Pay transparency regulations are forcing the issue in recruitment conversations. Organizations benefit from posting compensation ranges in job postings, even if not required, as it helps align candidate expectations early in the process, saving time and resources.
While AI and other technologies can improve efficiency and automate tasks, they cannot replace the fundamentals of recruitment, such as strong processes and human interactions. Without the basics in place, technological solutions may create more challenges and inconsistencies.
Jack was not surprised by much, noting that many booths focused on AI and skills, which started to sound alike. He was disappointed that the focus on AI often overshadowed the importance of connecting technology to people and processes.
A good onboarding experience is crucial to retaining new hires. Common pitfalls include ghosting candidates after they accept the job, failing to provide clear instructions, and not leveraging available technology to maintain communication.
During the pandemic, organizations responded in three ways: some paused hiring, others accelerated it, and some used the time to reassess and strengthen their processes and tech stack. The resilient organizations that prepared well came out stronger.
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 Turetsky, and we are here live at the 2024 HR Technology Conference in beautiful Mandalay Bay Exposition Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. I am with one of my best friends in the HR world, in the world, who is a fellow suffering New York Giants fan.
None other than the great Jack Kopman from Great People. Why, thank you for that kind introduction. And yes, a New York Giants fan, and I have the scars and the disappointing afternoons to prove for it. But you know, you don't have the tattoo that has the broken heart with the Giants symbol on it. I do not have that. I'm waiting for that, Jack. I'm still waiting on the Super Bowl years, and I'm remembering those fondly. When was that?
Let's see. It was many, many moons ago. Many, many moons ago. Oh, not that many. It's not like the Rangers in 1994. This is true. And hey, we've got a big game tonight. Who knows what's going to happen? Okay, the people who are listening to this know that the Cowboys beat the crap out of the Giants last year.
56 to nothing or something like a Penn State score over Kent State. But, you know, hopefully it doesn't happen that way. On any given day. Yes. On any given day. Any given Thursday now that it's not Sunday. Any Thursday night. So good news is I have a red-eye home tonight back to Philadelphia, which should say something. Being a Giants fan in Philadelphia is not the easiest place to be a Giants fan. But I think on this date, I think people have more despise for
for the Cowboys than they do for the Giants. Yes, that's true. And they're probably loving the Giants because they gave them Saquon Barkley. See, you had to go there too, right? It's on tape now. I love Barkley. I love what he's a Pennsylvania boy. Yes, exactly. Love what he did with Penn State. Yep. Wished we could have given him the showcase in the offensive line that he's got now. Of course. It is what it is. And a quarterback. Yep.
So everybody's wondering, what does this have to do with recruiting and salaries and... Well, we're going to tie it back to that because it all does tie back to the Giants and having a good corporate culture and having a good management and leadership style and...
and being able to pay people what they're deserved. Yes, there you go. There's always a linkage in there somewhere, right? We can always bring it back to the shitstorm that is the New York Giants. And if the Tisch family hears this, I apologize. But if you have a job open in the compensation department, let me know. That's right. Or in the data science part of it. Exactly, yeah. We can help you with that too. But before we get started, what's one fun thing that no one knows about Jack Copeman?
Well, we already disclosed the Giants. Yeah, but that's not a secret. The love for the Giants. That's not a secret. Well, I think, what would be a surprise? So early on, I've always been a singer, whether it's on my own and such, but I sing in our church choir. I sing at family, you know, celebrations. I haven't done a bar mitzvah yet. That's not on the docket. I'd have to go out and find what songs to do at a bar mitzvah. Habanagila is a good one. I think I know the words to that.
And you know what? I have had an opportunity to officiate a couple weddings for family, friends, and the such, which has been just awesome to do. Just awesome to do. So I'll post his phone number in the show notes. So if you need someone. I am certified in the state of Pennsylvania as an official wedding officiant. Yes. There you go. That's wonderful. That's news. It is. That's great news. It is. So if we know anybody who is getting married, please call Jack Kaufman at...
215.
