EP 39: Breaking down talent acquisition ops w/ Jared Long, Director of Talent Acquisition Operations at Duolingo

Jared Long, Director of Talent Acquisition Operations at Duolingo, joins host James Mackey to discuss what the talent acquisition and recruiting operations landscape looks like, applicant tracking systems,  how to use events to create inbound demand, and more!

Episode Chapters

00:25 Who is Jared Long

04:05 What does the recruiting operations landscape look like

05:45 How to engage with passive talent

07:15 Applicant Tracking Systems are missing the CRM component

10:32 Breaking down the ATS landscape

15:25 Recruiting ops focuses on technology adoption

17:35 Training recruiters using short-form video on how to use talent acquisition technology

20:15 Recruiting technology lags behind

21:30 Recruiting tech stack at Duolingo

23:24 Pros and cons of Gem

27:02 How Duolingo inbounds candidates 

29:15 Using events to create inbound demand

31:24 How to curate your resume to get an interview

33:58 The importance of building your brand

40:14 Wrap up

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Hello and welcome to Town Acquisition Trends in Strategy. I'm your host, James Mackey. And today we are joined by Jared Long. Jared, welcome to the show, man.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Hey, thanks for having me, James.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

For sure. And uh so yes, I'm very excited to speak with you about recruitment operations today. But I wanted, you know, before we jump into that topic and what we want to talk about, I was I was hoping you could share with us a little bit about your background and experience, just so

Who is Jared Long?

SPEAKER_00 1:11

everybody tuning in knows a little bit about the perspective you're coming from.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Yeah, happy to do to do that. So uh I started actually at Apple and Operations, not recruiting operations, but that's how I kind of made the pivot into this space. And I actually got a lucky break uh and had a really good manager over at Netflix who took a bet on me who knew that that operations background could convert into candidate experience, which was really the starting point of recruiting operations for most companies. Jumped to Netflix as their candidate experience manager operating in LA. Eventually, within a year, took over Canada Experience for LA, Latam, AMIA, APAC. Uh, got a bunch of world perspective relative to systems experience and technology in the recruiting space, did a stint in AMIA building out operations, recruiting operations for Netflix over there. Came back to the US at the start of COVID, pivoted into being like a business analyst and built my own technology for them. And now I'm in beautiful Pittsburgh doing the same thing for Duolingo all over again. So realize I like the build face, became too specialized, found a great town acquisition team over here and start from scratch and hopefully do the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Yeah, that's great. And just so everybody tuning in, you were at uh Netflix for over five years. So this isn't like something that you were you know you dabbled in. This is something that you really mastered for Netflix.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Uh five years and four positions, which is very rare in Netflix. Usually you go there and you stay in the same thing, but I kept jumping around to different spots.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

That's the way to do it, man. That's how you keep learning. Yep. Um, well, cool. So I so I noticed that so when you were in EMIA, that was Amsterdam, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Yeah, my favorite city in the world. I if I could live in Amsterdam, if I wasn't born and raised in California, I would live in Amsterdam in a heartbeat, just too far of a flight.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

Yeah, I'm actually I'm going for the first time in October.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Oh, it's amazing. Are you just staying in Amsterdam or are you actually gonna jump around the country and all the time?

SPEAKER_00 3:07

So I got like a like a CEO of peer group thing in Dublin. So I'm going to Dublin for the first time, and I'm really pumped about that. Um, and I'm trying to head down to like Southwest Ireland for a little bit um as well, just kind of travel around a bit uh and see some different regions. But uh, because my ultimate like several generations ago, my family's from there, so I want to go there too. But um, then after that, I'm gonna go straight from the CEO event to uh Amsterdam because there's a big EDM concert. I think it's AMF, is that right?

SPEAKER_01 3:37

Um, yeah, pretty much EDM owns Amsterdam. So if you're gonna have a good time, dude.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

I'm pumped Tiesto's gonna be there. Uh and so yeah, we're gonna go. I'm gonna get a couple friends are flying out, and we're gonna go to an overnight EDM concert and see Tiesto, and then we're probably gonna hit up Berlin uh and then Nice. So, but Amsterdam, I'm thrilled, I can't wait to go.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

Yeah, I was it was open-ended and it was the toughest decision I think I've ever had to make professionally to say, I gotta go back to the states. It landed me here, but loved it. Also, Dublin, not related to recruiting, but my favorite concert ever was Lana del Rey at a castle right outside of Dublin. That's an incredible place, too. You're gonna enjoy that.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

Nice, nice. Yeah, I'm really pumped. I'm really pumped. Well, anyways, yeah, so off kind of on a tangent there, but yeah, I wanted to um just jumping into kind of uh town acquisition operations. Um, I guess can we just start high level about you know how it's it's been evolving over the past few years? Like obviously it seems to be taking a bigger hold, and at least technology companies that are a little bit more forward-thinking when it comes to tech and data. Uh, however, one of the things that I've I've noticed over the past several years and that I've you know, I I would have liked to see more of is that there's just simply not enough uh TA

What does the recruiting and talent acquisition operations landscape look like?

