Isaac Cheifetz - Applying Lean Methodology to Talent Acquisition
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Welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast, your direct source for the latest trends from experts inside and outside the world of human resources.

Listen as we explore the impact that compensation strategy, data, and people analytics can have on your organization. This podcast is sponsored by Salary.com, your source for data, technology, and consulting for compensation and beyond. Now, here are your hosts, David Teretsky and Dwight Brown. Hello and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I'm your host, David Teretsky, alongside my co-host, best friend, and partner who jumps off of ridges, Dwight Brown.

Ridges, not bridges. I was going to say, I don't jump off bridges. Only mountains, ridges. Yeah. By the way, from salary.com. From salary.com. Yeah. But it's not salary.com sponsored jumping. No, thank goodness. Although, I don't know. Right. Exactly. And you heard the voice of Isaac Heifetz. Isaac, how are you?

I'm very well. It's great to see you two again. And it's great to have you on. Isaac, tell us a little bit about you. Well, I, like you, I'm a New York born and bred. I spent, let's see, undergrad in history, which I didn't know what to do with. Master's in organizational psych, which I didn't know what to do with.

I worked as a comp analyst for three years while I was figuring it out. This is all back in New York. Jumped to a search firm in the very late 80s that did nothing but AI, if you could believe it. So I was immersed in that world back then. Oh, in 1980 there was AI? Yeah.

It is very late 80s. Everyone thinks it's new. No, I was placing ML researchers and list programmers in that era when most people worked on the internet. As a matter of fact, we were on the internet, but the web did not exist yet. So we would get resumes from people at Oracle or Sun, but we would have to FTP them.

- Mm, lovely. - I'm sure. - Yeah. - Lovely. - And I came out to move to Minneapolis after a summer back country in Alaska and have been here ever since. My career has really been, I've been an executive recruiter two thirds, three quarters of my career. The other third, various kinds of consulting, mostly talent acquisition, organizational design, operating models,

I'm not a technologist, but I know more about data than your average bear. And even those smart bears that can catch the salmon, you know. I saw those in Alaska. And these days, I basically do two things. I do retained executive search, particularly for roles that are evolving new roles where companies want data.

to hire someone with classic blue-chip business experience, but who are also sophisticated about the new technologies, not as technologists, but rather in terms of how to monetize the spend on whether it's AI or digital, et cetera, et cetera. That's a novel concept, Isaac, actually having to have an ROI for it. Well, yes. Well, I mean, this stuff interests me, and I won't...

I was always very interested in that topic going way back. It's a distraction from what we're talking about today, but it's interesting. And the other thing I do these days is I have an offering called Hiring as a Service where I basically embed myself in companies on a long-term basis to be available as needed to help them turbocharge the quality...

Basically, to hire people better, faster, and stay longer. And the model we'll talk about today is a piece of that puzzle. So you're the $6 million recruiter, bastard. I'm more Oscar Goldman, but I'll take it.

And there's a certain portion of our audience who has no idea what we're talking about. If you don't know who Johnny Carson was, there's no way you know. Oscar Goldman was the Six Million Dollar Man's boss. Yes, he was.

He was a great straight man to all the jokes. So, Isaac, what's one fun thing that no one knows about you? Well, friends know it because I can't resist telling the story. But the summer after Alaska, I was solo hiking in the Montana Rockies.

And I saw it was in the late spring and I saw a bear on a ridge over me. And I wasn't really afraid, a grizzly bear. And I wasn't really afraid because I'd seen lots of bears in Alaska. I knew how to deal with it. And one of the things you're supposed to do is just walk along and make a lot of noise so you don't surprise them. So I'm walking along saying, hey, bear, hey, bear.

And suddenly in front, and I'm walking up a steep incline with probably a 50-pound pack on my back. And suddenly there's a young bull moose standing right in front of me, looking dumb, dumb as can be. And, you know, he wasn't a giant. He was a six-foot moose, not a seven-foot moose. But, you know, he was big enough.

