Debugging Work

Derek Hatchard (00:10.414)
Okay, hello, Brad. Welcome to the podcast. It's good to have you here.

Brad (00:15.362)
Great to be here, Derek. Thanks for inviting me on.

Derek Hatchard (00:17.746)
I'm excited for this conversation. You and I met just in the last month or so, and I've been really intrigued by your philosophy. let's start with just tell people listening a little bit about yourself, who you are, where you're situated in the world, and maybe most importantly, the business that you're building right now.

Brad (00:40.898)
first of all, we need to get you out more if you're excited about this conversation. so yeah, so my name is Brad Polo. I'm the founder CEO of candidate hub. I have a 20 plus 25 year plus experience background in sales, marketing recruitment. Most recently, I helped build a recruitment agency from the ground up.

Derek Hatchard (00:44.898)
you

Brad (01:10.102)
I've always sort of been passionate about marketing and I've always ever known enough about marketing to hurt myself. And so I kind of stumbled on the opportunity to bring all of that together with Candidate Hub and which I'm sure we'll get into what all that's about. yeah, so I kind of one of those weird

You don't see sales and recruitment experience together a lot, but yeah, that's my background.

Derek Hatchard (01:45.326)
Excellent. So, okay, let's talk about candidate hub. I think that's important context. So tell me more. Pretend I don't know anything.

Brad (01:56.797)
So Candidate Hub is actually a brainchild of the pandemic. So something good did come out of it. When the pandemic hit, it really shut down recruitment completely. So I had nothing better to do. So I decided I was going to talk to some recruiters. in one of our sessions we were on the other day, we were talking about problem discovery calls.

I did a bunch of them. I had nothing else to do. So I'm like, hey, why might as well talk to recruiters? And I talked to candidates too. And overwhelmingly, I kept getting the same response to this one question that I asked. If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about the process, what would you change? And overwhelmingly, recruiters kept saying, I just want quality candidates in my inbox every day. And my first reaction to that was I just want a million dollars. What's your point?

and, then candidates kept saying, I just want to hear back from recruiters. Like I apply for a job and I go into this black hole. Nobody, like, just get this thing. No, like if it's a no, just say no. and so it kind of reminded me of, know, when you're, scrolling through, back for us, older people.

Um, that remember Kijiji when it first came out or Craigslist, if you're in the U S you'd scroll through and you'd see an ad that said wanted one ladder. And then the next ad would say for sale one ladder. It's like, why aren't you two people talking to each other? Um, I kind of felt that that was the problem that was happening in recruitment. And the more I got thinking about, you know, this scenario where recruiters just wanted quality candidates in their inbox every day.

yeah, my first reaction was, yeah, I want a million dollars. Like, but, I got thinking about it and I was like, wait a minute. We do this for salespeople. We give salespeople quality leads every day. What are the most likely prospects to want to buy our solution right now? Right. And that's done using tools like marketing automation and lead scoring and things like that. So.

Brad (04:18.146)
I was like, why, why can't we do this in recruitment? And I, I found there was another company that was doing it. Um, one other company. And, uh, so I reached out to the CEO of that company and we had a chat and I told him, I wanted to build a company just like his, and, uh, he was very supportive. Um, and, uh, that's how candidate hub was born. So candidate hub is essentially, um, a marketing automation solution built specifically for recruitment. So.

We help companies save 90 % or more on their sourcing costs by helping them to nurture candidates and convert candidates much faster.

Derek Hatchard (05:05.245)
is okay let me let me ask you the right question here the

you go through a process as a candidate and you get to a point where you've talked to someone, they filled the role, you were the second pick, something like that, you get the classic. We'll hold on to your resume for future reference. Can you unpack a little bit, like what is actually going on in most companies in their recruiting department or at a recruiting agency? Like what is really happening and how does

Like how does your software, or maybe even how does your philosophy change the way that recruiters should approach that relationship with their candidates?

Brad (05:52.684)
Well, the ever hear the saying the biggest lie the devil ever told was convincing the world he didn't exist. the biggest lie that recruiters ever tell is we'll keep your resume on file. in sales, it takes four or five attempts, if not more to close a sale in recruiting, we're notoriously one and done. So

Derek Hatchard (05:59.863)
Hmm. Yeah.

Brad (06:22.376)
I interview you Derek for a role and I interview somebody else comes right down to it. I hire the other person for whatever reason. and I'll tell you that I'll keep your resume on file and I'll reach out if something else ever comes up. And then six months later, I need to hire another salesperson or whatever it is. So what do I do? I start all over again. I post a job on a job board.

