Getting people hired | Katie Silver
Dave:
Katie, tell me about your job.
Katie:
Hi, Dave. Thanks. Sure.
I'm a recruiter. I work in recruiting and hiring. I mainly work with companies and teams that are growing or maybe a little stuck, and need to find people for important positions within their companies. I help them find great people.
Then I work with lots of job seekers, lots and lots these days, who are trying to find their next adventure. Through asking tons of questions and getting to know them, try to understand what makes them tick, what they're great at, and what's going to be fulfilling. Then I make matches between these companies and these wonderful people, and hope that everything works out well.
Dave:
Why is this your job? How did you find this career?
Katie:
Yeah, that's a good question. I think a lot of recruiters will tell you this. I sort of fell into it, but I've always been a little bit of a matchmaker. I'm dating myself, but if I think back to high school, I was like the master of the three-way calling, would think about who else needs to call, or when the junior highs come together, who should meet each other and who on one sports team should know somebody. I've just always been that way.
I'm a huge introvert. I don't like being the center of attention, but I love connecting people. I'm really curious about people. I think magical things can happen when you get the right people together. That happens in relationships. It also happens, of course, in the workplace.
I was in sales for a really long time. I think that's also very much matchmaking. Landed a job doing sales at a recruiting agency, a creative recruiting agency. That's where you and I met.
Got to know some wonderful recruiters through that work, really loved what they did, and felt like it was very much an extension of what I just did in my life. The sales skills were really helpful. Shifting from sales to recruiting, I got to focus a little bit more on the people side of things than closing a deal.
Dave:
Yeah.
Katie:
Though I still do that all the time, I'm still always closing deals. Yeah.
Dave:
When you say that, what does that mean in your context? Does it mean there's a company that needs a position filled, and you are closing the deal in the sense of finding the right person for that position? Or is it something different?
Katie:
It's that and. It's closing a deal with both a company and a candidate. What that might look like is if a company is trying to hire for a very specific role, like I do a lot of recruiting for computer scientists. These people are all employed. They're very hard to find. I have to sell them on the idea of this company that I'm supporting, what's great about them, and why they might want to leave their current position to step into the unknown. Then at the same time on the company side, I might meet a candidate who on paper doesn't check all of the boxes for the role that they're hiring for, but I know they're going to be incredibly successful, and I know that they are going to be an amazing hire for that organization. I have to sort of sell, "sell," I'm air quoting, the hiring managers and the leadership team on why they should take a chance on someone.
Dave:
Right.
Katie:
Yeah.
Dave:
What are the kinds of things that you've learned about what makes a good match in that sense?
Katie:
Oh, that's a big question. There are a couple of things. From a tactical standpoint, there needs to be the fundamental match between the thing the company is trying to accomplish in the role that they're hiring for, and the things that the person knows how to do. As like a very specific example, company is hiring an accountant, the candidate needs to know how to do accounting. That's fundamental. They need the skillsets. But I think the basic fundamental skillset for the role, and at the level that the company needs them to step into.
But beyond that, there's this matchmaking that's about way of working, alignment with ethos and values, the pace at which the company runs, and the pace at which the candidate wants to run, levels of curiosity, levels of, again, like just how we work and how the organization works. That part is the most interesting and the most complex.
I've learned that for me to be successful, I need to deeply understand how people work, and how they're going to thrive and where they might get stuck and the type of support that they might need. I also need to deeply understand how an organization works, and do they meet each other?
Dave:
Right.
Katie:
Yeah.
Dave:
Do you have long term relationships with the organization?
Katie:
Yeah.
Dave:
What is that longitudinal or whatnot relationship with the client? Have you worked with the same person to put in 3 different positions over a period of 10 years?
Katie:
Yeah. Yep. Yes. That's my fate. I love that. I have some clients who I work with who I just met them, I'm trying to help them figure something out quickly, and then maybe we don't work together again for a few years. But my favorite relationships, and I have many of these, are companies who I am an extension of their team.