And I, I'd been walking along by myself. I'm a little spaced out, just going, Hey bear. Hey bear. So I look at the moose and I said, Hey moose. And he just stared at me. And I, so I thought I had to up the ante. So I sort of did my best Rocky imitation. And I said, yo moose.

charged me because I guess that sounded pretty impressive. And he charged me from 10 yards away and he was so fast. And so, you know, they look like they're on stilts. They're so nimble, especially on, uh, inclines. He was on top of me in, in three seconds. Fortunately, um, I was standing next to a big tree. So I just took one step behind the tree. He flashed by me down the hill. I could have paid him on the head. I didn't, uh,

And he goes about 100 feet down the hill, and I'm standing there with adrenaline shooting on my ears. And I don't know what to do, because I know if I keep going up and he comes after me, he'll be on me again in seconds. But...

He's just chewing on shrubbery, and every few seconds, he lazily sort of does the 180 with his head like another ancient reference, Linda Blair in The Exorcist. And I realized he doesn't care anymore. He made his point. He got rid of the testosterone in his head.

And I kept hiking and I felt really safe for the rest of the trip because I felt statistically the odds of being attacked by both a moose and a bear on the same trip were really low. So that gave me some hope. But when I got home and told friends about it, I got a lot of grief for, you know, inciting a moose to attack. Inciting a moose. Did you get a ticket for inciting a moose? No, no, no. There were no gay people around. I got away with it. Okay.

I mean, it's not like you went out and kicked it or anything. Right. Nor did you make an arrest. That's for the courts to decide, Dwight. No, I didn't. I didn't kick the moose. A jury of my peers will find me innocent, I swear. Yeah. What's that phrase? Don't poke the skunk? It's...

I thought it was don't poke the bear. Don't pretend you're Rocky when talking to a moose. I'm just picturing you walking down this trail going, hey bear, hey bear, moose. The bear looked at you and went, okay, I'm sorry. What genre are we in now? What are we trying to do? I'm getting in the head of the bear trying to say, and the bear is a director saying,

What are you doing, Isaac? Isaac, I want one scene here. One scene. Give me one character. David, I can't lie to you. I respect you too much. It wouldn't make the top 20 list of stupid things I've done in my life. So I think we should turn it aside and move forward. Okay. All right. Well, that is one of the more unique...

one fun things that we've heard in a long time. It is. It's so I think you're up there for the nomination for the Oscar on that one. So you get a slow clap for me. That was good. And transitioning now to talk about our topic and our topic is going to be fascinating, which is applying lean methodology to talent acquisition. So

And so, question Isaac. What's wrong with talent acquisition? Is it really broken? I hear from a lot of people. I would say that if I think about the three constituencies, well, maybe three or four. I mean, who are the constituencies for talent acquisition? They're the hiring managers. They're the job seekers. They're the CEOs. Right.

And there's the talent acquisition folks in HR. I mean, maybe there are others. I don't know. I guess legal comes in if you do something really awful, but normally not. And yeah, I hear from lots of folks that they're just frustrated with each one in their own way. The candidates are frustrated when they apply over and over online for jobs that they're perfect for and don't hear back. The...

The folks in HR talent acquisition are frustrated with often having internal business clients who don't take the process seriously enough. The CEOs are frustrated that this is that they're just not seeing the

the, uh, the consistency of quality results that they would like to see that they hold other functions up to. So yeah, I, I'm not, I'm not saying it's a radically broke. Oh, and the last thing I'll put in there is I often give it, talk to executive transition groups and I'll often say, how many of you found your job at the executive level through online application?

And I know this sounds crazy. I've yet to get one. Yeah. Which is mind-blowing. I think you've seen, you mentioned social media. I think you see the stories on LinkedIn about people getting frustrated, not just by being ghosted, but by actually getting through a process and then not hearing back. And there are just so many stories about the entirety of the value chain for recruiting that is...

just substantially broken. And we've actually had on the program a few talent acquisition experts who talk about how the process has evolved and whatnot. I think one of the tenets of the process, though, is you have a supply of people and you have a demand for talent. And the supply of people has been gigantic. People not only switching roles, but people who are out of work looking for a specific role. Yes.