So, Zach, the first question I have to ask is, and this is one of the ones that I've been talking a lot about, especially in thought leadership and actually in presentations I've done very recently. The world of recruiting and compensation are really overlapping in a lot of ways now because they share a lot of data. They share a lot of processes. Obviously, they're so intertwined in the candidate experience and the employee experience.
But from your perspective, where is it going? Where is that relationship between recruiting and compensation going? Well, you know, the compensation question is always first and foremost, right? And I think, you know, over time, what we've seen is that recruiting teams never really wanted to get into the compensation topic until
until farther on in the screening and selection process, right? They were the only ones that wanted to push that conversation farther back. The candidate wanted to understand what it was like their first or second question. So I think what's great is getting that information back up front for the benefit of the job seeker to know that this is worth my time to learn more about your organization and such.
But it's also good for the recruiting team because they've got so much on their hands right now. Why go through an entire process with somebody when there is not alignment on what the candidate is expecting and what the organization is willing to offer for their role and everything? You don't want to get, you know...
X number of days, weeks, months into a screening process with somebody only to find at the end that you're not, you're never going to be able to align the dots when it comes to what that candidate is seeking and what the organization wants to pay. Yeah. And so taking it back to the Saquon Barkley conversation, you know, they had a number in mind, he had a number in mind and they were never going to get together. They were never going to do that. Yeah. They were never going to do that. And if, if Saquon had known right away,
what the number was, then it could have short-circuited everything and you could have had more conversations with other teams. Well, and I think it also, I mean, it also...
You're too funny. I mean, did everybody notice how he tied that all together with a nice, neat bow? But I think what was also interesting was that they had a lot of other options, right? If you're not going to spend money on Barclay or on somebody coming into the organization, where else are you going to put that money to use? Free agency. Yep, free agency. And you're going to invest that not in that person, but in...
the offensive line in that case to help with the next running back that's kind of coming in. Or the draft class, because way before that, we had the draft issue. And, you know,
Where we're going to go there? So, sorry, tying this back to the topic at hand. Game time is at 8.15 East Coast time, and my tailgate friends are already at the stadium, I think, enjoying some libations and food. Yes, and we're still here at the... Yeah, we're still here at the train. And I've got sore feet and knees to prove it.
Yes, yes. Yep. Well, so going back to the conversation, though, now recruiting and compensation need to be so intertwined because the front end is going to be influenced by, really, regulation because...
As we all know, pay transparency is now the law and there are regulations in place that say that on postings, in many states, by the way, on postings, you need to make sure that you're telling people an accurate representation of what the hiring range might be. Jack, how does this affect the world of recruiting?
Well, it's really just another data element. And I think, once again, that sense of transparency now kind of opens things up, right? So I think what... At least when the first one... Nothing like a regulation to get people kind of focused on something, right? Exactly. But I think if it's done right and you don't have...
I think initially when we... And you correct me if I'm wrong here. You're kind of the experts on this side. But I think what we started seeing is like they'd have a role for a sales professional and the salary range was $25,000 to $250,000. And it's kind of like, okay, well...
Where is it? Is it farther down? Is it farther up? And that wasn't really helpful to the organization, but that's probably the best that the organization could do in terms of saying what the pay scale was going to be. Well, very famously, there was an example that Netflix had posted a flight attendant job for $60,000 to $385,000 a year.
And I guess that's transparent to a certain extent. Transparently foggy. Because if you were a flight attendant and you were looking at that, you were saying, well, wait a minute. Right now, my current role, I get probably $150,000 and it's a negotiated contract. It's negotiated.
