January 31, 2023
Description
In this episode, Chris discusses what measures are necessary to have a successful talent acquisition process and business with Wendy Taylor, a Senior Executive and Leadership Advisor, Silicon Country.
Wendy has 15 years management consulting experience leading over 50 engagements worth many millions of dollars for global Fortune 500 companies and fast growth venture-backed startups. She is trained in all things McKinsey. In addition to leading engagements with 30 clients, Wendy developed the curriculum and delivered training for Fortune 500 VP and C-level executives.Wendy also designed talent strategy for dozens of fast growth VC-backed tech companies — advising C-level executives on who to hire and when — to achieve their next round goals. When Wendy is not working with clients, writing articles for LinkedIn, or on podcasts, she can be found keeping score at baseball games, singing classical choral soprano, or planning the guest list and menu for one of her fabulous salons.
Transcript
Chris Nichols:
Hello and welcome to the talent tide podcast presented by job.com. The show that ensures you have the information you need to adapt and evolve your workplace culture as you ride the wave of change in Talent Management. I’m your host, Chris Nichols. And today we have the senior executive and leadership adviser Wendy Taylor, when he has 15 years of management consulting experience leading over 50 engagements worth many millions of dollars for Global Fortune 500 companies and fast growth venture backed startups. She is trained in all things McKinsey, in addition to leading engagements with with her many clients Wendy develop the curriculum and deliver training for Fortune 500, VP, and C level executives. She’s also designed talent strategy for dozens of fast growth VC backed tech companies, advising C level executives on who to hire and when to achieve their next round of funding goals. When the I am so thrilled to have you on today, we were just chatting in the pre show about when we first discussed having you on the podcast. It’s been many months, even years. But thank you so much for coming on. Hi, I’m so excited to be here. That’s again, like it’s great to have you. And I’m really excited about your unique perspective. And just your experience. Because I think it’s something that in the startup community, especially I have found in talking with founders, that is a weak spot. Many founders are more often than not one of two things, they are either really good salespeople, or they are really good software engineers, developers, etc. Or they just have I guess a third one would be they have a really big idea. They’re trying to figure out what to do with it. They have no idea how to hire, they have no idea when to hire they they’d have no they’ve not thought yet about a talent strategy. That’s so far down the line from where many of them ever get to their mindset that they’re so focused on what’s right in front of them. But it is one of the most important things that you can do is hire the right people at the right times in order to scale your business. So really looking forward to hearing from you. And so to set the stage, why don’t you give our listeners an idea of your background? How you got into working with with these tech startups and, and fortune 500 companies and how you got to this point in your career, if you don’t mind? Sure.
Wendy Taylor:
So I am a tech startup executive was actually really how I did this. So was part of a then tech startup that did something really, really innovative in the late 90s and early 2000s. And we actually postponed our IPO because of 9/11. So that’s that’s what we’re talking about, had our exit in the spring of 2002. And I stuck around and got some really great leadership experience in a fortune 200 company after we were acquired. But I’ve gone through all the grind pains, I was employee number 23. When we were acquired, we had 500 employees, 400 of them work for me, and a good deal, the 100 that didn’t used to because we tend to hire into operations. And then they got, you know, I would identify talent, so it was time for them to move on outside of operations. And so the funny story is when we did the announcement, all hands meeting we’d been acquired to the entire team, or at least all of the San Francisco based team. I sit in the back of the room greeted each person by name as they came into the room. 400 of the 500 people in the company were there that day, the VP of HR for that fortune 200 company was in awe because I knew the name of every person. And but I had hired most of them. So and so when I did leave that I joined a firm led a boutique consulting firm led by an ex McKinsey leader, Stanford MBA. He taught me so much and I worked with and rent and ran projects for his clients, mostly fortune 500 but also some huge engagements at Stanford. One of my most precious belongings is a Stanford blanket that they gave me and Sanford wineglasses when I finished that engagement and then it made sense to get back into the tech world and leverage my startup experience. So I joined a firm where I was focused on consulting with venture backed tech startups, mostly in talent strategy, and also did some executive recruiting but mostly it was consultative strategy. All that stuff that you were talking about that the brilliant minds, that creative minds that come up with our greatest startups don’t really have actually the management experience and sometimes the people skills to make really good talent decisions. And I will tell you that my first career was in education. And I ran Youth and Family Services for a YMCA. And before that, I worked full time all the way through college. So my first management job was at 20. So that 12,000 interviews I’ve done. That’s because I started interviewing 20 as as a boss. Yeah. So and for wide varieties of jobs, for sure. So
Chris Nichols:
well, and you mentioned the 12,000 interviews, while while you were chatting, I had the 12,000 in my mind, and then I was like, I got to do some math here. So effectively, if you had stopped at the 12,000. And I don’t know, when you stopped counting, but you stopped at 12,000, you’ve an end, on average, a 30 minute interview. That’s about 6000 plus hours. So to put that even in more perspective, 2080 hours is kind of the full time equivalent for the number of hours that one person works. So effectively, you’ve spent three years of a career interviewing candidates for yes. What have you learned?