A good example of that is I work with a local computer science R&D firm. I've worked with them for eight years. I know everything about them. I know how they operate. I know what it takes to be successful there. I know the type of work that they want to do. As I'm meeting people, especially who do sort of similar work to what they do, I'm always thinking about them, and who could be their next great hire, even if they don't have an open position, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I have long-term relationships with quite a few clients across a number of different industries. I'm constantly thinking about how do I build a pipeline of people for them so that when they're ready to make a hire or even when they're not ready, but they're coming close to, I have a whole group of people who could be great for them.
Dave:
Yeah. You do this ... Right.
Katie:
I'm in person with them all the time. We all know about each other's lives, families, and all the things. Yeah.
Dave:
Which is interesting because, okay, so what I was going to say is you do this independently. You have a business, but it's not as if you are embedded in the company. You're not an employee of the company for whom you are recruiting.
Katie:
No, but I am embedded. I'm not employed, but this is just my point of view, but I think to be successful, you do have to embed yourself. I'm not an employee. I don't get paid to spend time with these people. I get paid, frankly, if I help them, if it's a successful hire. But I'm better at my job if I spend a lot of time with them, if I really do get to know the team, and the business. Yeah.
Dave:
What is your sort of, for lack of a better phrase, work-life balance in that sense? It seems like that would be mostly manageable. I imagine there are fires you need to deal with at any given point because there's an emergency or there's something that need ... But generally speaking, that seems like it wouldn't be a bad situation.
Katie:
It's not. I have as much balance as I enforce in my own life. On the job seeker side, there's no shortage of people who need help, particularly in today's market. This weekday, we're talking on a Friday mid-morning or late morning, I've talked to 58 people this week.
Dave:
Wow, 58 job seekers.
Katie:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There's never a shortage of work to be done in helping candidates. There's never a shortage of work to be done in helping my clients think about what they might need to hire for next. But I work for myself. I can turn that on and off.
Sometimes I get calls really early in the morning, sometimes I get calls on the weekends for something that is like a fire drill, but that's pretty rare. Sometimes I work really long hours, but honestly, that's usually my choice because I'm trying to help more people.
Dave:
You must feel at times like, "Man, this person's really in a bind. I want to help."
There's only so much you can do, and yet at the same time, it's got to be really gratifying to get someone the position that they want after they've been unemployed or just really unhappy at their job for a while.
Katie:
Oh, yeah. Every conversation I have, maybe not every, but most, and this is the reason I love the work, is I can contribute something to helping people get unstuck something. Maybe it's that I do help them find that great new job or the great next company. Or on the client side, maybe I help the team find their next great hire, and it means that the rest of their team is not working 80 hours a week. They're finding more balance.
Sometimes getting unstuck just means helping people think about how to approach their job search differently or consider industries that they maybe haven't looked at before or even just fix something on their LinkedIn. I'm really lucky in that way, in that the vast majority of work that I do, I do feel like I can say I have helped someone in some way.
Dave:
Yeah.
Katie:
Yeah.
Dave:
What are common things? Do you see a top three kind of thing or even just like one or two things that come to mind of like, "This helps people, people never think about or they don't adequately consider how important such and such," like you mentioned some small thing on their LinkedIn.
What are some of the very baseline pieces that people might offer overlook?
Katie:
Yeah. As job seekers, I think the biggest is the power of your network and building a network. I think there's like a preconceived notion or an assumption that you have to be some big extrovert, huge outgoing person to have a huge network. I think for a lot of people, I'm a good example of that not being the case.
I would sit home and watch Netflix all day every day. I'm not a hugely extroverted person. But I have a huge network because I'm curious and I build my network through connecting with people that I actually want to learn about. I think helping people see that your network is really, really important in helping you find your next job, the right next adventure, growing your career in the way that you want to, but it doesn't have to be like a weird, salesy thing.