SPEAKER_00 4:51

operations around. Like every company, it seems, is investing in sales ops, revenue ops. They understand the importance of it. Um, they understand like just how big of an impact it has on the organization. And you know, most leaders will agree, or at least when you you call it out, that you know, people are the primary driver of value. And yet, right, like we're we're running TA on a shoestring budget, considering it a cost center versus a value add that actually can generate revenue and increase valuations in the long run. So I yeah, just your thoughts on you know where it started past several years and kind of where it's headed and what you're saying right now.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

Yeah, I think it's really, really interesting because when I started, recruiting operations wasn't really a thing. Recruiting operations was really just considered talent coordination or recruiting coordination. And so usually RCs would roll into the recruiting managers and they would be very cyclical and almost looked at as a feeder into becoming recruiters, which nowadays a lot of people that are in the recruiting operations or recruiting coordination work don't want to go into recruiting. The reason they're going into coordination is they lock the like the operation side. And so when I joined and did this work, there like you said, only big tech companies were really uh looking for this. And I would say around 2020, there's been a major shift, especially with diversity and inclusion becoming a prominent piece of the recruiting approach, that recruiting operations was a needed, uh a needed branch in the recruiting space. And I say that because the only way to truly impact those visions and make your teams efficient is to use technology. And when you use technology, you can use it in the proper or improper way. And if you give people technology, as you probably know, and you don't educate them

How to engage with passive talent

SPEAKER_01 6:31

on how to use it, and then you give them a strategy and don't educate them on how to execute on that strategy, you get yourself into situations where you're spending a lot of money to try to do something, you're not really solving the problem, and then you end up, you know, and backtracking and trying to do something else. So now when you go onto LinkedIn and you search for recruiting operations, almost every company, especially in the tech world, is hiring that. And that's because it expanded from just being recruiting coordinators to doing that, developing processes, doing documentation, impacting DEIB. Uh, also like CRMs, which used to only be on the sales side, are becoming a really big thing in the recruiting world because uh continuous nurturing of top talent, especially passive talent in the engineering space, is so vital to not only find but also retain that talent.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

Yeah, for sure. I think the whole concept of community uh within talent acquisition as well is huge, right? Like just to just to double down what you're saying with passive talent, right? And and continuous outreach, like I always, you know, and I know some big companies are doing this, and and likely smaller companies may not have the budget or the horse, you know, the enough people to really do this. But I really love the idea of like just consistently throwing events and adding value to people in specific functions. So whatever positions are scale positions, so engineers, salespeople, whatever it might be, to host regular events, reaching out to passive talent, just constantly engaging with them. So whenever you open a new role, you know, you have that kind of warm introduction versus going in cold. So yeah, I'm seeing that that trend too with the the CRM, and that's actually um,

Applicant Tracking Systems are missing the CRM component

SPEAKER_00 8:01

or just more CM CRM functionality, which is one thing that I don't feel like a lot of ATS systems really do quite well yet. Do you do you all is it part of your ATS or do you have like a separate system that integrates? Like, how are you currently doing that?

SPEAKER_01 8:16

Yeah, I'm not even I'm not affiliated, but I'll just drop some some tools here uh and give some people some some shout-outs. So there is a lot of CRM functionality in the market. That's actually probably my biggest break in the recruiting operations space is for a company that I worked for prior. I built a custom CRM for them because they had millions of candidates in their database. So it's a two-year project. And the biggest, the problem statement that we were solving was we have so many candidates in our database, it was too difficult to refine those candidates. And we needed a way to be able to aggregate them and then search against them very quickly. And we were able to do that by parsing together or piecing together different technologies, but most companies don't have the resources to do that. So companies like Jim or People AI or even Greenhouse is now trying to add a CRM on top, are realizing that an applicant tracking system, the sole purpose of that is really the start of the uh recruiting journey to the end of the recruiting journey tied to a job, whereas recruiting is a continuous process. And so they need a way to bucket people based off of either location, skill set, title, um, experience, and a way to keep them engaged so that when you reach out, it's a numbers game, especially in like a very competitive market, it's a numbers game. So, how are you building these data sets that you can get in engaged with very quickly? So your team doesn't have to be massive to hit your hiring goals. You can essentially 10x your team by leveraging this technology like drip campaigning, like similar skill set searching that allows you to do the same work that you need to do without having that the heads that you thought you needed to have to do, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 9:56