what the hell are they doing? And so that very famously was a very big mistake. And I don't know whether anybody got fired. And if you're a Netflix professional that, that in the compensation realm, please let me know. But, and if you need a job, let me know. Yeah. But you know, that that's just not compliant. And so we use that as an example, but it's a very good example to your point before that you're not helping anybody when you're being that opaque. Right. And,
And in fact, you're violating the regulation and you're going to get fined for it. And I think people, that was early on, right? And I think people have gotten certainly a little sharper on that. But, you know, it's still the fact that that is one element that I think that goes into a job seeker's
when they're thinking about changing. And I think there's so much more that needs to kind of come into play with that. It's like, you know, what is the role? Am I a good fit for that role? Regardless of compensation, am I really a good fit for that role from a skills, you know, standpoint? But also, is the culture right? Is it right for me? Do I have
to be in the office? Do I have, I mean, there are so many things that go into, you know, not only the requirements on the company, but also what the job seeker wants. Because anymore, you know, it's not just about comp. That is absolutely an important part of it. Yeah. Because that is the sustaining life for them. And, you know, they've got to pay the bills and make sure they can do that. But at the end of the day, you get paid a lot of money and be really unhappy in your job for whatever
reason. Your hiring manager, the work you're doing, the work you're not doing that you wish you could be doing. There are a lot of movies on how miserable people are at their job. I've never been miserable at my job, so I've never known that. That's why we're still working. Yeah. When we get tired of it? I'm just kidding, by the way.
I thought you were serious. No, no. No, I've been miserable sometimes. I love what I do now, but I've been miserable sometimes. There are times when we're miserable. You know what? We get up in the morning and we go back to fix things. Absolutely. So that's the fun part of this. And that's a much more mature way of looking at it. So I'm interested. Can I ask you a question? Of course you may. So as I look at this from the recruiting standpoint, how do you look at it from the compensation side? As somebody that kind of lives and breathes in that compensation side, how do you think it infects?
kind of recruiting? Well, to me, it is one of the best things to happen to the relationship between recruiters and comp that we've had for a long time because now they have to actually talk. And now it's not just where I publish a range based on what
compensation is given to me. Actually, there's got to be a conversation that we're having about, you know, okay, is this the relevant range? Do we need to go to the higher end of this range? Or, you know, where should we be strategizing for hiring this kind of a role? And you become more of a consultant to the manager between comp, the recruiter, and manager. Have a conversation about what's our strategy here. Because if all of your competitors are trying to hire the same
position, you can now transparently see what they're putting as the hiring range and make a more strategic move. And that's not collusion. That's the law. So now all these companies have the ability to see what are my direct competitors actually paying for this job. So it becomes, it's not a whack-a-mole or it's not a, you know, kind of chasing my tail, but at least it enables you to have those
mature business conversation about what we can afford and what do we need. Yeah. And I don't know, I don't know when, when, you know, the conversation we're coming about, about mandating paid transparency, if they, if they really thought about that as competitive Intel for the people that are out there looking. Right. So I thought that was an interesting by-product of that because you're right. You know, if you're opening up a new job, gosh, all you got to do is go to, you know, a job board, look at the postings for a similar job and you go,
okay, well, I need to pay this amount of money for this role. And, you know, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And now some of the things that I've been talking to companies about around that are, they say, well, my state doesn't require it.
And I say, okay, well, are your competitors operating in other states? Yes. Okay. Well, many of the companies I've been talking to and consulting with, I'm telling them, choose one strategy across all your entities and post ranges if you are operating in states that require posting. Because otherwise, you're going to have to have bifurcation strategies, and it's going to get very confusing to everybody. So post your ranges. Do you think the hesitancy on the part of those organizations not wanting to post that is...
that they just don't feel they need to share that or they don't have the data to back it up or they think it's going to put them at a competitive disadvantage. So I think it goes back to even more...