I source candidates, I go through a bunch of interviews, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When I have this perfect candidate who six months ago wanted the job, it may still want it, but I never follow up. I never talk to you again, unless I go buy your data again and you apply for the job. And it's not necessarily because it's the recruiter's fault. It's just easier.

ATS systems, applicant tracking systems aren't built well for nurturing, storing candidate data to go back and find it. They're just, they're really good at moving people through the interview and hire process. That's what they're built for. So we built a software that will pull those candidates out of the applicant tracking system, put them into

I was talking to a prospect the other day and he called it a virtual bench and I love this theory. It's, it's a, you essentially virtual benches, where, know, you're, you're building up a prospect pool of potential candidates in different verticals within your company. whether it's marketing, sales, whatever, you know, we create these segments of groups of candidates, these virtual benches of candidates that you can market to.

and reach out to and very with very personalized content at scale and capture their engagement score them on their engagement and let your recruiters know sort of which candidates are most engaged so you are actually going back to those candidates you're not just sort of cycling through them and buying them over and over again you know you're going back to them we actually pulled recruiters

Brad (08:43.842)
excuse me, we actually pulled recruiters and the stat that we identified that 10 % of recruiters actually go back to the database.

Derek Hatchard (08:55.458)
So, okay, I've heard you quote that stat before and I've just been here waiting for you to say it again, because that blows my mind. Like, I just cannot believe that. It's shocking.

Brad (09:10.454)
Yeah, it blows my mind. I talked to somebody else who said that they did a similar study and they came up with 12%. So I don't think I'm far off. it really, but like I said, it's not, I don't think it's their fault. think it's just, it's kind of like, you when you buy a computer and you get it home and you plug it in, out of date. So the same thing with an applicant tracking system, right?

Data goes out of date fairly quickly. So recruiters are relying more on tools like LinkedIn because they feel the information is more accurate, more up to date.

Derek Hatchard (09:49.87)
So let's, can you maybe compare and contrast how this might play out in a couple of different fields? how would this be different? And let me back up a second. So my background is software products, software engineering. We went through our heydays where recruiters were just beating down your door and you could kind of just, at any point, you could just raise your hand and say like,

Yeah, okay, now I'm willing to talk to you. If you've ever seen the show Silicon Valley, they made fun of this where this guy, he updates LinkedIn, he starts immediately getting gift baskets sent to his house from recruiters. And now we've come into a different era for software developers where it's harder to even figure out which companies really have jobs because of ghost job postings.

Brad (10:29.388)
Yeah.

Brad (10:45.927)
don't, don't get me started on that.

Derek Hatchard (10:47.598)
Let's, I want to come back to that. So that was on my list of things I wanted to talk about. can you compare, contrast, you know, maybe the experiences of say the tech industry with something like say local healthcare, where I have a, you know, my candidate pool are, you know, people who have particular credentials sort of within my geography, or I'm going to have to move people in. Can you maybe just talk about that so that if we have different types of people listening, they sort of know

what your message is, not just to them, but to the types of recruiters who would be recruiting them.

Brad (11:23.604)
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, let's I'm not going to, you know, sugarcoat it. Our approach is a long game. It's it's it speeds up your process in the long run, but it takes time to get set up. It takes time to get it sort of really cycling on all four cylinders. So if you're doing a lot of.

like front end recruiting, I call it like you're looking for merchandisers in a store, maybe not the what you want to do or if you're hiring once a year, not really your solution. But if you're in a situation where you're hiring software developers in the day, now the position is nursing and doctors where they can really just pick where they want to go, right? Like, and they're not on indeed, you're not going to find a doctor in the world on indeed right now.

Derek Hatchard (12:22.015)
You

Brad (12:22.652)
if they are, you probably don't want to talk to them. No offense. so it's, it's really difficult as a recruiter to find that candidate and get to them faster than anybody else. And so what our vision is, is using sort of combining an e-commerce style approach with traditional B2B SDR philosophy.

with lead scoring and automation and stuff like that. So if you think about,

say Amazon, you know, Amazon can personalize buying duct tape. So why can't we personalize the job experience? If you are hiring really in demand, low supply positions like software developers in the day, doctors, nurses now, data analysts are still pretty high in demand.

things like that, then you need to create a virtual bench. And I've done this comparison before. I don't know if you've heard me talk about this yet, but the three ways to build a championship team are free agency, trades, or drafting. And those three apply in recruitment as well. So in recruitment speak free agency,