Yeah, it does. Um so you said greenhouse is is building in a CRM layer because that's actually like the one uh critical thing I had to say about greenhouse is just searchability of candidates and ability to engage with passive candidates is is currently lacking. They are the the ATS I recommend, and we actually we have it internally, and just from a data and reporting perspective, I think the data is a cleanest, the customization for custom stages uh to track pipeline reports, time and stage, you know, loss reasons, all that kind of stuff. Like a lot of the I like a lot of the data functionality, so it's it's easier to manage uh for that perspective, but at least for startups and growth stage companies. But I feel like as you kind of push into larger organizations that are looking for more of that CRM functionality that are hiring like hundreds of engineers a year or something like that, that's where it starts to break down a bit. So I you know, curious to kind of is is this part of their push into enterprise? Like they want larger customers, or I'm wondering like how far along they're they're in doing this and and why they're doing it. I mean, it seems obvious like for us, but curious if you have your words there.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

I've I've probably demoed and leveraged or used every applicant tracking system on the market, and I do believe that there's buckets of applicant tracking systems. So, how deep do you want me to go with technology? Because I can I can give it to go, man.

SPEAKER_00 11:15

Like, I want to hear it because I again like I don't want to talk about the great resignation anymore.

Breaking down the ATS landscape

SPEAKER_00 11:18

I want to get technical. Me either.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

I don't want to talk about it either. So in this world, what what we're really looking at is CRM. I think there's a misconception with CRM. CRM is not only for large-scale companies, CRM is actually probably more valuable for small scale companies. And when you're talking about if your company doesn't have the money to invest in technology, there are a lot of resources and tools out there that can allow you to make a like a lightweight CRM or ATS. So if you're a small company, I think like things, and I don't know if it's still around, but like Google Hire was really good. LinkedIn has a really lightweight ATS that you can use in their system. Uh, I am the biggest fan of Airtable if they ever go public. Um I'm on that. Airtable is a great tool, but they have a pre-built template on making an ATS in there, and you can leverage that from a CRM standpoint using their automation technology as well. Uh, and then you get to this mid-size level, and really the three prominent players there are Greenhouse, Lever, which I just heard and I can't validate, but I think Lever just got purchased, and they both kind of do the same thing, and I think Greenhouse is better structurally, and then you have Smart uh Smart Recruiters, which is a very interesting player, and they've invested a lot in trying to build in automation and technology and AI influence into their concepts. They're a really interesting company to look at as well. And then truthfully, large enterprise customers, we're we're only really sitting on, for the most part, custom-built solutions. Like if you're at Meta and you have 100 engineers that can work on your tool, they're gonna do that, right? But really, it was Avature or ISIMs. Avature started as the first recruiting CRM and built an applicant tracking system after. Pretty clean UI, not very customizable. Uh, I like them for the CRM piece, didn't like them for the ATS piece. ISIMs, sorry, ISIMs, if you're listening to this, terrible UI, but really good customization. So a lot of companies would build custom skins on top of ISIMs because you can customize it for the needs that you want. And now Salesforce and Workday have made their way into the large players as well. Workday utilizing sub tools to make up for the what they lacked prior, uh, making them a lot of companies switching to them, which is a is like a curveball. No one was using workday for a long time for an hour.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

Yeah, workday, workday is like uh HRS as well, right? Like, are they doing like the HR side? So it's like a full they're trying to do end-to-end.