Earlier than that, it's very expensive to create all that data. It's very expensive to maintain all that data. And many organizations have the culture of not sharing, of not being transparent. And so transparency and implementing transparency is expensive. And it takes a ton of training, especially for stakeholders like managers and employees. And, you know, for candidates, we need to be transparent and we also need to talk openly.
their language. You can't use midpoint progressions. We can't say, you know, market penetration. We can't say we target the 50th percentile of the market. What? What does that mean? I don't know what that means. I don't know what that means middle. So, so, so to me,
Companies that are not transparent, that have transparency forced on them because of market forces are going to go into it very angrily. And they're going to do whatever the minimum is. And they're going to get a lot of pushback from internal stakeholders. And they're going to say, oh, this has been a nightmare for us. Well, you didn't put in the work. So of course it's going to be a nightmare. So I think...
it's going to force most companies to become transparent. Yep. And you know what? If it makes them better, it makes them better at their job, makes it better to attract talent and opens up those conversations, all the better for it, right? I think it's going to take a lot of...
investment. And I think companies are going to be very wary of that investment because we can't afford what we're doing now. And now this stuff is being forced on us. It's going to come from somewhere and it's going to hurt. Yep. 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 let's talk a little bit about the recruiting tech and recruiting processes and how they've evolved. Because beyond pay transparency, we're here at the HR Technology Show. There's a lot of stuff being talked about, but mostly one thing. AI? Yes, AI. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. I have never seen...
a two-letter acronym take over a profession an initiative in an or in in in industry like ai has um do you think it's overused well i think there's probably a lot of ai powered solutions that have have very little ai power behind them right but it is the buzz right and it is what's a it's a it's what's um
It's what everybody wants to talk about. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether it's AI powered or a little mouse running around on a wheel powering it. Whose name is AI? Whose name is AI. You know, at the end of the day, you've got to be able to prove the outputs and the outcomes from it. And if you can't improve cycle time, if you can't improve quality of talent, if you can't improve performance,
efficiency on the part of the recruiting team. I don't care what it is, right? And I mean, this is something that every organization has been focused on shaving an hour off the recruiting time, a dollar off the cost of recruiting and the such. But I think what's really important in the context of today is that you've seen TA teams just absolutely get dismantled and just, you know, you know,
Blow it up. Just dismantled because of economy and COVID and all that kind of stuff. And now they just don't have time to do these things. So anytime you can use some type of a new technology to improve how I'm doing interviews, how I'm searching on people, how I'm matching on people, if you can help recruiters be much more efficient, they hopefully can keep up with the demands of the organization, the
to fulfill what they've been hired to do. And that's to connect people with talent in the organization. You know, Jack, one of the strange things as I look around this show floor to your point
I see a lot of point solutions that take on a piece of the process. Like right behind us, there's a company that does scheduling of interviews. And you go a couple of steps further and you get the AI bot that actually does the interviews and provides a summary of feedback and whatnot.
And another utility that will look at the outcome from the interview. Exactly. And I think this has been something that has plagued, specifically, and I've been in TA for a couple decades now. So I think that's been something that's plagued. There's always the new shiny toy. There's always the promise that this is going to be a game changer and everything. And I've had a number of conversations this week and in previous conversations with prospects and customers that if you don't have the fundamentals right, if you don't have the fundamentals right in terms of
What's your strategy is to attract talent to your brand, how you compliment that organic traffic coming in and discover new talent for your sourcing efforts, your hiring process, and then ultimately kind of in between is your marketing aspect. If you have the basics down, I don't care what kind of improvement you're going to have on one specific activity in that.
It's just not going to work because you don't have the basics down. I think too many people, I was talking to somebody, a TA leader the other day here yesterday, the days are a blur here, but he was sharing that he came in with an idea in terms of exactly what he was looking for and what he wanted to accomplish with the TA team.
He was walking out and his eyes were glazed over because there were so many different things that he saw. I've got grandchildren, believe it or not, I've got grandchildren, and they walk into a candy store and they go speechless. It's the same thing with TA leaders going into this event in that there's so many areas that they could, but they missed the point. I think they missed the point, and this is certainly not a commentary on everybody, but they missed the point that you've got to get the
basics down from a, from a process of people in a technology perspective. But just, just to kind of give them a little benefit of the doubt here, you have hundreds, if not thousands of people screaming at you every day as a, you know, their, their clients, we need this to get better. We need that to get better. We need more, more candidates. We need better candidates. We need more experienced candidates. We need evergreen recs. We need this. We need that.