And also you have those internal people who are looking for new pathways who are frustrated because they haven't seen growth in their roles. So to me, one of the key underpinnings of the process is, I think, because of the internet, there are a lot more candidates now.

There are, there's only a few roles and trying to stick the 150, maybe 200,000 pounds of supply into that, you know, eight ounce bag of, of demand is, is a very, very key challenge.

And you think about the in between between those, you know, you're and that's that's that brokenness is it's like two groups sitting on opposite banks of a river without a bridge trying to get to each other and.

Jump in the water and the water just sweeps you away. You never make it to the other side. And it's cold. Exactly. Especially where Isaac is. I have people, yes, I'm in, I'm outside Minneapolis and it was five below yesterday. It's about 25 now and it feels spring-like. But, uh,

I remember once talking to somebody a couple of years ago, and he told me proudly that, oh, I'm doing a really good job on my job search. I'm applying to jobs online 40 hours a week. And I quoted to him the late, great UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden, who used to distinguish between activity and accomplishment. And I said, you know, I said, yeah.

It is completely useless to apply online to jobs that you are not a great fit for. It is a bad use of time because you're now competing, at least if you're a great fit, you're competing with some finite number of people who are a great fit. If you're a loose fit or not a fit at all, you're now competing with tens of thousands of people who are doing the same mindless thing you are.

So I'm a much bigger advocate for, I call it peer networking, for simply going across your network and saying, hey, let's catch up for 20 minutes and not talk about job search. At the very end, say, hey, if you know of anything, because you'll have a set, and if you do, you can have a handful of those a day, and over the course of months, you'll really stir up your network. I just think that people, they get to a desperation point

Because they see so many other people out of work. Yes. And Isaac, I've been there too, where you get to a point where you say, I've tried to, I've tried my quote unquote best because I'm an expert in a field to try and get a role in that field.

But it seems like I'm competing against myself more than anything else because I don't get anything back. I don't get any feedback. And I get ghosted more often than not. I hear that from a lot of people who have absolutely blue-chip backgrounds. And honestly, it makes them a little crazy at a certain point. Not irrevocably, but it's hard, yeah.

Especially the last year or so, because the last two years, it was both kind of a down economy and there was in this era, this notion that AI would replace some large percent of jobs, which it hasn't yet, which it hasn't. And I think we probably won't, but at least in the short to medium term. But it really, I think there's reason to think that 25, well, that there'll be a lot more hiring just because there was a lot that was...

Where companies were resisting hiring in this two-year period for those reasons.

When you think about the impact, number one, you have the impact on the candidate. Number two, you have the impact on the hiring company. But when you look at it from the big picture perspective, there's a big contingent of people who are unemployed out there who have given up on the hiring process. They've done it for so long and been so discouraged that they've stopped looking for a job. And so you actually have this broader economic impact.

that goes with this. I think a lot of people think, well, it's a process problem within a company. Well, it is very much so, but there's a bigger component that goes with it too. Big time. And that, I mean, that's probably ultimately, I mean, that's a more strategic conversation than the one we're having here today, I think. And it's ultimately a more important one. And it's probably above my pay grade.

But, uh, but yeah, you should apply to that role then Isaac. Yes. See if you can get it. And,

And let us know.

These people are not going to be unemployed in the long term because what they're doing is so central to the future of the economy. So that, you know, when people, when companies I work with have massive layoffs, I try to help. But I, the human component of, oh, what will this person do next is just isn't the same. That's a luxury I have just because I'm at home.

I'm really at the cutting edge of where things are now and where they want to be. Like what you hear so far? Make sure you never miss a show by clicking subscribe. This podcast is made possible by Salary.com. Now back to the show. So Isaac, let's transition to talk about, is there a solution? Can we make a change to the function that might improve the situation? Sure.

