if you have time.

Pete Newsome: 38:25

OK, won't be secret if you share it.

Sioux Logan: 38:27

It's not going to be secret, but I'm going to put this out into recruiter land.

Pete Newsome: 38:31

OK.

Sioux Logan: 38:32

You know, malcolm Gladwell, the writer.

Pete Newsome: 38:35

Yeah, so every read his book, because he has books behind him, right behind you in the shelves.

Sioux Logan: 38:39

Did you ever read Blink?

Pete Newsome: 38:40

I did yes.

Sioux Logan: 38:41

So Blink came out Pete the year that I started Redstream and Blink was a very pivotal book for me and I teach my recruiters to Blink at resumes. You know we go back to earlier talking about looking through 1,100 resumes. Recruiters' brains get fatigued very quickly because they want to look at them and they want to particularly newer recruiters they need to read all the content.

Pete Newsome: 39:10

Right, their brains are going.

Sioux Logan: 39:12

I don't understand any of that. I'm not technical. I must read every line of it. I don't read resumes when I'm processing them, so Gladwell's concept of Blink is the best.

Sioux Logan: 39:24

Decision makers are people who hone their ability to look at something and extract information.

Sioux Logan: 39:31

That's really important, and what I teach my recruiters to do is I Blink at it, I look at their job and so, OK, let me preface it. I'm looking for a technical writer with a solid amount of experience I don't like to talk years of experience, but a solid amount of experience who they preferably have worked on AI projects and they interface with developers, product owners, technical people. That's what I'm going into looking at these resumes for, You're going to look at the job title, the company name and the dates the job title, the company name and the dates. Job title, company name, dates, boom. Maybe their education is relevant to whatever. But if you do that Blink, you're quick to see OK, oh wait, that person's actually only been a technical writer for six months, but all the jobs before were teaching pre-K, right, I mean. And then how the question becomes how did you get to be a technical writer and is that person going to have, with six months of experience, going to have enough experience to work for your client.

Sioux Logan: 40:36

The answer is no, but an inexperienced recruiter is going to go oh wow, but this person actually has AI. They have AI, they were a tech writer with AI, so they're right, whereas they're not seeing the whole picture. They're not seeing it. So it's a technique that I teach my recruiters you can ingest and process a lot more information in a lot shorter time than you think you can. A lot of very useful information if you hone that Blink skill.

Pete Newsome: 41:06

I love it. That's great, and you know what's so great about it, sue, and I'm going to use this, if you don't mind, or for job seekers as well, because I think that is who needs to know that. That is how a good recruiter looks at a resume. I've never explained it that way. You have that's such a great way to look at it. But the premise is the same. I talk about reading headlines. You're in a checkout line at the grocery store and you see People Magazine or whatever the magazines are today. I'm probably dating myself. I don't even know if people still publish as a brand.

Sioux Logan: 41:37

I think it does.

Pete Newsome: 41:37

They put the big headlines because they want to grab your attention. So the message I always give the candidates is make it easy for the recruiter to know who you are and what you do, and if you create a resume with that in mind, all the other garbage that you see is really irrelevant, because that is how a good recruiter looks at a resume and as much as anything else. That's all the time you have to look at a resume. You can't you don't read someone's paragraph of what they you know their life story or their education, you may?

Pete Newsome: 42:09

I mean once you're out of school for some short period of time, right? Who cares? There's no cares, right? But you look at the highlights and that's what you just described. I love it.

Sioux Logan: 42:19

But that is such good advice. I advise candidates the very same thing. When I'm working with candidates who are and I get referred a lot of people and I'll go through their resume and I said to somebody very recently I'm bogged down, I can't read it, I can't process it. We need to reformat your resume because it's so text heavy that I don't know what you do.

Sioux Logan: 42:39

And if I don't know what you do, boom you know one of the smartest people I know but boom, it goes in the delete file because I can't process it. And we get a lot of heat for we being people in our profession. We get a lot of heat for not being courteous and respectful and not all these things. The volume of information we process in a single week is very high and, like you said before, if you post a job, you get thousands of resumes and you can't do justice to it all and so and that's what people don't realize.

Pete Newsome: 43:14

And this sounds harsh. This is going to sound harsh. We're not paid for that right. We're paid on behalf of clients on, nearly in every case, on a contingency basis, meaning we're working for free until we deliver the candidate they're going to hire.