And they're trying to balance everything and trying to dot the I's and cross the T's. And then they come to this show and you've got everybody screaming at you about, you know, how every process in the entirety from, you know, the publication of the rack or actually from the approval process of the rack all the way through to the onboarding experience and making sure that you don't drop the ball in the, in that interim, in that honeymoon phase. So there are so many people screaming at this person, uh,
God, I just wouldn't want to be them to have to deal with all that shit. And hey, not that these solutions are not worth it because if they, you know, interview process has always been a challenge historically through the process, right? And as such, but ultimately what happens is when you start
to fix a problem with a third-party solution coming in, and you do that for this part of the process today, you do it for this part of the process tomorrow, you do it for another part of the process the day after that, all of a sudden, you've solved those problems, but you've created more opportunities, more challenges in terms of now you're delivering really inconsistent user experiences to people that are coming into the organization and people that are using these systems. And now that you look at their screen and they've got...
27 tabs open and they're working over here. 200 notifications that are pushing them in different directions to fix shit. And that's just something that they end up live with. Right. And yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's been interesting to see how far this industry and how far the TA profession has come, you know, and just the role that technology has played in it, but you still can't get by that. This is still, regardless of where you can shave time off and automate tasks and everything, it is still a people business. You still have to talk to,
A recruiter's got to talk to a job seeker. A recruiter's got to talk to a hiring manager. A lot of things you can infer and learn through AI, but it boils down to those conversations and convincing somebody to, you know, in the role of a recruiter, leave that current job, come over to this opportunity. That's really where the, that's really where the heart of it is, I think. And it will continue to be. Well, I mean, at the end of the day, as long as we're still hiring people and you're hiring into an organization of people, people have got to be involved. And, and,
you know, until the AI overlords take over everything. And then they tell us how we're working for them. And there's specific places that that works just perfectly, right? If you're in a high volume field-based hiring mode and, you know, you don't have to really get into the intrinsic, you know, skill sets of somebody and you're looking for somebody to fill a shift into such, you can do
the majority of that online together. Now, you hope they show up for their first day, obviously, but you can do the majority of that online if staffing and putting something in a position is important. But when you start looking at more of the skills-based people that are coming in in the organization that are delivering value at maybe a little higher role and comp level, it's still that people person. Higher touch. To get them into the organization and to keep them there. Yes, exactly. Well, and where I've seen lots of failures is
in a phenomenal, phenomenal recruiting process is that gap between the moment I say, yeah, I accept the job and the moment that they start on that first day. You know, that onboarding experience gets absolutely obliterated when, you know, you ghost them. You know, you ghost that candidate who's not an employee yet. Right. And they're like, oh my God, you are so interested in getting me on board. Right.
And, you know, I haven't heard from you. Where do I go from my first day? You know, who the hell am I reporting to? And it's not an it's not a difficult it's not a difficult problem to solve. Right. You've had you know, you've got tools out there that are automating marketing message ourselves, continue ourselves included. Right.
Um, and so, and unfortunately, sometimes we think about those, the candidate marketing ending it. Okay. They've been hired. You know, I don't need to do anything. And that's somebody else's responsibility when, when he or she shows up to work in the first day, it's so easy to set up a mini campaign that's, Oh, here's the message messages I want to deliver when they have accepted the job up until the point in time that they are on site for the first day. It's, it's not, you know, I think some people think that there's, that there's,
The technology has not advanced to a point to be able to do that. That technology has been around forever. Organizations have just decided not to use it and not to leverage it for those specific use cases. Right, right. You know, it's kind of like the general manager not calling Saquon with an offer.
But just letting it go. You're going back to the Giants. Geez. I'm leaving it alone. I'm going to leave it alone. 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 to salary.com forward slash HRDL consulting.com.
to schedule your free 30-minute call today. I want to ask you, is there anything that shocked you in a positive way coming here? Anything you saw that was actually, ooh, that's actually pretty cool. I'm interested in that. I have not, um...