It can be just connecting with people who you're curious about anyway. You're curious about the industry that they work in or the company they work for. They post something that piques your interest. Sort of helping people dedicate time to that, and recognize that it doesn't have to be like this hugely intimidating thing. I think people make mistakes in not giving enough time to their network, and instead just sending out a million applications.
I think the other place where people sometimes get stuck is understanding the state of today's market. I think a lot of people spend a lot of time applying for jobs that they think they could be qualified for, or they think their skills are translatable. That is something that can be a really great strategy when it's a candidate's market, which means that there's more jobs than there are candidates. But right now, that's not the case.
I think people make a mistake casting a really wide net. Right now, you have to be pretty laser focused on a job that you could be successful at tomorrow, even if it's a lily pad job to your longer term goal.
Dave:
What do you find in that sense? I'm curious about that concept of a lily pad job. Do you find that people are reluctant? What is the flexibility in a typical candidate? Is it just related to, "I've been out of work for a year and a half, therefore I'll take anything?"
Or is it really just more of a constitutional person to person, different way of thinking about work?
Katie:
Both probably. Yep.
Dave:
Yeah.
Katie:
I think there's a tipping point after about six months of being without work where people start to say, "I'm open to anything, I'll take a contract, I will do something that is a lower salary."
That happens when people are newer in their job search, they tend to focus on all of the things that they don't like about their current company, and like not having those things. Their list that informs their next opportunity is much more about, here are the things I don't want versus here are the things I do want.
It might be, "I don't want to go into an office. I don't want to make less the next amount of money. I don't want a boss that's micromanaging."
It's just a laundry list of things that they don't want. Then after a certain point, that shifts. They start to become a little bit more open to like the art of the possible, "Okay, maybe I could make a little less money. Maybe I could go into an office two days a week. Maybe I don't have to lead a team for now."
I'll get back to that point.
Dave:
Yeah. Okay, I'm in my mid 50's. I've been really blessed that I'm running this company for 16 years and I'm not looking for work. I feel really fortunate in that way. I'm always looking for clients. It's not as if I'm just like lazing around on the couch.
But that said, I think there's a point, and I don't know if you've seen this, because I don't know, I guess, is there a typical age range that you specialize in or that you just find most people? Because I assume not everyone talks to a recruiter. I guess to set up this question, are you typically dealing with a segment of the population or is it really all over the place?
Katie:
It's all over the place as of lately, because I get a lot of people sent my way. But broadly speaking, I work with people who are mid to senior leaders. Most of the time, I'm working with people who have been working for 15 years or more, and have held positions of influence, whether that be in a people leader role or just as an individual contributor who had a lot of responsibility. They're usually making more than six figures.
Dave:
Yeah. You get to a certain point where you're accustomed to making a certain amount of money. You're accustomed to a certain amount of either autonomy or reward in whatever form you might value. The idea of going sideways, I think a lot of people are open to, but not the idea of going backwards, and certainly not the idea of starting over in a different track.
Katie:
Yeah. Yeah.
Dave:
Is that reasonable in a market like today's? Do you just find like, obviously there are unicorns, and people who are just going to get hired regardless because they may have whatever it takes? But for a typical person, how important is that kind of flexibility?
Katie:
I think it's pretty important. I think it's pretty important in this market. I think it's important to be trying to think two or three steps ahead, meaning one step back to get two steps forward. "I'm willing to take a step back because this thing will round out my skillset in a way that's going to be more competitive."
Or, "This thing gets me into an industry that's growing."
Right now, sometimes, Dave, it's like, "This thing gets me a paycheck." It's that simple.
But I think being able to think about in a market like today's, being able to think about how does your next opportunity get you closer to the thing that's two steps away versus it being like, "This is my forever home?"
Of course, if it is your forever place, awesome, awesome. That's great. But I think you have to be willing to take a step back or to take a step that feels real sideways.