Pete Newsome: 43:32

One candidate, which means and this is the harsh part every moment we spend on every other candidate is a waste of time. Now we think bigger, we think farther ahead than that. But it's not our job. We don't find jobs for people. We find people for jobs, and I think people who aren't familiar with our industry anyone listening to this, hopefully is that that's how we operate. But I think a lot of candidates don't realize that. They think well, the recruiter is there to help me only to the degree that it helps himself. And does that sound kind of crude and crass? Yeah, maybe, but it is a reality of the industry that we're in. Or you can hire a career coach, and I don't. That's not necessary for many people, but it is an option to pay someone to give you attention. That's not the job of a third party recruiter. Like our staffing recruiter, we're working on our clients' behalf.

Sioux Logan: 44:27

Yeah. Yeah, I don't think it's harsh because I come from the same side of the business as you. If I looked at everything that came through and spoke to every single person, I wouldn't have a business.

Pete Newsome: 44:38

Yeah, if one of your recruiters tried to go through a thousand resumes for one job, you would A you'd lose a job right to your competitor or your client would get tired of waiting. Very quickly you would fail and that's a. It's frustrating because I know how the job seekers perceive it, because we spend a lot of time thinking about them too, but it's not ours to fix right. We don't have the ability to fix that.

Sioux Logan: 45:07

No, and I'll tell you from a timing perspective that that was an interesting comment from you we are done. If we don't come up with candidates within two days for a consulting job, we're shot out for it. We're really. I mean, it's fast moving. They're off and running with people from our competitors. We've got about two days. And then if it's an FTE role, direct hire role that you're trying to fill, you're done in seven days probably. Yes, seven, and that's probably five business days of calendar week. But five business days If you don't have candidates in five business days, it's not going to happen.

Pete Newsome: 45:43

Yeah, Right, those numbers are perfect. I'd use the same ones. And isn't it interesting how you and I have talked about quite a few things in the past 45 minutes that we've never talked about before, despite, because most of the time we're together, we're talking together in a group setting and it's more high level. But it's interesting how you started recruiting in New York. I started in Florida. Different kind of businesses, different times. We weren't that far apart year-wise I started in 93. So you were just a few years later. But it's scary almost how similar our thinking is as far as right and true things that work, because that's what works. And I suspect if we went down the line and talked about things like references and referrals, we would have very similar perspective and probably frustration that it's not easy to get buy-in from our teams, even though, which is not really what we're talking about right now. But I know these things would be tried and true, but it's hard to convince someone who is used to instant gratification, right.

Sioux Logan: 46:49

Yes, yes.

Pete Newsome: 46:51

You have to invest the time in the individual, and I guess what we're really seeing is the right individuals. Yes, the hard to find they are indeed Okay. Well, I want to do this. I promised that we wouldn't be on that long and we're already at almost 50 minutes and we're not even in connection with all the things we're going to talk about. Would you be willing to come back and continue this talk?

Sioux Logan: 47:15

I'd love to. This is so much fun.

Pete Newsome: 47:17

This is Well. It's crazy how fast the time can go, isn't it?

Sioux Logan: 47:21

Yes, I didn't realize we were talking that long.

Pete Newsome: 47:23

I am. I try to keep an eye on it. So I don't If I say we're only going to keep you for this long. I want to try to adhere to it, but this has been great. And so if you've listened to this long and you're a new recruiter or you're someone who hasn't really listened to what we'll just call some old, you know school tried and true ways of doing things, I hope you've taken notes and we'll put it in our show notes and we'll put the transcript out there, because I know how hard it has been for someone to go out on their own which Sioux did in the most competitive market in the world. I'm in Orlando, florida. You are in literally the most competitive market in the world, in Manhattan, and succeeded for a long time. So you're listening to someone who really knows their stuff and I've witnessed that firsthand for a number of years. So this has been absolute gold. Thank you so much for your time today.

Sioux Logan: 48:16

You're welcome. This was great, Pete. I'll talk to you soon.

Pete Newsome: 48:19

All right, thanks for listening everyone. We'll be back soon. I'm going to make Sioux come back, so we'll see you again.

Sioux Logan: 48:26

Thanks, Pete.