And that's probably a bad answer to give because I haven't had a chance to kind of walk around. So these have been an opportunity to kind of see, you know, the overall theme. And I think, I think still, you know, every other booth, you know, I can, you know, circle around here and it's either AI or skills, AI or skills, AI or skills. I love to see the advancing. I love to see the startup organizations that are taking a real creative approach, but more and more, they start sounding, they all start sounding alike. So I haven't seen anything that has really jumped out, uh,
Because again, I think my mind is thinking about the basics and how do you make sure you're connecting the dots. And that is still that process of attracting people, sourcing, engaging, and ultimately hiring those people. And so I think the other flip side of that coin, which is what's disappointed you, I guess it's that, right? That we're leaning too heavily into the AI messaging and not connecting it back to the people prostitute, right? Mm-hmm.
Okay, I'll leave it at that. The mm-hmm answered everything I needed on that one. Yeah, and I haven't, you know, and shame on me, I haven't, usually I spend a lot of time kind of walking the show and everything, but I haven't, you know, being here for so long, being in this space for so long, there's a lot of the old guard that is here. You know, it continues to amaze me the investment that organizations make to get their name out there with, you know, you've got booths that are, you know, 10-foot booths, you've got other ones that are an acre wide. Yes. You know, so it's kind of interesting to see that, but
You know, just this show has really changed over the years that it's not just the technology because you can't talk about technology without connecting to the people and processes in the organization. So it's been, you know, I think that's been good. I think what I've appreciated is just the advances overall. The entire water level continues to rise in terms of the maturity of TA professionals in my side and the maturity of the technology that's helping them solve those big, hairy problems.
When you come here next year, what do you wish you see more of, though? In the next show? Yeah. Well, you know, let's just say, put your hat on, you know, put your all-knowing, all-seeing hat on and say, you know, what would next year's HR technology be for the HR, for the recruiting, for the AT professional, for the TA professional? Yeah.
I love, you know, from the format of the show, I love when you've got stages within the event that you can go over and listen to a case study. And I know they've got one or two of them around here. So I really enjoy that. I think that.
You know, just the format of the show. I would love this event to be in Philadelphia. They didn't have to travel across the country, but I don't think that will ever happen. Here's our plug for Philadelphia Convention Center. Or Javits. Or Javits. I could take the train up there. That would be easy. Then we can go see a Ranger game. No, I think it's tough. I think the team here does a phenomenal job. And this is a Herculean effort in terms of organizing all of the people and everything here.
I don't know. That's a great question. I haven't really thought about what more, you know, certainly you want to see more content. You want to see more specific. You want to see less commercials on the stage than maybe that's out there and such. But I think hearing from practitioners, you know, anymore, it's not about what you've implemented. It's
It's what the outcome has been from that. And I think if more of the conversations were focused on, well, what did you achieve by implementing XYZ? Exactly. Or what did you lose? What cost savings? Yeah, what was the cost savings? What made it better? What was the impact on cycle times? And sometimes that's really tough to prove out, especially in a mature space that, you know, you talk about implementing a new ATS. Well...
I've had an ATS for 20 years and quite honestly, from tracking an applicant, there's not a lot of new things that are going in. I think all the growth in our space has been everything outside of the tracking the applicant. How do I, the core applicant tracking, not so much attracting them to the brand or the marketing side. I think those are the fun things that are out there today. I almost don't care about savings and I don't care about the positives because
tell me the true freaking story. What worked? What didn't work? What did you have to do to overcome it? Because no business is perfect enough to be able to implement a technology and everything be rosy. All right. What are the missteps you had? What are the problems you faced? How did you overcome them? Are you still dealing with problems? What's not perfect and what's perfect? No technology in this entire hallway is ever going to be perfect for every single company. Right.
And so it would be great to hear stories that were real, that I could believe in, that enabled me to be able to say, oh, crap, I've had that problem too. How did they solve it? Oh, they solved it that way. That's really cool. I learned something today. No, I agree. And I think the big differentiator for organizations is not just
You know, there's a lot of organizations that, you know, pride themselves on the logo slide and they love us kind of a slide as such. But the true testament, I think, of the technology that organizations are delivering and of that partnership is...
are they staying with you for more than just that initial contract period? When things get rough, do you have a model in place that you can have an open, transparent conversation about what's working, what's not working? And...