You know, in if you're not a sports fan, free agencies essentially where you know, somebody's contract is expired. They're now on the free agent market and anybody in the league can sign them. Well, that that market is really competitive. So it's going to cost you a lot of money. You have to outbid everybody else in the in the league. That would be, you know, the people that are on those job boards. That's the candidates that are applying to jobs. They're

Brad (14:28.322)
unemployed or they know they're leaving and they're actively applying. The other way is trades, which is also costly because I now have to give up assets, right? If I'm trading for a player, I have to give up a prospect. I have to give up an existing roster player, whatever it might be in recruitment. That's, you know, essentially going to a staffing firm.

Trying to get somebody to come from another another company. It's gonna cost you it's gonna cost you 25 % of their salary It's it's still an expensive approach the one that true fans really know about and really pay attention to is the draft So in the draft I pick a can I pick a player I? Mean unless is Connor Bredard who walks into the league the year after he's drafted most players don't

play in the professional league for three or four years. So they're drafted. They go back to the minor league teams they're playing with. They work on their skills. They hone their craft. You know, they're not ready for a spot with the big club today, but we know that they're going to have the talent that we're going to need in three years. Recruitment has that too. We're just not doing anything with it. So if I'm recruiting for positions and I've got

a limited pool of candidates, then I should be looking at the candidates that are not quite there yet. You know, the ones coming out of school, the ones that are a year or two away from getting their license, the ones that are not quite yet eligible to work in our country, but are trying to get here. You know, those candidates that aren't there yet, but they're going to be in a year or two. And I need to start working with them. I need to start nurturing them. I need to start getting in their head. I need to entertain them.

I need to educate them so that when they're ready, they want to work. They want to get a call up to your club. They want to play for your team.

Derek Hatchard (16:39.822)
So what does that look like for the, well actually for both sides of the relationship, the recruiter and the candidate, what are the new things you're asking the recruiter to do there? And what would I be experiencing if I'm kind of, if you have your sights on me?

You know, maybe I, mean, one of the examples that, you know, I think is, we'll be familiar to hiring managers is you had a candidate that you really liked and they took a different job, but you know, two or three years from now, they might be back on the market, which I assume that this would fall into sort of in this umbrella of ideas, but like, what does that look like? What, what new things are you asking both sides of the relationship to do in order to nurture those draft picks as an example?

Brad (17:26.528)
Yeah. So funny enough, the recruiter actually isn't doing anything really super different other than they don't have to source candidates as much. They call candidates that are wanting to talk to them. The burden then falls if you want to call it that on a recruitment marketing team. you know, much like in sales, if we're doing B2B sales, you have your marketing team who develops

marketing leads, we call them MQLs, and then you have your sales team that tries to close those deals. So you have your marketing qualified leads and your sales qualified leads. So recruiters are still going to probably do some sourcing. They're going to find candidates on LinkedIn or whatever that they really want to talk to. And they're going to try to go out and get them. They're not going to do anything really any different than they are now. The recruitment marketing team is going to do what marketing has been doing for

25 years and that is sending engagement content educational content entertaining content putting stuff on social media emails text message campaigns all of this stuff to keep a candidate sort of entertained and keep a candidate engaged with our brand so that when they are you know in sales and marketing we call it in market out of market

in recruitment, we call it active and passive. But when that candidate has switched from their out of market and now they're in market because of whatever reason we want them to want to come to work for us. So the recruitment team is actually doing the same thing. They're screening candidates, talking to candidates, interviewing candidates, putting candidates in front of hiring managers, et cetera. But the

marketing team is now focused on making sure that we're bringing those candidates through the pipeline.

Derek Hatchard (19:35.182)
I see. I think Shopify did something like this targeting engineers a bunch of years ago. Yeah, okay. Can you remember more of that than I can? It's been a while since I saw it.

Brad (19:42.05)
100%.

Brad (19:49.362)
No, I don't remember specifics, but I do know that they that they did do that.

Derek Hatchard (19:53.326)
You

Derek Hatchard (20:00.472)
People listening have Google or chat GPT. One of those can explain it to them. Yeah

Brad (20:02.9)
Yeah, they can probably go look at it. A good example, one of my favorite examples of it now company that's doing a fairly decent job of entertaining and educating potential candidates is a company called Go Auto. They do. Yeah, they're they're an automotive dealership, right? They have they sell, buy and fix cars. And so, you know,

Derek Hatchard (20:21.454)
Auto like an automobile.