Dave:
Right. This feels very natural to you in terms of just how you've always thought and operated. But is it something that you would've imagined yourself doing, I don't know, however many years ago? How long would you say? When did you make the jump from sales to recruiting? How long ago?
Katie:
10 or 11 years. Yeah.
Dave:
Okay. Was it something you'd ever considered before or was it really just like the opportunity arose?
Katie:
I hadn't thought about going into recruiting. I've been a people leader for a long time. I'd led big teams, and I loved that. I loved hiring. I loved coaching and mentoring people. The idea of being able to do something that was connected to hiring in some way, that was a given for me. That I was going to be involved in hiring in some way, whether it was hiring a team that reported to me or helping people hire other people.
But the recruiting thing, yeah, I didn't imagine it. At the time, if I'm being really honest, I was running a big staffing agency. I was pretty burnt out. I thought, "Well, I'm going to go be a salesperson or maybe a recruiter to do an individual contributor role for a little while."
I just didn't realize how much I would love it.
Dave:
Did you know anyone previously? Did you know people whose jobs, that's what they did and they were models?
Katie:
Yeah. Yeah. I worked at a staffing agency, so everybody I worked with was a recruiter for the most part. I loved it. I made some of my best friends to this day in that world. Prior to that, I'd worked in college admissions, which is basically recruiting. Again, met the most wonderful people. I knew a ton of people who were doing this work who really loved it.
The things that people didn't like were basically the same things I didn't love about sales, just like pressure, quotas, and things like that. But the actual interacting with other humans and helping to make those matches, everyone I knew who did it loved it.
Dave:
I don't know. This sounds like it would be a relatively stable field to be in. I just spoke to someone earlier in the week whose entire industry is blown up. She literally has a PhD. It's, I don't want to say useless, but it is considering the time and money that she invested, she is really at a crossroads. I think obviously with AI today, a lot of people are wondering whether their jobs are going to be around in 5, 10, 20 years.
I suppose there is vulnerability in almost any field in that regard, but how do you feel about this as a field when you think about, "You're not that old, you're going to be working for a little while still?"
Katie:
We're the same age.
Dave:
You're not that old.
Katie:
Yeah, I'll work as long as you work. There'll be disruptions. I use AI all the time now. There's things that robots can do that are great and super efficient, like just matching a resume and a job description. That can totally be done by AI. I think that it's helpful to optimize those tools.
Some recruiting roles will go away because of that, or teams won't need to hire quite as many people because of the technology. But you still have to look someone in the eye, talk to them, understand what are they motivated by, how do they show up when things are stressful, and how are these two human beings going to interact together in a reporting dynamic? I think you need a person to do that.
I do think it's still, knock on wood, pretty stable. It's a very competitive industry. There's lots of recruiters out there. There's lots of third party recruiters. You have to really develop deep and trusted relationships with the people that you're working with in order to stay busy. But I don't think that great recruiters, not that I'm a great recruiter, but I don't think that great recruiters are going to lose their jobs to AI anytime soon.
Dave:
Yeah.
Katie:
Yeah.
Dave:
Do you personally have ambitions for where this is going for you in the next years?
Katie:
Yeah. Part of the reason I wanted to do it and thought about the individual contributor role, and again, this was like 10, 11 years ago. I wanted a job that was flexible from a location standpoint.
I'm in Oregon, but my family's all on the East Coast. My parents are getting older. I wanted something where I could work from anywhere. I think recruiting has really served that purpose in many, many ways. It allows for that flexibility.
I've had my own business now for a little while. It's gone well, which is great. I feel really lucky for that. As I keep going, I'm less interested in how I do this, and make more money, and more interested in the volume of people that I can help. Like, "How can I help more people?"
Hopefully, that makes me money in some way. But that's sort of my ambition now, is just looking for ways to use technology and the power of my own network that I spent a long time building to help as many people as I can.