Unknown:
I’ve learned that the best approach is left brained and right brained. And what I mean by that is getting really clear on what skills and experience the person needs to have, but also getting clear on what will help them be successful. So is your company at a level of funding where scrappiness is important, you can thrive without a big budget, you can thrive without a ton of people telling you what to do, then you need to be interviewing for that. If you have an environment that’s very athletic oriented, there’s in Silicon Valley, certainly there’s an awful lot of companies, where you they hire for young talent, ex athletes. Now, as a musician, I would suggest that serious musicians in high school had the same leadership development as serious athletes. But I couldn’t always talk people into that. I can and I can in Nashville, because they understand there’s a respect and valuing of music and the arts and just disciplines involved in that. But yes. So I will say that, that left and right brain, the other thing that I noticed oftentimes is early stage startups tend to hire their network. And that next thing, you know, everybody, there’s a whole bunch of people that are all the same. They’re all Bobbsey Twins with each other, they’re all identical. They go to the same school, they use the same vocabulary, they have the same personality, they have the same, same, same, same same. And no matter whether you’re running a team in a fortune 500 organization, or you have a startup with 25 employees, you will be more successful if you bring in diversity of experience, diversity of personality, introvert versus extrovert left brain versus right brain communication style. All of that’s important. And usually, we don’t talk about that when we talk about, say diversity in hiring, but your team will have so much more power and be so much more effective. If you think that
Chris Nichols:
that you brought that up, because that’s one of way. I’m so glad the things that I often talk about with with organizations when they’re like we need more diversity. What do you mean by that? Right? Because, unfortunately, when we talk diversity, especially in this day and age is we think about the color of our skin. And there’s so much more to diversity than than that. I mean, you see all the times in companies and shoot you know, even in our our government in the United States, right? It’s a lot of Ivy Leaguers. Not a lot of regional state school folks that are in those government roles. Yeah, so but there’s something to that in that diversity of thought. So if only the people that went to Ivy League’s are taking up the roles, there’s a lot of there’s not much of a melting pot there of opinion on how things should be done, because there’s a lot of overlap between those those Ivy League schools have very similar schools of thought. And so those perspectives are extremely valuable whenever you’re selling products and services to the rest of the country right when you’re selling to Middle America or we’ve seen it in Nashville windy with with companies that have tried to insert themselves into health tech. Right and the challenge is that, you know, Silicon Valley has faced and trying to enter themselves into the world of healthcare and thinking that they, they they can solve the problem because of who they are. And the reality is they don’t they don’t understand it. Right? They don’t they don’t speak the language. You see it in other fields. I’ve seen it in ag ag tech, right agriculture in Silicon Valley companies trying to solve that. And so, no, I think that diversity of thought and perspective and background is so important. When we when you talk about working with companies, I think that one of the things that you mentioned was that you’ve taught hiring managers, you’ve worked with these companies hand in hand about how to how to how to interview with three plus years of experience full time experience, just interviewing. What What have you taught hiring manager? What do you teach hiring managers to help them be a more effective interviewer,
Unknown:
the first thing we start with is getting really clear on what they need from the role. And so getting super clear on what the person has to do to be successful. And looking at the technical skills, whether it’s actually a technical role and engineering role, or product management role, or sales or marketing, there’s still technical skills. And so we look at that we get really clear at that. And we we then look at what are alternative ways the person could have gotten that experience. One of the things you frequently see if you’re a job seeker, is that most of the people making hiring decisions have a very rigid focus on what they’re looking for. There’s like a checkbox. And, and the application tracking software helps the human tick those boxes, and is really narrowly defined. Well, if you have enough management experience, if you know your area well enough, you can actually get creative and say, well, here’s one way they can get it. Here’s some alternative ways they could build that experience and come to our company and be successful. And then looking at what does it take. So here’s an example company I’ve worked with. They had an ed tech product. And so their engineers had to talk to teachers, elementary school teachers, and they did six weeks sprints. And two of those six weeks, were sitting side by side with people who were called to teach 5 to 12 year olds. That meant that these engineers actually had to be real humans, not your typical classic Silicon Valley stereotypical not to make fun of them, but stereotypical Silicon Valley software engineer. And so we had to figure out how do you build a talent strategy to attract engineers with people skills. And, and that was a kind of interesting thing for some, you could just say, you have to spend two weeks of every six week agile sprint sitting next to kindergarten teacher, and some of them you could see them cringe. And that was the end of that sometimes you had to dig a little deeper to so. So we start with that. And, and we go within into the soft skills, which is a really bad word that we need to replace with something better, but I’m still working on a better word for soft skills. And we figure out all that personality, how does our culture work? That company loved five syllable words. Now, I’m a geek. And I actually really kind of enjoyed getting to dust off my five syllable words I usually avoid using so I don’t offend anyone. But the reality is, is that was like part of their culture. So if somebody didn’t do that, they would actually not have been respected. And they would have had a hard time getting their ideas through. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. It was a reality in that company. So basically, once we’ve done that, then we figure out how we’re going to approach the interview process. And for the hiring manager, I really want them to be able to dig into all the stuff. But then the other parts of the interviewing process, the other people play different roles. So obviously, if it’s a software engineer, you can have one of your serious Senior Principal engineers, do a deep dive on their technical skills. And really make sure that they’ve got the capacity to do what you need them to do. You can have somebody that they have to work cross functionally with, like one of the teachers evaluate their cultural fit, and talk with them and ask them to tell stories. And here’s where asking people to tell stories is huge. So whether it’s STAR method or SAIL method, getting people to tell stories that demonstrate whatever the thing is that you’re looking for.
Chris Nichols:
I love that. For those that don’t know what Do you mind explaining a little bit more about the those two different stories? Yeah,
Unknown:
sure. So star has been around for a while. The probably the most famous big company that’s really famous for using STAR method very consistently in its interviewing is Amazon. And it’s situation tasks, actions, results. It’s a really great way to structure getting out of people. What was the situation? So you as the interviewer are going, Okay, how does that situation compare to one in our world? And then what did they have to do that can kind of get at the what did they do versus peers or their boss versus their team. Now, if their team did it, they kind of get the credit. But sometimes it gets a little squishy about who did what, and then the actions that were taken, and then the results. And it’s a great format. Depending on your culture, though, and depending on how much you value certain kinds of emotional intelligence, which, quite frankly, isn’t typically valued in a lot of startups, but more so in some of our tech communities outside of Silicon Valley. So one of the cool things about working with outside Silicon Valley tech companies is, we see, I’m bringing best practices from Silicon Valley. But sometimes I’m also encouraging leaving behind the lessons learned what Silicon Valley doesn’t do well. And one of the things that I love to see is the SAIL method, that situation, action, impact, and learnings and learnings I love. Because that means that the person whether they are 24 year old engineer, or a 45 year old sales leader, they actually have thought through what they learned from that experience. And that can really tell you whether you’ve got a winner that you want on your team. It’s huge.