Let's talk about how do we write job descriptions.

I mentioned I was a comp analyst for three years. So I don't think I'm giving away any secrets. I think the vast majority of us, if we have a new role, if we're in the job design role and we're told to create a job description for role X, what's the first thing we do? We go to Google. We Google the title.

We scroll several dozen job descriptions that have that title, find the ones that seem well-written and closer to what we're doing. We download them.

We meet with a hiring executive and basically go through those job descriptions, circling the elements that the hiring manager wants in the role. We cobble it together. We polish it. We've got a job, a nice job description. Here's, and I used to do this forever. Here's the problem I realized at a certain point from a process standpoint is from a distance, it looks like a good job description.

But it's almost like a Frankenstein monster across the field that looks like a person. But when you get up close, they're both sticking out of his forehead because he's not actually a real person. He's a facsimile. And I think it's the same thing here. You can put together a job description that reads really fluidly for that and yet has nothing.

Anything that has to do with what you're trying to accomplish in your business is coincidental. And that's just not good enough because once you hire that person, once you hire a person to that spec, the odds that the job description is incrementally off, 10%, 25%, 40%, whatever, are pretty good.

Well, I think there's a fundamental problem, Isaac, with what a job description really is. Because work today is mainly...

Search for information. I'm being flippant, by the way. Search for information, cobble information together, and present information. For a lot of us, right? And those are our duties. I mean, some of us sell, some of us buy resources, but the job descriptions that are there are so antiquated.

They're looking at how someone works in a very old-fashioned way. Whoa, big time. Big time. Ooh, if you have a job, if you have a job that has existed by title for decades in the company, let's say a CFO. You could have a CFO and they just keep hiring against the same job description because, well, a CFO is a CFO. And for all we know, that job description was written at the end of the Korean War.

Exactly. Right. Well, that's when the last time the survey was updated. And even though thematically a CFO is the same as it was back then, in the sense it's the person who's responsible for overseeing the metrics of the company and applying it strategically. Right.

But where the sophistication of those metrics back in the day, it was gap or equivalent. Today, a CFO is half an analytics person. So, yes, that applies to same thing for sales, same marketing. Good Lord. I mean, marketing today versus 15 years ago, almost unrecognizable. I mean, I knew marketing executives in the 90s.

who were dirt ignorant about technology. They just, they didn't know and they didn't care, had nothing to do with that. Today, marketing is two-thirds analytics. Absolutely. All SEO. Digital medium. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that's what worries me, though, is that a lot of those descriptions are,

that people use today are just totally antiquated. They don't really focus on the current set of tasks, duties, and responsibilities or educational requirements. I mean, most of them still say they...

require a bachelor's degree and probably two-thirds or 75% of the people who are doing the job don't have a bachelor's degree. They probably have more insight not having one than they would if they invested the four years to get one. I couldn't agree more, but I'm going to sidestep that topic just because we could do it. No, no, no, that's a rich topic and that's very salient to what's going on today relative to higher ed, but

But we'd need hours to talk about that one. I got all day. And that's when we just lost all of our listeners. Just right there. Sorry, I was just kidding, everybody. We will close this out in 13 or 14 minutes. I promise.

But it's, I mean, it's true that the job descriptions are probably the most neglected thing. I mean, we see it all the time in our work when we're doing market pricing and companies don't have up to date job descriptions. Um,

But it makes total sense to me, Isaac, that with the process you're talking about, that would be, that's the ultimate starting point. Yeah. So give me maybe three to five minutes. I'll just do a quick dive on the process. Okay. Please. So, I mean, when I say design for quality, what is design for quality? Most continuous provement methodologies, whether it's TQM or Six Sigma or, you know, whichever variant a company uses are,

use the concept of design for quality, which is that you are making hard systemic decisions at the beginning of the process as to what, you know, based on data as to what the customer needs and what that translates into in the product. In our case here,

What is the product? Well, the product is the design job in a, you know, which presents as a job description. Your customers, I would say, are primarily your internal customers, the hiring managers, and secondarily, the candidates. Maybe not even secondarily. Yeah.