Okay.

Brad (20:32.682)
anybody in automotive knows the hardest position to hire is mechanics. I used to redo mechanics when I was in heavy equipment, in the staffing industry. and, so they, they do a series of entertaining commercials. I, there's quite a few of them that I could think of, but if you go look up, go auto, and go to their YouTube channel, you'll see their recruitment videos. They're not putting it's, not

words on a page, on a job board, it's entertaining content and they're getting people to engage with it and getting people to convert through that channel as opposed to posting words on a job.

Derek Hatchard (21:17.364)
Okay, I will look that up and then I will put it in the show notes as well because that sounds really interesting.

Brad (21:24.8)
I'll make sure I send you my favorite video you can tag it. It's called Don't Work For Beer.

Derek Hatchard (21:30.21)
Okay. Don't work for beer. I just like these, I like these ideas. And as you talk about this, and I can hear how you you're weaving the sales background and recruiting background together. just like, it makes so much sense and sense intuitively. One of the things that used to frustrate me working in a larger tech company was getting all of these resumes, only hiring one person. I'll give you an example.

I had to hire for a role and I wanted an internal candidate, but the posting still goes up publicly and I get all kinds of resumes. And I think the recruiters screened, I don't know, I several thousand people and gave me 60 resumes at the end of it. And I had 60 resumes of really qualified people, none of whom I wanted to hire, but somebody in the company should have hired them.

And all of that effort was for not because they were basically just filling a pipeline for my one head count that I already knew I wasn't going to fill with an external candidate. It felt horrible. It felt horrible to me. I had to feel horrible for the candidates. have no idea that like recruiters are talking to them and they have no shot. all of it's horrible. And then they're just going to get a, this role wasn't for you email at the end of it and have to reapply later and get these warning messages from.

workday saying you shouldn't apply for more than three jobs per year, which just makes like none of that makes any sense to me. It all seems broken.

Brad (23:03.464)
Yeah. my gosh. Yeah. And I mean, there's certain situations where there's, you know, in unionized environments where the collective bargaining agreements and you have to post this externally and you got to do this internally and blah, blah, blah, right? And there's not much you can do about that. You just, you've got to play the game. You got to, you got to follow the rules. You got to check the boxes, but you don't have to waste the effort.

Right? don't like those 60 candidates.

could maybe they weren't the ones that you wanted for that role, but any one of them could have potentially filled that role. And so if you did it right, you could nurture those candidates and have them at the ready so that the next time you needed to fill that role, you could go back and say, look, these 10 candidates are still watching their social media content. They're still on our career site. You know, this guy was on our career site yesterday. Let's give him a call. See if he's looking for something. You know, if he's on a career site, he might be looking for a job.

Derek Hatchard (24:07.544)
Yes, that's such a great idea.

Brad (24:09.044)
Right? So why not keep that those 60 candidates in a pipeline and nurture them and send them emails and send them text messages and feed them social media content and see who's engaging with it. I've used this analogy to if you were working for a car dealership and you had to make one, it was Friday afternoon, you were on your way out and you wanted to make one more phone call before you left.

Would you rather call somebody who's done a building price, somebody who's been into the dealerships, done a test drive, you know, maybe really engages with your social media content. So, you know, they really love the brand. Or would you rather call somebody that filled out a form six months ago and you haven't heard from since? call are you going to make? Pretty easy, right? Recruiters don't know that today.

Derek Hatchard (25:01.72)
Right. Yeah.

Brad (25:05.346)
They don't know which candidates are most engaged. They don't know which ones are still kicking around on their website. They don't know which candidates have necessarily applied in the past. So if we can give them a list of here are the candidates that are really, really qualified. Like we have one client that they do have a lot of high volume candidates. high. Like they have a high volume application situation with one of their roles and they have certain criteria that like

it's healthcare. So they have to have certain schooling and they have to have this they have to have that and there's some hard yes knows right. And so we can filter based on those hard yes knows and the ones that are knows it's like okay, so you don't qualify but here's what you can do or you know, thanks but no thanks. And then the ones that are you know, sort of meet the criteria. It's like here's the list for the recruiters to go through. now instead of having

a thousand resumes to screen, have 200 or instead of having 60, you have 10, right? and so you like we're, we're saving that recruitment team, 13 hours a week, just with that one campaign. And so there's, there's so much that you can do to make the experience better because even those candidates that are not getting the job are getting notified. They're

Sorry, you're not a permanent resident in Canada or you're not legally entitled to work in this country, but here's what you can do to fix that. That's better than, sorry, we've moved on with a different candidate. And it's not taking up any of the recruiter's time. The system's doing it for them.