Chris Nichols:
I appreciate you sharing both of those because it just goes to show the thought that can go into the interview process in general, right? Because I see so many companies that just kind of winging out, do I feel good, it made me feel good. I feel like I could connect with them. Those Those sorts of things. So because of that, and maybe it’s a good lead into the follow up there is what are companies missing? Right? Like, what do they do poorly in the interview process? So so that way, if I’m listening into the podcast today, I can be like, Oh, wait, we do that? Maybe we should stop doing that. So what are some of those lessons that?
Unknown:
Yes. So I’d say three things. One is the you actually really aren’t clear about In fact, the poor recruiters are working from a bad job description. And you’re not clear about what you need for the person to be successful. So that’s one. The second is that you didn’t build interview questions to assess what will make the person successful. And the third is one of my favorite entertaining stories. This was a client with this actually the same company with the teachers working with the engineers, they had a highly, they already had a structured interview process, I didn’t have to teach them how to do that they already had one. Their problem was this. They had such a structured interview process, there was no human to it. So we literally sat at these executive level meetings to make hiring decisions. And the conversation went like this. Candidate A scored a 3.4 on a level four and a 4.2. On a level three, we’re making an offer at 150 K at level three, all in favor. Every single hire was done that way. And my mind was just blown. I like okay, I love teaching people to have structure, I build scoring rubrics to teach you to keep kind of keep score. But these are human beings and everybody who works for you is a human being. And they are not a number. You can have the numbers, and then you can look and say, Okay, now let’s talk as humans. And if you mix both of those, you’re going to make smarter decisions.
Chris Nichols:
That’s a That’s fascinating. Also somewhat concerning for education and technology companies. So I guess it’s par for the course. So this has been fantastic Wendy so far. So you, you’ve talked about designing talent strategy for fast growth startups, early stage startups, advising C level executives on when to hire who to hire. Talk about what that process looks like. I you know, maybe I’m I’ve launched a company or I want to launch a company, maybe I’ve got 10 employees. When you come in, what kind of questions are you asking? What are you trying to understand about the company?
Arran Stewart:
Job.com is a HR technology company dedicated to providing the best digital recruitment platform and talent solutions on the market. Our mission at job is to remove the friction from the hiring process by delivering technology that creates more effective talent placement, better fit career moves, and a more human hiring process.
Unknown:
We start with who is already on the team? So is it two co founders? Or is it 10 people, and what the next stages, so I’ve worked with a company that had B Series funding some of their VPS were not the right people to lead those parts of those organizations, to through, C round funding, they weren’t the guy that was the VP of engineering, he needed to be running apart, he could not be a CTO of a C. Level company he couldn’t he was not that was not the right thing for him. Sometimes those are painful decisions, that that went really smoothly the CEO and I, I’d like to think that, you know, we handled that really well. The first thing I do if we’re talking smaller, for sure, but even for the for the smaller ones, it’s what do each of you bring to the table, whether it’s two of you, or five of you, what are your super powered strengths, one of the things you can do pretty darn well, if you have to keep doing them. Because until you’re about 100 employees, you’re wearing five hats, every person in that company is wearing five hats, two of them fit perfectly. And so that’s just the way it is pretty much until about B series about 100 employees. So what we look at is what is the thing you’re doing right now, when it’s two or five of you, that you got to get off your plate as soon as possible, because you’re gonna mess up. And you look at that you also look at personality. Sometimes if you’ve got two co founders, if they don’t bring if they’re pretty much the same kind of person, and have overlapping strengths, you need your next hire, to bring a completely different personality. If it’s left brain versus right brain, introvert versus extrovert, you need that difference. You just need to embed that into the organization. Then as you go through stages, whether it’s funding stages, SOT number of employees stages, number of customers, then you need to look at what do we need for our next step. So my sweet spot is I come into an organization when it’s time for it to grow up, which is ironic, because my name is Wendy and Peter Pan has about not growing up. And it’s time to create order out of chaos, because early early stage is just chaos. And so I am the order creator. If you embed me in a large organization filled with order, I will be bored out of my tears and you’re wasting your money. But if it’s time to create order, that’s one of my sweet spots, whether it’s operations or whether it’s from a talent perspective. And so you want to think about that for your company. If you’re a bunch of crazy, chaotic, brilliant idea, people, and you’ve got a few execution people, and you’re starting to get to about 50 people, what you need is you need an order creator, you need a Process Designer, and you need more execution people. And that’s what you need. So it’s about really assessing the talent each person on the team has and where the gaps are, and then filling those gaps with an eye to what’s our next stage of development because companies are like children. And so your newborn needs different things from you as a parent than your two year old than your kindergartener than your fifth grader. And the company said the same way.