Dave:
Right.
Katie:
Yeah.
Dave:
Is there a story or an experience that stands out to you that was especially gratifying in that respect?
Katie:
For sure. I'm just trying to think of a more recent example. This was months ago, probably a year ago. I met with a woman. She's in San Diego. She had spent most of her life working with non-for-profits. Then she did a bunch of work with Peace Corps. At the time, it was at the height of when everything was happening with DOJ. She was really scared. Everyone around her was losing their jobs. She felt like she was at this point where she had to make a shift, and get away from the nonprofit government world, even though she loved the work so much.
We spent a long time talking about, what could she do next? How are her skills marketable? How could she still do work that felt meaningful and mission driven?
I connected her with a bunch of a handful of companies where I knew people that were doing mission driven work. I didn't know if they had jobs open, but this ranged from consulting firms to ed tech firms. But that were outside of the public sector, and outside of nonprofit, to just help her build her network.
We met every couple weeks for a while. She's not paying me to do this, but it was just fun. Again, would help her get connected to people at some of these organizations. She wrote me last month when she landed at one of the consulting firms that I introduced her to. She said it's just like a complete change in her life because she can still do wonderful work. It adds to the variety of work that she's doing. She's working with great people. Fundamentally, she's not in fear of losing her job every day.
That was really cool. That was really cool. It's not the same but I got a note yesterday from a gentleman who I talked to earlier this week. He's a program manager. He spent most of his career in healthcare. He's been out of work for 18 months. He's applied all over the place, talked to a million recruiters. He just sent me a note that said, "Thanks for making me feel like a human."
That was awesome. Hopefully, I can help him get a job. But sometimes there are these big, powerful stories of this person made a career pivot, and it's changed their life. Sometimes, it's things that are much smaller, but still super important. Like, "I've been getting automated rejection emails for almost two years, and you made me feel like a real human being again. Thank you."
Dave:
Yeah.
Katie:
Yeah.
Dave:
What has changed in the market? I don't just necessarily mean the ups and downs of hiring or unemployment. But in the time that you've been doing this, what kind of changes have you seen in the experience of the job seeker?
Katie:
Oh, yeah. It's so much less personalized for the most part. Some companies are still doing an amazing job of creating a great candidate experience. By that, just recognizing that someone has taken the time to apply, and following up with them after they interview. Sometimes even giving them meaningful feedback. That's extremely rare, but that still happens occasionally.
But more and more these days, for an applicant, it's like throwing your resume into the void, and you just hear absolutely nothing. Lack of follow through and follow up can sometimes follow ... People can get pretty far along in a process, Dave, and then they just get completely ghosted.
I think that it's very natural to think like, "Oh, that means the recruiters are terrible, or they just don't care about people."
It's not that. There's so much volume because of the tools that allow people to apply for thousands of jobs in a short period of time, or just like click easy apply. These poor recruiters are overwhelmed with applicants 99% of the time. I would bet they deeply want to get back to people. They're in the job because they care about people, but they just can't.
Dave:
Yeah.
Katie:
Yeah, it feels the experience is not great for the applicant, and it's not great for the recruiter, frankly, either.
Dave:
Yeah. What are the kinds of things that you think about or maybe talk about with peers all the time?
Katie:
Recruiting is great, and it can be a grind. You have to talk to a lot of people, a lot of people. That can be exhausting at times. Sometimes, if you work for a third party recruiting company, like a placement agency, a consulting firm or something like that, it can be very salesy. It can be very competitive. Sometimes you don't get paid unless you are successful in filling the job. It's a commission based job in a lot of ways. There's some insecurity there.
You have to be able to tell people no, and that's no fun. A lot of that happens. But I do think overarching, you get to help a lot of people. You learn a ton. If you're internal with the company, you learn everything there is to learn about their business because you're working with all the hiring managers, you know their pain points, and you know how the company's growing. You get deeply embedded in the business.