Derek Hatchard (26:55.214)
Love that so much. And the not taking up the candidates time is fantastic. So, okay. So, you know, this podcast is called debugging work and I really see sort of, you know, three, three or four major stakeholders here. Right. So there's, there's the recruiter, you know, there's the, there are the candidates, there's the hiring manager, there's the, you know, the recruiting marketer and candidates in particular, but

In many cases, the hiring managers, they don't have a lot of insight into all of the machinations that are going on in the recruiting world unless they ask their inquisitive and ask lot of questions. So part of why I want to have this conversation is I think that this is insightful to many different people to understand sort of what's going on and hopefully to build a little bit of empathy. think a lot of people would, a lot of individuals who are job hunting would be surprised to hear that the tools for recruiters don't make it easy to do the things that seem obvious.

But this is not just, you know, this is not a big commercial for candidate hub. I've got, I've got a couple other topics I want to ask you about here. And what is, want to come back to the, to the ghost job postings, because this is something I coach people on a lot is, they, just, all they do is they, they apply on LinkedIn and they apply on Indeed for jobs and they don't hear back from anybody. And they are shocked when I tell them that, you know, some percentage, possibly 25 % of those jobs literally don't exist. It's just companies.

opposing so they look like they're growing. And I'm sure you have strong opinions on that. So I would love to hear you rant or pontificate about that practice and hopefully why it's broken. If you don't think it's broken, I'll be shocked.

Brad (28:30.903)
to

It's not only broken, it's extremely unethical. So there's two things that you touched on there and that that strike a bit of a nerve. So we'll go to the ghosting the ghost positions.

People in the industry think it's not happening anymore because companies know better, but it's still happening and short still happening. And essentially people are using it to create a virtual bench. So it's like, I'm going to put out a job to see what's out there.

I'm not hiring right now, but I just want to put a job out there to see what's out there. And you're starting to see some legislation coming in around job postings with like salary and stuff, which is all, I think, really good. And I think you're going to see it become illegal to position without actually having a position to hire for. At least I hope it does. There's much better ways to create talent pools.

then then just putting out a job ad for the sake of putting out a job ad to see what's out there. Like it's you're not doing your company any good. You're not doing the recruiters any good. You're not doing the candidates any good. It's it's just bad unethical practice. So if you're doing that, please stop. There's there's a million different ways you could be doing it.

Brad (30:05.916)
The other one is, you you talk about debugging work and hiring managers, and I think hiring managers need to have hiring as a KPI. Because they so many times when I was in the staffing industry, they get a call from the recruiter to be like, I need you to drop everything. We have this really important role. We need it filled right away. Like, okay, no problem.

I'll call the hiring manager, have a conversation with them, call them up. It's like, if I can find you three candidates tomorrow, like this just job is really important, right? Like, so I'll do whatever you need. I do whatever you need. Okay. If I can find you three candidates tomorrow, can you interview Thursday? Well, no, we're pretty busy this week. I'm on vacation the week after. Um, and then it'll take me some time to get caught up. So I could probably interview in two weeks. So those are two different things. And.

So in candidates move so fast these days, like you have days, if not hours, not weeks, right? So hiring managers need to prioritize recruitment and it needs to be a KPI in their I think in their in their job description of, you know, hiring is important, like one of the top.

Components because that's as a manager. That's your your responsibility is building and coaching your team, right? So If you have a hole to fill your You're putting a lot of stress on the other members of the team that are trying to keep up with that and so you need to prioritize taking the stress off of them and filling that role because Candidates aren't going to wait two weeks. It's just not gonna happen

Derek Hatchard (32:05.302)
You just gave me a great poll quote there for this episode. That's, I'm, I'm clapped. not to clap. I don't want to always come through the microphone, but I'm, I'm silently clapping.

Brad (32:15.074)
You just have to put in the clapping sound.

Derek Hatchard (32:21.208)
Yeah, okay. will, I will, maybe I'll do that. Depends if Riverside lets me do that. the, this is so much fun. we are getting, we're getting, long on time. I want to ask you, I want to ask your thoughts on one other thing, which is this, the state of the world. And it's not across all industries, but I know you'll have insight into it, which we live in a, you we live, we live in the same province in Canada, which has.