Chris Nichols:
I respond very nicely here to your comment about being an order creator, I totally get it. And what I find is that those individuals who need an order creator don’t often realize that they need an order creator at the right time, right. Usually coming in to quite the chaos so and change management, especially with with founders is oftentimes difficult, right? Because they were really good at the idea stage. And, and to your point earlier about these VPS aren’t the right people to get us get us to the next stage. kind of stuck with the founders, usually like some founders have enough self awareness that they’re like, Hey, I know that I’m not the right person to be the CEO. I know that I’m not the right person to do this. But that’s not often the situation. So how do you deal with those types of situations when you’re working with founders who may not know when to let go?
Wendy Taylor:
Well, it’s actually a place where I’m a good partner for a VC. Because usually the VC, first of all, a lot of what I do is the stuff that isn’t in VC wheelhouse, but VCs will decide, sometimes for very good reason, this person really cannot be the CEO of this company has potential with this person can still maybe run product for the next year or so. But they cannot be CEO, we need to bring in a grown up, you know, that kind of thing. And so, in that scenario, and the grown up phrase I’m using from a Silicon Valley perspective, where you see so many founders under 35, obviously, and a lot of our outside of Silicon Valley tech communities were a little smarter about embracing founders who are over 35, and even over 45. But, but so I’m a good partner for, for those VCs in that circumstance, to sit down with that founder, and, and kind of coach them through some self awareness, and figure out how to have it be a win for them. Because frankly, doing the stuff that makes you a good CEO is, if that is really a bad fit, they are actually miserable. They just don’t want to let go. And if you can make it respectful, and you can make it a win win. And sometimes I’ve seen places where the VCs just got rid of people, and I got rid of founders, and there were ugly conversations, and that’s what they did. But ideally, you you have someone who can kind of come in from a human perspective and help that person see, okay, my baby’s growing up, and now, now it needs something else. And here’s the role I should play. And that that’s the best thing for everyone.
Chris Nichols:
I think that the other day, you mentioned the age component. And I believe I saw a number I think maybe you have the exact number, but I thought it was something like companies that have founders that are 39 years old or older, have like a 60 some odd percent chance more of being successful. Now, how do you quantify success? I don’t know. But, you know, I think when you look at the location of Silicon Valley, and its proximity to Berkeley, and Stanford, and then you throw in, you know, we talked about Ivy League earlier, and how so many of those individuals maybe, instead of going to New York City to work in the finance industry now, you know, they’re embarking across the country, to go out west. And I think that’s, we talked earlier about kind of the culture and young people getting involved, I think when you go to a place like that, you come out believing that you probably already know, as much as you need to know. Right? Yes. Experience, your knowledge and your experience. And so I think that’s why you see a difference. And, you know, other places in the country, I think people are much more humble in their engagements and more humble in what they believe to be finding the right product fit match, right, like, Yeah, I think a lot of young people think that they can solve challenges and problems, and they can, but the reality is who’s gonna buy it? Or is there a market for it? And so you often see, tech startups fail for that reason alone is that, was it really a market for somebody to come in and buy this idea, but not necessarily marketable? So no, great, great thoughts? What what do you see as being their the biggest challenges to overcome and some of that growth stage hiring? You know, you talked earlier about needing to find engineers that can can talk to kindergarten teachers, right? How do they? Are most of them aware of their of the things that they have to overcome? Or do they just have to be exposed to them? And if so, how do you typically go about doing that?