And now you might think that this is a really complicated thing to do. I've found it's really easy to do, and here's why.

All you have to do is take, you don't have to immerse yourself and become a quality guru. All you have to do is start with the funded business case. Let's assume this is a new role. Let's assume this is a director of sales for...

You're new for the attempt of your company at monetizing data. As an example, you make robots, you generate data from the factory floor. You want to anonymize that data and then sell it to customers. Well, this role that you're hiring for is the result of a funded project.

of a funded business initiative. Someone took the trouble to write an extensive business case that was approved. All you do, you start with that, you review it, you do the classic gap analysis, current state, future state gap, and you start flow charting. And what's beautiful about this is it both helps you be decisive and you show your math.

So what needs to be done in the next year to reduce that gap or to address it? What does this person, this key person need to do to reduce the gap? What experience do they need to have to be able to do this? And again, we're flow charting and we're not sitting around just as a group of stakeholders in the hire throwing out opinions where...

We're defining, we're making decisions the same way we would if we were building a call center and wanted the defined answer as to what next steps are. And I'll give you an example of where this can be really powerful. The question of do we need someone from within our industry or not?

I maintain that you almost never need someone from your industry. What you need is someone from an industry with the same critical attributes as yours. And because after all, think about benchmarking. You benchmark best practices outside your industry in order to leapfrog your competitors. You don't benchmark your competitors. Right.

And the three elements are a similar product complexity, similar go-to-market strategy, and selling at the same level. And once you've identified what those, quote, cousin industries are, now you put yourself in a position where instead of having dozens of candidates, you have thousands, and none of them have non-competes.

So that's an example of where you can take some chances because they're not really chances. They're the result of very concrete analysis where you're showing your math, where someone questions, why are you doing that? You can say, well, this is our train of logic.

Yeah, I think, Isaac, though, a lot of people who are listening have just there's a lump in their throat saying, wait a minute, does that mean that there has to be a business plan every time I want to hire somebody? Because the answer is, is that almost never do we have a business plan that supports the hiring. It usually is a requisition that got approved, whether it was last year, the year before or even this year. And now they have to go out and, you know, hire for that.

Do people typically ask for that ROI? No, you're point well taken. You point very well taken. So let me step back from that. Yes, there are occasionally those things exist. I'd say the more senior it is, the more likely it exists. Yes. If we're talking at the C level, it exists. But at most levels, it does not. But it doesn't. You can still do this colloquially. I mean, you're hiring that person for a reason.

So you can do this on the fly just as easily. And you can just simply sit there and sit with your internal hiring exec and say, give me half an hour, walk me through it. Where are you at now? Where do you want to be in 18 months? What is the role of this person in moving you towards this? What is it specifically that they need to accomplish?

to be successful in enabling what you're looking to do. So you can do it colloquially just as easy and it doesn't take days. It takes a half hour session with the hiring manager. And I'm not saying it's not, and the good news is here, this stuff is done on such a loosey-goosey basis sometimes at its worst that you don't have to get it perfect just by applying

Just by using the concepts of lean, even though you're not actually reducing variance in the way, quantitatively, in the way you do in real lean, there's so much low-hanging fruit that the results will still be noticeably better. Does that mitigate? Shoot back at me on that, if you would. So when you identify this pool of candidates, right?

We were just talking about the supply and demand and the chasm that sits between those. How does this process identify those folks? Is it out on the applications that come in? Where do you identify this pool and then how do you make that connection?

I don't have a perfect answer to that, though. It's something I think about a lot. I would say that I think the trend we're going to see going forward is that talent acquisition partners, for them to have still more of a powerful impact...