It doesn't have a lot of big corporate headquarters or a lot of people, certainly in my industry, who are working remotely from here. I spent a lot of years working either in distributed or remote teams. as the pandemic sent everyone home and there was this at least temporary embracing of remote work, suddenly it felt like if you were doing work at a computer,

you could do it from anywhere. And so when people started applying for jobs, they were no longer competing with a particular people in a particular geography, but they were competing with the whole world, or at least competing with candidates in any kind of aligned time zone. Curious what you think about this new paradigm that we're in where there are so many resumes and you've got on the one hand,

recruiters complaining about all these AI generated cover letters and these AI tuned resumes that they're getting and then candidates looking at the numbers saying like, if I don't apply for a thousand jobs, I don't hear back from anybody. It feels a little broken. I kind of just want to hear your thoughts on that. I don't have a well-formed question for you.

Brad (34:00.706)
Well, again, I picked out a couple of things there. Atlantic Canada used to thrive on the idea that we could compete globally. We could compete locally for global talent based on our way of life, right? We can get people to come here and enjoy our way of life and

They're going to, we can afford to pay less because they're not going to be paying the, the salary or they're not going to have to pay for, know, that condo downtown Toronto that they have right for a million bucks. Um, so we don't have to pay the higher wages. We don't have to do this. We don't have to do that because we have such a laid back, cheaper lifestyle here in Atlantic Canada. And it's true. do. The problem is now

we have to compete locally against the world, right? So it's flipped because people can live here and work for that company in Toronto and earn that wage from that company in Toronto. And so we need to completely rethink our recruitment strategy on how we're going to attract people to the industries here in Atlanta, Canada.

and we also need to think outside the box and how we're going to keep people within local companies. I remember one time somebody telling me, when the Memorial cup is in St. John's like, you know, it's going to be such, it's going to be so good for recruitment for the city, you people in St. John, cause everyone's going to see us on the grand stage and think, I want to live there. And I'm like, that is such a load of crap. It's not going to do a

darn thing for, you know, the recruitment industry. It's it, it's not, it's just not like we're not there anymore. so it's, it's really important that we think of outside the box on what we're going to do to attract people in it. And it, it can't be just, we have a better way of life because

Brad (36:29.174)
That should be sealed.

Derek Hatchard (36:33.226)
And frankly, I have colleagues who work for large global companies. And while technically we have a laid back mode when you are working across time zones and you're on calls 12 hours a day, trying to stay aligned with people. Sure, you're not commuting two or three hours every day, but you're actually working.

all that time and you're not really getting the benefit. I like to brag to people that I, know, seven minutes from my front step, I can be in the woods and I can go walk my dog and literally not see another human being around for 20 or 30 minutes. And that is a privilege I get to enjoy because of where I live. But it comes, it does come with consequences. And one of those consequences is when you work in tech, you inevitably have a lot of colleagues on the West coast. And so I've spent

Brad (36:58.999)
Mm-hmm.

Derek Hatchard (37:27.402)
a lot of time on evening calls just in order to fit into other people's schedules. The dynamics are not, they're not simple. And you're right, just trying to assume that people are going to want to settle in a small community. And that doesn't just apply here. It applies in any kind of smaller, lower cost of area.

Brad (37:55.198)
100%. Yep.

Derek Hatchard (37:56.526)
I will, if I can just rant for a second, one of the things that it's very important term, but one of the terms that does really just drive me up the wall is the term cost of labor, which I watch people get, you people try to compare salaries across different geos within the same company. And they get told that, you know, even though you're doing the same work and, know, everyone's on remote calls that your, your labor is worth less because of where you live. These are complicated dynamics and there aren't, I don't know if there are good solutions for them. I, I've.

certainly run into companies that say, doesn't matter where you live, we pay you the same. And then I run into companies that are like, nope, we are going to index everyone's salary based on cost of labor in your particular city. Anyway.

Brad (38:40.674)
I think there's, there's an even more micro problem than that. Like, I mean, that's a pretty macro problem. Like that's a big problem. Right. But the other thing that I see happen a lot in this is more retention based than recruitment, but it's still important is, the, could probably count on one hand.

the number of companies that give accurate market pay raises. So like what I mean by that is I get hired today for a position at $60,000 a year. You know, I get into the company and I'm happy that I'm making $60,000 a year for two years time.