Wendy Taylor:
So I would say generally, that companies certainly knew, we expect our engineers to talk to teachers, but generally speaking, there was a lot of lack of self awareness in a lot of the companies I’ve worked with. And sometimes when I would coach on interviewing, I would hear oh, in my tremendous experience, conducting interviews, and they said, Oh, how many have you done? 25? Like, okay, would you like to hear some thoughts from somebody who said, 12,000. But, um, as far as the awareness, it’s it. So I’ll give. Here’s an example. I had one cmo I’ve worked with multiple times. And the first time I met him, he was he was, you know, getting to the point where you would expect some maturity, but he was still stuck on. Ivy League equals intelligent. And he didn’t believe that there was a way to interview to assess intelligence other than check to see where they went to school. Ironically, he went to Berkeley in one of the least competitive majors at Berkeley. So he had he was still 20 years later, kind of getting over or his not being able to get into the more demanding majors at Berkeley. And so his way to make up for that was to try and recruit talent that he thought was smarter than him. And it took some convincing that I could assess intelligence without relying solely on where the person went to school. Beyond my own personal experience. Sure. And so that’s that’s that was how I did with him is I showed him here’s the questions we can ask, here’s how we can assess it, look at this. And the next time I worked with him, he was so over that there was no more of that. IV, only IV Berkeley Stanford only hiring requirement that was gone. So it’s sometimes you can only get it incrementally. And what that means is that they’re not going to make all the best hiring decisions, because they’re just not ready. And in part, because if you do have founders and early management teams that haven’t managed before, then they don’t have any experience to rely on. They haven’t made bad hiring mistakes, and they haven’t made bad management mistakes, because they don’t have any experience with that. And that’s why you actually put a lot of people in Silicon Valley, even in their 20s and early 30s. And they’ll say, I won’t work for a founder who’s under 35. Because of the experiences they’ve had, even though that’s their peer, and that’s really kind of interesting. And I don’t mean to disrespect, you know, they’re brilliant young minds. And I love working with them in I love, especially working with him in the outside of Silicon Valley tech communities, because I see a little bit more openness, to your point, to perspective to wisdom to other thoughts, that kind of thing. And that’s particularly, you know, really rewarding, because I know that then I can really help them.
Chris Nichols:
Sure. That’s absolutely right. I get it. Because if they’re seeking outside counsel in the first place, yeah, that definitely means they have some level of self awareness. Or maybe the VC just said, you need to go talk to somebody, right? Yeah, exactly. One of the two, the two things there, right, so windy. One last topic that I want to hit on is board advisors, I think when you if you hop on LinkedIn, and you spend any kind of time there at all, you see lots of people have varying degrees of experience, working in quote, unquote, board advisor roles, not Board of Director roles, but they’re their advisors to startup companies, maybe they’re friends of the founders, etc. But in my experience, that the founders that I’ve talked to have mostly had bad experiences with these advisor type roles. I have a theory as to why that that could be but I would love to hear from you why you think founders, what role advisors should play you know, before you have a well functioning Board of Directors where you can pay people and have really senior level people, what, what role should a board of advisors fulfill? And and how do you you see companies maybe use it more effectively?