That it's going, the idea of taking people from line roles or support roles who are subject matter experts and putting them into talent acquisition for a couple of years and making it in whatever, you know, in whatever way a, you know, a high, you know, visibility role that is considered a step up. Because, I mean, what's more important than, you know,

than your future employees, right? And talent acquisition. You know, the children are our future. But what I'm saying, so I think that will... We are the world. Oh, gosh. And so I'm saying that... Remember, I mean, I exist at the... I'm a headhunter, okay? Right. I mean...

So I make my living at the ground level putting people into roles. This isn't an academic. Everything I preach are heuristics that I learned over many, many searches. But to answer your question directly, yes, I think that the most important thing is to move people up to where...

I mean, OK, I mean, I presume people like David or myself, because we've been doing this for so long, we have the ability. If you gave us a stack, a three inch stack of resume, we could sort through them over a glass of wine in a couple of hours and just eyeball them and put them into red, green, yellow piles, even if they were a complex spec. Yeah.

because we've done it so often and are knee-deep in so many different disciplines, we can do that. Most people, it's not fair to expect most people to be able to do that, but it's eminently doable to have people incrementally get better at it. And the better they get at it, the more there'll be a, it won't feel like as much of a challenge to sort through those. Now, whether will AI help us

Who's to say? I mean, quick story. A CEO told me a couple of months ago that

He told me that he'd heard from another CEO that people were starting to use, candidates were using AI to rewrite their resume to tailor to the spec, to the job description. And the companies were using AI to assess those resumes. Well, I mean, that's the ultimate garbage in, garbage out, right? I mean, you're both, I mean, it's deception at work.

Where are you going to see them? Well, Isaac, I'm just going to disagree a little bit. One of the things that AI has done on the inbound side is it's searching for certain things and certain patterns. And I applaud people that use AI on the supply side so that they can...

What's the word? It's not even gaming the system. It's actually utilizing the system for themselves. If they put together the best resume and cover letter possible, they're never going to get chosen because they're being honest. And honesty is not the best policy in this case because the AI is looking for those keywords that the system has set up against them.

And gaming the system would be, to your point, writing crap and expecting it to win. What the AI is doing is helping them understand how to write the resume and cover letter in a way in which the AI might be more receptive. To me, it's more not as much gaming the system. It's using the system for your purpose.

Okay, but you're, if I understand correctly, I mean, that makes sense to me, but if I understand correctly what you're saying, you're saying that in your scenario, the candidate is using AI to make their fit more obvious. Yes. What I was talking about are people using AI to make it look where they're not a beautiful fit, they're a gentle fit. Right, yeah. Yeah, so I think we're,

We're holding on to parts of the same elephant, I think. Yeah, and I think the frauds do get assistance here, but the people who are genuine also get assistance. Sure. Yes, yes. And again, I'm always up for learning. I don't really understand the best practice of filling each job, say, on LinkedIn with dozens of buzzwords.

Because how does putting down business development or leadership or any number of dozens and dozens of key buzzwords, that's not enough.

Given the current state of tech, it's just so brittle right now. I don't think there's enough information there. And so with the lean hiring model, I think what I'm hearing is we've still got this brokenness of getting the supply to the demand. However, you're building up

the supply in a more targeted way that really gets to what the needs of the job are and what the key responsibilities are and the skills that are necessary for that job. It's really about that targeting piece of things.

Yes, and I left this out. I didn't intend to talk about this a lot in this presentation in the interest of time because normally when I deliver this as a presentation to HR groups at companies, it basically takes half a day to cover the several modules. But another powerful element of this is it makes it easier for candidates to see when a job is a great fit for them because you're delineating so much more tightly how the role fits into the business.