Um, you know, I've gotten my 2 % annual raise because of inflation. So I'm at $64,000 a year, but now the people that are doing that job, the market is demanding 90 grand a year. And so, um, there's very, very, very few companies that will actually go to that $60,000 employee and say, we're bumping you up to 90 grand because that's what you're worth.

And so what happens is, and there's actual numbers on this, the average raise year to year within a company is two to 5%. But the average raise going outside to an external company is 12 to 15. So we need to pay more attention to what the market is saying.

So not just I'm going to in Atlantic Canada pay what the same wages are in Toronto, but I'm going to pay within my department what the fair wages for that position because this is what it's going to cost me to replace you if I have to replace you.

Derek Hatchard (41:01.858)
I think I have this correct. One of the episodes of your podcast, I think one of your guests that was on talked about this exact problem and talking about the hiring managers or business owners kind of balking at the salary recommendations from the recruiters. And they're like, but we don't pay anybody that much money. And they're like, if you don't pay anybody that much money, everybody that's working for you is a flight risk. Like it creates this just existential risk for the business that isn't well accounted for.

Brad (41:22.752)
huh. Yep.

Brad (41:28.13)
Yeah, no, it's like, uh, I can't, well, we can't afford to give him a $15,000 raise. Say, okay, well then write me a $40,000 check. Well, what do you need that $40,000 check for to replace him when he leaves at the $15,000 higher salary that we're going to have to hire somebody for. Right. So it's going to cost you like 40 grand to replace the guy. Plus you're going to have to pay the $15,000 higher salary. So just give them the $15,000 higher salary.

Derek Hatchard (41:47.79)
Great.

Derek Hatchard (41:57.29)
I ran into this a lot at the last company I worked for that raises, raises never kept up with cost of living. when you started to talk to people who had 10 years of tenure that they had fallen so far behind and they really don't want to leave the company and the company doesn't have good mechanisms. They're all exceptional circumstances. It has to be a crisis to make adjustments and it's a shame.

Brad (42:07.542)
They never do.

Brad (42:25.418)
Yeah, 100, yeah.

Derek Hatchard (42:27.534)
Um, and so I, listen, I brought up your podcast there. I do want to, I do want to, if people find this stuff interesting, uh, you have episodes that I really enjoyed. just want to read off a couple of these are ones. don't know if these are ones that I liked, um, stop focusing on the 5%. That was, I, that was such a good episode. Um, uh, recruiter list recruiting, which I figured is probably, uh, it's a nice sort of rage bait title.

Brad (42:42.741)
that was a good one. James Ellis. love James Ellis. Yeah.

Brad (42:51.926)
That was Stan. Yep. With Stan, was an AI episode. We talked a lot about how AI could eventually replace recruiters.

Derek Hatchard (43:05.518)
And then what else did I like? I liked the business of recruitment. was another good one. And then unlocking millions, the ONTAP gold mining of your candidate database. was last year in May. that? Candidate hub was underway at that point, right? Yeah.

Brad (43:23.426)
Oh, yes. Yeah, we've been around for a while. That was more of a yeah, that started as a webinar and made it in its way in as a podcast. But I mean, that's essentially what what our philosophy is, right? Like you're sitting on a gold mine. It on average costs $20 to get a candidate into your applicant tracking system and which doesn't sound like a lot. But if you have 50,000 candidates, that's a million dollar asset that you've got that you're wasting. Right.

Derek Hatchard (43:54.094)
I quoted you that exact number to somebody last week.

Brad (43:54.272)
So.

Brad (44:01.026)
Nice. love it. But tell me there any other position within an organization that can literally waste a million dollar asset. Like picture this. You're a distributor. You have a warehouse full of product and customer walks in and says, I want XYZ and you've got 25 of them on the shelf.

But instead of going out back and selling them that one that you have on the shelf, you pay a premium to special order one in because it might just be a little bit better because it's newer. You don't charge them more though, right? You don't charge them more. You just bear that cost of bringing in a special ordered item because it's easier than going out and finding one out back. How long would that salesperson last?

Derek Hatchard (45:00.526)
I love that analogy. was trying to think, trying to think who else gets to waste a million dollar assets. I've got recruiting and Hollywood movie producers. think those are the only two I can think of.

Brad (45:12.588)
Probably the only two, yeah.

Derek Hatchard (45:15.564)
They, no one's going to know what I'm talking about, but the road runner movie that got shelved, it's disappointing. It's someone who grew up watching road runner on TV. Shows how old I am.

Brad (45:27.042)
There's millions wasted in Hollywood every year, but they make billions, so it's okay.