Wendy Taylor:
Great question. So the way I look at it is that an advisory board should be a safe space, where you can actually admit to the stuff that you really don’t want to admit to out to the world, out to the tech community where you live out to VCs and potential VCs. So safe space, first of all, caring and committed to your success and your idea of success. But beyond that, what you want is you want to make sure that they’re bringing serious experience, doing the things that you’re trying to do. And they end if you have more than one of them. Ideally, they each come from a different perspective. So one of them could know your customers and that market really, really well either from the kind of from a Chief Revenue Officer perspective, whether that’s sales or marketing, that would be really valuable. It’d be great if that person knew how to grow a revenue team. But that knowledge of the market that would be valuable, somebody who understands the challenges of leadership of you know, the the role I would play as a strategic advisor, someone who understands the challenges of the leadership, who can help assess where your weaknesses are, and figure out how to get those built up as fast as possible in the best way possible. Whether that’s another strategic advisor or whether that’s a first hire, or somebody who’s a fractional leader, that kind of thing. So that’s, that’s a roll out And then technically, you can think about that. Now, that being said, you want to be careful, I remember talking to someone and their technical adviser was very big on outsourcing everything to India. And I said, So initially, that could have some cost savings, and that person had deep ties and knew the people and could vet for quality. And that was wonderful. But as you grew, you probably wanted some engineering talent in the US. And you needed to figure out how to do that. And if he was really attached to all being offshore, that might cause some problems for your company. So to some degree, the advisors have to be able to kind of grow with you, too. And understand, okay, yes, day one, let’s outsource this thing, whether it’s outsourcing marketing to, you know, a small agency down the street, or engineering offshore to what do we do at the next stage, and that kind of thing, and they’ve got to be able to grow with you. And they’ve got to have literal or figurative, gray hairs? I don’t have a lot of them, but I have a lot of figurative gray hairs. And they do need to have that for sure. So I would say that those are some of the things I think there are a lot of people who just think they know everything. And they think it looks cool. And so they put that they put that on their LinkedIn profile. And it’s like, I’m an advisor, and I tell people what to do. And sometimes they really have no clue what that founder needs. And that’s probably how some of those go wrong.
Chris Nichols:
Yeah, I think the companies that have advisors that are that are effective are those that have self awareness, they’re willing to admit their flaws. They’re willing to take advice from others. at it, there’s a lot of opportunity to use advisors. But we get, we get so caught up in the day to day of what we’re doing, that we think that we have all the answers right, or that we’re alone in this endeavor. And I think that, you know, having a small group of advisers that you can bring together every so often and talk to them about what you’re doing, especially when you’re a small company, right? When you have, you know, founder LED or you only three to five employees, that outside perspective is everything because maybe you’re missing things that you mentioned earlier experiences matter. gray hairs matter, you get, you know, seeing some seeing life helps a lot when running businesses Exactly. Anything else you want to add to this conversation today, it’s been wide ranging from interviews to teaching board advisors, but any other advice for anybody listening, whether they’re recruiters or their their leaders and companies.
Wendy Taylor:
So with the recruiters, I just will say out to the recruiters Hang in there, it’s not a real happy time for you right now. Think about how you can support people in their job searches as an alternative way to kind of ride out bad times when you do lose your job. Hit me up if you need some thoughts on that. And also, do your best and also for the recruiters do your best to try and earn that capacity to become a trusted adviser. And so do everything you can to be worthy of it. And then do everything you can to make the case for your hiring managers that that’s who you are you your job as a recruiter will be far more rewarding. And you will be far more effective. And you have the potential to make far more money if you can do that.
Chris Nichols:
Great advice, Wendy. Thanks again for coming on. You mentioned somebody reaching out to you How can what’s the best way for for listeners to reach out to Wendy Taylor.
Wendy Taylor:
So the best way to find me is on LinkedIn. I was the first Wendy on LinkedIn. So linkedin.com/in/Wendy Taylor, and you’ll see a lot of hair. And you’ll know you’ve come to the right place.
Chris Nichols:
Congratulations for being the first one detailer. I am not the first Chris Nichols, for many of us out there. So I can put my first initial in on mine. But no, it’s great to have you on and I would recommend connecting with you at the very least, you think you do a good job on on LinkedIn of engaging. So thank you again for coming on the Talent Tide podcast. That’s a wrap on another episode here. Please subscribe to us on YouTube. Follow us engage with us on Spotify on Apple podcasts. Anywhere you listen, you can find us. Thank you for listening in and we’ll see. We’ll see you soon. Thank you