If you're doing more third party recruiting like what I do, you get to learn about a bajillion different industries that you maybe wouldn't have learned about. With ad agencies, I work with DARPA. That's a pretty wide range. If you're someone who's curious and likes to learn, you do spend pretty much your whole day learning, whether it be learning about an individual when you're talking to them, learning about a company, learning about an industry. That is super fun.
Dave:
It's one of the things I like about doing what I do now. I work with all these companies. I work with experts in such a wide range of fields like water engineers, and things that I have no personal knowledge in, except that now I've been working with water engineers for 13 years or something like that. I know so much mundane, wonky. That's really interesting to me. I bet it's interesting to you in your own kind of world.
I would imagine though that's not necessarily that interesting or appealing to a lot of people. I mean, it's just a type, right?
Katie:
Yeah, I think it's just a type. I think it's just a type. I don't know. I feel lucky that I am that type. But like for me, I was always one of those kids who I always did better in school when I was also playing two sports, and had some volunteer thing. If there wasn't a lot of variety, I didn't do well at anything.
For people who like to do deeply focused work and go really, really deep into a certain subject area or industry, I think recruiting could be frustrating because you are kind of all over the place. But for someone whose mind works that way, and who is really stimulated by variety and newness, there's no shortage of that in recruiting.
Dave:
Right. How are you doing?
Katie:
Just like in general?
Dave:
Yeah.
Katie:
Yeah. Dave, I'm stressed about everything that's happening in our country, but other than that, fine.
Dave:
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. There's that.
Katie:
Yeah. But I'm good. My partner is a writer. It's been interesting. You were talking about career security. It's been interesting to watch what's happening with him. I know so many amazing writers and copywriters, and they're just getting decimated. It's pretty brutal.
I'm curious if you're finding this as well, but a lot of people I know who are writers, graphic designers, people in the creative community are pretty impacted by what's happening with AI. That makes my heart hurt because deep in my soul, I am just a super fan of all things creative, and people who create and make things.
Dave:
Yeah. I see it and I don't. I think, again, I've been really fortunate for a lot of reasons. But it's a small business, so we have a reasonable, modest need for revenue. We're not trying to make millions of dollars. We serve a very focused customer base of nonprofits, foundations, and public agencies. Again, it's probably worth pointing out that the government funding has been slashed, so that affects the public agencies.
One of the repercussions that immediately follows that is that the money that the government has been giving to nonprofits in many cases has gone away. Yeah, it's there and it's real. But we've been pretty fortunate, I think, if I could sort of guess at a reason, I think it's just we've been doing this for 16 years. It is the network. It is the body of work to some extent. But also the familiarity with the landscape, the personnel, how things work, and how we work.
What I know now compared to what I knew, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago when I was really just getting going, it's night and day. To try to do what we do without that background, I think would be very, very different. Yeah. But on the other hand, it's incredibly gratifying to get to hire those graphic designers-
Katie:
Totally.
Dave:
... videographers, web developers, or whatever it might be to do the work on behalf of the client. That part about it is amazing. I love to be able to not just work with the teams, which is great in itself, but to compensate people for their skills.
It's a lot of things at once. What's your experience of what's happening work-wise with people outside of your work vision of it, like your personal work/recruiting? I'm assuming that your friends, even the very little I know about, what that might look like, represent a wider demographic of jobs and experiences, how are they doing?
Katie:
I think they're doing okay overall. It's interesting. Everyone I know is being asked to do more with less. It doesn't matter what industry they're in or what their job is. I'm really thinking through, from friends who are in HR to friends who are engineers, everyone I know is being asked to do more with less. That's stressful.
But at the same time, there's a ton of gratitude for having a job. Many of us know so many people who are unemployed, that for my friends who are still working, I think we're all just very grateful.
Dave:
Yeah. It's a crazy time.
Katie:
Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm.