You can sit on the same side of a desk and solve those problems together. I think too often, like we hear, and I'm sure our competitors do, you know, they will come in and say, we don't like our ATS. We don't like our CRM because of this. And knowing the space, your system can do that, right? Your system can do that.
why aren't you leveraging that from your existing system? Right. And I hear time and time again, Dave, it wasn't configured properly in the first place. It's like, then shame on you. Shame on you for letting that happen. Absolutely. And why not go back in and work with that vendor to try to fix that? So,
I don't know. It's just, you know, the more things change, sometimes the more things stay the same in our space. Oh, and they certainly do. And, you know, you could learn a lesson a lot of times from the mistakes that you've made in other organizations or even other implementations doesn't mean you're going to not make them the next time you're going to fall into it's like me with getting married. You know, I keep falling into that same trap and make the same mistake.
But Jack, I think it's one of the things I appreciate about talking to you is since you've had that multi-decade experience, not only on the technology side, but on a process side, you've seen lots of business cycles. You've seen recessions. You've seen booms. You've seen a pandemic, at least one. Yeah.
We've all seen that. Yes, we have. And the world of recruiting has changed significantly, not just because of the technology, but because of the times and because of demographics and other things. And so that's why I love listening to you because you've got not just the background, but you've got the stories that actually prove it. And the battle scars to prove it. Yeah, it's been interesting. But I think the more I think people get all uptight with really...
sporadic changes or intermittent change in the process. And, you know, the labor market is such that it goes down, it goes up, it goes down, it comes up. And that's just the nature of it. And you need the kind of the, you need the fortitude to get through that from a business perspective and organizations need the fortitude to make the right decisions in their own organization, but not compromise what the future looks like. I think when we got into the pandemic, we
I think we had, I divided it into three different types of people, conversation we were having. Those that, you know, hit the pause button on hiring because they just couldn't hire, right? You think about the restaurants, you think about the hospitality side, they just couldn't hire anybody. You had those other industries or organizations that couldn't hire fast enough. Exactly. Logistics, healthcare, and they just couldn't, and they needed help in terms of doing that. But then you had the third category of people that go,
We know we're going to get through this. This is the time for me and us as an organization to look at the people, the process, and the tech stack and the platform that we got in place here and make sure that when we come out of this, that we're stronger than when we went into it. And I think those were the thoughtful conversations that organizations had to be prepared. And when they came out,
They may not have come out with anything new, but they had better awareness in terms of what was working, what wasn't working. And maybe they might have made some, you know, tweaking the process here, tweaking, you know, whatever the case may be. But those, I think, were the organizations that recognized that this is not a long-term thing. It's not something I'm going to have to deal with for the rest of my life. Right.
Right. But I think those are the organizations. So it was a very interesting time. And resiliency. And we don't, we don't have to spend too much more time on that, but, but the resiliency of, of,
companies to get through a global pandemic, come out on the other side, should show them that, hey, listen, we just changed our business model significantly and everybody had to in some way, shape or form. And we came out the other side and we were okay. Yeah. And now we can use that as a lesson. And if there isn't every, God forbid, there's another one, you know, we're going to have to remember that. Yep. Good times. Yes. Well,
And if the Giants go 2-2 after tonight's game, it'll be better times. It'll be a fun ride home. A flight home, I should say. If the flight leaves, hopefully.
Yes. Well, Jack, I pray that that's true. I pray the Giants go more like eight and six or sorry, eight and no, nine and eight rather than eight and nine or let's hope we're somewhere in that in that area code at the end of the season. So, yeah.
Jack, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. Always good to chat with you, my friend. And for everybody listening, Jack Kotman, great people. Available for bar mitzvahs, weddings, as an efficient, and just a really great guy. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Take care. Stay safe.
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