Derek Hatchard (45:32.878)
That is the accounting of the planet money or CBC front burner or some podcast I was listening to have a really good breakdown of like the accounting of Hollywood. It's fascinating. But not what we're here to talk about. We've gone way long. I want to switch to the lightning round so I can ask you a couple of questions and then we'll get wrapped up. So, Brad, what is a book, a podcast or a video, something that you recommend to people?

Brad (46:02.626)
So if you're interested in recruitment or HR or anything, highly recommend Chad and Cheese. They are HR's most dangerous podcast. Warning label, it is not a clean podcast. But they really stay up to date on latest tech.

trends, what's going on in the industry. So if you want to stay up to date on the recruitment industry, that's a really, really good one that I'd really highly recommend.

Derek Hatchard (46:41.23)
And then is there a person place product thing something that you would just like to shout out?

Brad (46:48.184)
my God, I could spend hours. Yeah, I mean, I have some real special people in my life that have helped along the way. One in particular, Adam Gordon, built a product called Candidate ID that...

was essentially an inspiration for candidate hub. And Adam is the CEO that I was talking about when I called him, he was like, how can I help he still helps me today. Even though he's sold candidate ID. He's got a new product that's out now. Adam and I think a lot alike in terms of what's working in sales and marketing and how can we make that work in

recruitment. And one of the things that's really going well, and is catching on a lot in sales and marketing is sales enablement. So Adam brought that, that idea to, to recruitment with, with the concept of recruiter enablement and launched a product called poetry, which is essentially just a place where you can store all of your job descriptions, your social content.

All of everything that you're doing so that you know You and I don't have to work in silos and you don't have to recreate everything and I recreate everything we can put it all together and Put playbooks together and things like that. So poetry Adam Gordon in poetry definitely worth a shout out

Derek Hatchard (48:20.34)
that sounds cool, actually. All right, we'll put a link for that in the show notes, too. Last question for you, Brad. What is the most important superpower to develop in the modern workplace?

Brad (48:33.11)
The ability to change. Technology is changing so fast, especially with the adaptation of AI. People can build product without even having coders these days. Stuff is coming out so fast. So we need to really think about the way we're doing roles and...

be willing to change and, and you hear about how AI is going to replace people and make people obsolete in different roles. You know, I think it's going to, it's going to be a little bit different than that. Like, you know, to me it's, we wouldn't have, Spotify and Apple music if it wasn't for Torrance.

and if you don't know what torrents are, you're not as old as I am. and, you know, we wouldn't, you know, people said that, DVDs were going to ruin the video industry, the movie industry. you know, Netflix changed the way we watch movies. so it.

Derek Hatchard (49:35.33)
you

Brad (49:54.74)
It just, it's gonna make us, the technology that's coming out today is gonna make us, it's not gonna take our job, it's gonna make us do our job differently. So the ability to be able to change and adapt quickly is what's gonna set people apart in the future.

Derek Hatchard (50:12.456)
I love that answer. Speaking of torrents, I'll make my own recommendation. How Music Got Free is a two-part documentary.

Yeah, two-part documentary. It's available on Paramount Plus. I don't know where else it's available, but it is about sort of the rise of file sharing. And it's really interesting how these CD masters ended up on the internet before the CDs got released. It's well worth the watch. Okay, so Brad, if people want to...

If they want to follow what you're doing, if they want to connect with you, what are the best places for them to find you on the internets?

Brad (50:55.534)
Definitely LinkedIn. Look me up on LinkedIn. My email is brad at candidate hub.io. Happy to chat with anybody who wants to reach out, but connect with me on LinkedIn. I love connecting with new people and I could talk out, know, obviously you can see how much I love talking about this stuff so we could talk for days about this stuff. So

Derek Hatchard (51:20.43)
I appreciate taking the time. This is such an important topic. I mean, I know you made fun of me for being excited about it, but recruiting affects everybody. It affects the, we all need a way to support ourselves. So all of us who are out there looking for jobs or creating jobs, we all need to connect. And like that is sort of like part of the heartbeat of modern society.

So this is really important. It affects people's lives. It affects people's mental health. So I appreciate you taking the time to talk about it and to rant a little bit. I think there's a lot of things that are worthy of a rant in this area.

Brad (51:52.258)
percent.

Brad (51:58.645)
Anytime.

Derek Hatchard (52:00.302)
All right, well thank you, Brad.

Brad (52:01.665)
All right, thank you.