And B, it likely reduces their frustration level with the company transactionally because of that clarity. So that's really, well, I guess what I'm saying is there's nothing else in civilized society that is still done from a process optimization standpoint. I mean, no one would ever build a call center or a technology stack or a house without

with this kind of casual attitude towards process. Yeah. And I once had a buddy who's a pretty, uh,

Fellow you know, Dwight, of a former employer, heavy duty guy who's a good buddy. And I was describing this to him years ago. And he said, well, yeah, it makes sense. But the truth is, I like to have a job 85% described. And then I go out, start interviewing. And I use those conversations to pin down. You know, I learn things and I add things to them. I said, well, I said, that's cool. I said, tell me this. Would you build a new house that way?

Right. And the answer obviously is no, because if you said that to your PC, the GC would say, no, I won't do that because some idiot with money tried it three years ago and his house cost two X and he wasn't happy. So no, I need a tied down spec with a bow around it. And, you know, so I'm suggesting that, that doing that a will by its nature, uh,

lead to a smoother, faster hire. And that number two, it also, I think, gives the talent acquisition person a real foundation on which to push back against hiring execs who have, because a lot, let's be honest, a lot, if not most,

of the undisciplined ideas about what ought to be in a job come from the hiring manager, not from the HR person. And if, and, but in H, you know, me as an external recruiter, it's part of my job to,

in confidence tell the executive, no, that dog won't hunt. It'd be a lot different if I was on salary to that company. And this is a tool, if one grounds oneself in it, to be able to say, hey, this isn't my opinion. I'm applying just like you do in many areas operationally of the company. I'm applying...

I'm applying design for quality principles, I'll lean. And based on that, we need to answer these questions now, not later. Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, man, I wish I could talk to David about this? Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer for listeners of the HR Data Labs podcast, a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast or whatever is on your mind. Go

Go to salary.com forward slash HRDL consulting to schedule your free 30 minute call today. Well, but Isaac, how does someone, let's kind of start this last question in a very straightforward way. Sure. What does someone do in talent acquisition to adopt these principles? Do they have to become certified in like Six Sigma or Lean principles in order to be able to utilize those within their role?

That, no, no, that would, well, the short answer is no. Though I would say that if they did, that's probably a heck of a competitive advantage for their career. It is not necessary, but if they did it, I think they'd be distinguishing themselves big time in terms of the kind of roles that will be available to them going forward.

But no, I mean, I'm actually working on a handbook right now that would be basically paint-by-numbers for this so that you wouldn't need to know everything about it. So we'll put the—if there's a link available, we'll put that in the show notes. So someone who's listening to this could say, okay, so how do I act on this? And if there's a crib sheet version or a—

Or what do they call the... Cliff Notes? Yes. If there's a short version of those. Well, David, don't act like you don't know what Cliff Notes are. Cliff Notes? I know I've never used those in college. I mean, anytime. I don't know what they are. No, but we can put the link to that in the show notes. All right, perfect.

So, Isaac, any other salient pieces on this that you think are critical before we close? The short answer is no. I mean, there were half a dozen times in this conversation where we stepped back and said, oh, that's a fascinating tangent that we don't want to go off on. So there are lots of emanations to it. But more than anything else, I think I would say that

Okay, here's one. I would say that historically, when technology enables real efficiencies, has real ROI, it's pretty obvious, and there's a lot of low-hanging fruit. So anyone, someone comes to you and says, I have magic beans or...

magic gen AI that will fix this problem, the odds are you're probably really better off focusing on optimizing your processes really tightly. And then once you really understand your processes, looking for modules of them that can be automated. But anyone that tells you that they can automate the soup to nuts, what you're doing, run away.

So there are going to be a lot of people running and screaming then after this podcast, which, you know, it's okay. Especially if you are running and listening to us as you run, just run a little faster. They will not catch up to you. Isaac, I think we're going to have to ask you to come back and we can spend another at least day or two talking about this topic because it's a fascinating one for Dwight and I. Anytime, my brothers.

Thank you, sir. Thank you very much for being here. My pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Dwight, thank you. Thank you. Thanks for being with us today, Isaac. Definitely a lot more that we can delve into. Absolutely. And thank you all for listening. Take care and stay safe.

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