SPEAKER_01 13:41

Yeah, they're doing end-to-end, but they're doing it the smart way. So, like greenhouse is trying to build all the functioning and functionality in-house, which is difficult because then they have to maintain it. Well, workday has done is built a core system that allows you to have a smooth transition from pre-employee to post-employee, and then leverage technology. I'm blanking on it, uh, but it's a good thing to look up. They have a a recruiting CRM that I looked at, and then that's their preferred partner, and then they use uh prelude or good times for their scheduling component, which they never had. And that is the yeah, that's the technology that not enough people invest in. If you want to save money on recruiting, invest in scheduling technology because it is the biggest time suck because it's so manual, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

And uh, I you know, we talk about Salesforce. There used to be a company called Talent Rover. Do you remember them? They built this, yeah. So they built the stack like on top of Salesforce, so it was basically like a Salesforce ATS, and then Bullhorn bought it, and I was I got so upset because I just knew it was gonna just go down the train.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Yeah, I didn't talk about like bullhorn or brass rings, those. I mean, I look at them as like agency ATSs, so I haven't had much experience in that space, but yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

Well, I was just thinking about the Salesforce background backbone. They had talent rover was was uh I a lot of people liked that for a minute. Probably more so on the agency side, you're right. But you know what's funny is like we actually use greenhouse as our agency ATS.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

That is interesting. I mean, they have an agency portal, so I guess you could do that, but it's no, we don't do that, man.

SPEAKER_00 15:15

Like, we just set it up like with a couple custom fields so that we could have different clients within the system, and we're running like all of our clients through greenhouse to track like uh performance of our accounts.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

So it sounds like you need me to come over there and look at your systems. That's what it's yeah, man.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

I do you would yeah, uh if you want to help us optimize it too. I'm trying to they recently did updated the interface, which I still haven't played around in. So, like, I every time I go into the system, like, what am I looking at?

SPEAKER_01 15:44

Uh yeah, it was sneaky. They updated and didn't tell anyone, and it it threw me off too. I didn't I wasn't able to like inform my team on it.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

So, and recruiters do not like change, so that is no, I don't, I don't because I mastered the other one, and like when I was hands-on doing stuff, I was on the old interface, and now I'm not hands-on anymore, and so it's like I I just uh custom field, is that it? Oh well, that's the how he did it.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

That legitimately, I believe, is the other reason why recruiting operations has come to

Recruiting ops focuses on technology adoption

SPEAKER_01 16:11

prominence, is because so much technology has been released in the last several years that are optimizing for efficiency. Recruiters like simplicity, and so when you have a CSM telling you this technology is great, it's gonna give you 10x on your return, and then they try to teach you about it, you zone out. When you have someone teaching you that doesn't know your workflow, you zone out. So recruiting operations has become that like stopgap for technology because every time I implement a new technology, they say, Let's do office hours, let's do a training kickoff, and never the response is never good. But if I take that, if I have that session and then bring it to the team, adoption goes up. So it's almost like an in-house CSM is another component of the recruiting ops. It's become very valuable as technology has taken over.

SPEAKER_00 16:57

Yeah, for sure. I mean, we have um for our customers, so basically, just so you know what we do, we're an RPO company, which is for those listening, it's it's a fancy way of saying companies borrow recruiters from us. Um, and so we do that for a lot of tech companies, and we actually have process documents built out for like literally every single part of the town acquisition process, everything from sourcing, outreach, town attraction, you know, employer branding, what whatever it might be, all the way to interview workflows to custom interview questions, to um DENI programs, referral programs, like whatever it might be. We have playbooks for that. Um and a lot of a lot of the times, like it's yeah, you're right. It's like it's okay, how do we take that process right and bake it into technology to make it as simple as possible to just like have these workflows set up in a way that's just not too complicated? And then obviously there's that training component, right? Where you you ideally are walking the team through how it's done, and you know, I think greenhouse does a decent job of putting together a fair amount of videos and stuff, um, but but not necessarily for custom workflows. So that's something that we try to record our own videos for.

SPEAKER_01 18:03

Um sometimes, but is that what you use in?

SPEAKER_00 18:06

Yeah, something like that. Just zoom and and we have some some video links and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

Nice. Yeah, I do. I I I do believe that short form education, especially in the form of video, is the future for training people. So, like, there's this company,

Training recruiters using short-form video on how to use talent acquisition technology

SPEAKER_01 18:21

uh, what I was saying is a company Loom that's really good at doing like humanizing the training element because they put your picture in the corner. So you like it's not just someone recording their screen talking. Uh, and I had this hypothesis at Netflix that I if we did every training in the form of a document and then a video no longer than 90 seconds, we could go from all the self-served questions that we were dealing with, which means we needed people actually reviewing a channel, to only dealing with high, like complex problems, like in a six-month period. And and train, I don't think we got to the the level that we wanted to, but I'd say we reduced the amount of of questions that we were getting by like 50 and a quarter by just doing these short form videos because people don't want to ask questions, they want to know like they they know what they're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 19:11

Just can I get the answer quickly without likely don't make me search for it, make it obvious where it is, and no, I don't want to fucking email anybody. Like, just give me the answer, you know. So I think it's it's yeah. I mean, if you don't make it super easy for them to find too, then like they're just not gonna they're not gonna like search through a bunch of videos to find what they need, so yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

That's the I hate it. I hate it. I don't know if you ever use greenhouse support, but you have to search and it gives you a bot and it's never the right article, then you got to click two times to get to a chat. I know they know that I'm going to the chat 90% of the time. Just give me the chat straight up. That's all I want.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

No, yeah, I so so why we're that's okay, particularly on the SMB side of the house. Yeah, it's not um it's not great uh in terms of like you know, their your ability to get in there. So, what I did is um I I took on a uh an internal role a few years ago building out uh greenhouse for a company, and um I I was working with this this guy, Cole Reavers, who's uh you know customer success over at Greenhouse, and he did a really great job for us. Um, and and he actually like went above and beyond greenhouse's like typical process. So I gave him a shout out to their CEO and founders. Um, so basically, so now I just use that as a reason like, dude, I'm gonna reach out to you anytime I have a question because I would I would help you out and make you right give you recommendations, and then hopefully in return, like he he continues. So he's he's played he's played ball with us most of the time, and I just I try to give him shout outs and in return he tries to help. So, but yeah, like the typical process just isn't like that's I guess so like that's the one thing too. It's like there just isn't a lot of of of fast kind of customer success, particularly for the SMB accounts.

SPEAKER_01 20:53

Um, yeah, it's uh I think there's a lot of areas in recruiting that have been done a certain way.

Recruiting technology lags behind

SPEAKER_01 21:01

I truly believe this. Like, I think recruiting has been done a certain way for so long with certain people that they don't want to change. They know it's not efficient, but they're good at what they do, so they're able to get their job done. And I do think that the the evolution of certain things like self-service relative to like recruiting technology has lagged behind other things like uh you know, artificial suggestion of an individual based off of skill set parsed from their resume, because the need for that has out and the the need for to be able to implement that into a recruiter that's done their their work a certain way for so long greatly outweighs this other piece. And so what people generally do is if it doesn't work, whatever, I'll just move on to something else. I can go back to what I've always done. And so, again, that's another area where my my world really comes in, where we end up dealing with a lot of these like tier zero requests that are repetitive because they don't want to go to the technology company to ask that question. They rather have me answer it for them in the moment, and our companies pay someone like me to answer it for them in the moment, which might not be the best use of time, but it does solve a problem or stop a gap.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

Right, for sure. For sure. So so I I do have another question for you. I wanted to ask uh so duolingo, what what

Recruiting tech stack at Duolingo

SPEAKER_00 22:16

is the current recruiting tech stack? Um, so that that one, and then two, like, do you consider it ideal, or if you had unlimited budget, like what would you do to enhance it beyond where it is? So just like it's two questions at once. Sorry.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

No, it's all it's all good. So Duolingo actually probably from a like a tech stack standpoint, we've overindexed on technology, leveraging technology to solve single problems rather than multiple problems. So I've been here for six months. Uh the easiest the way that I Describe it is we've got a beautiful lot of land. It's unmanicured. We've got all the tools we need, all the all the resources we need. And right now we're figuring out how to build the blueprint. And so uh I think we do have the right tech stack to solve majority of the problems that we're trying to solve. It's really about creating the connectivity and then consolidating like what do we want to use Gem for? What do we want to use greenhouse for? What do we want to use agency recruiters for? And figuring out that proper blend is really what I'm solving right now. Rather than I don't have the budget or the resources to get the technology I need to solve the problem that we have.

SPEAKER_00 23:24

Gotcha. So it's it's um, but like in terms of tools, you're like greenhouse is the primary one. Gem sounds like it's part of the stack. Are you using any kind of other like I don't know, anything like job boards to data tools to anything like that?

SPEAKER_01 23:39

Yeah, if we're gonna go the whole one, okay. So we got greenhouse, gem, seekout, ashby, carrot, hacker rank, handshake, linkedin, uh like probably like built in. We just signed a partnership with, like 10 different other job boards that we're doing stuff with, few agencies that we're working with. Um, you name it, we're probably leveraging it in some capacity.

SPEAKER_00 24:05

Gotcha. Hey, quick question about gem. Where does it work? Where doesn't it work?

Pros and cons of Gem

SPEAKER_01 24:10

Oh man, I love the people at Gem. I use Gem at uh Netflix too, but I would say the only way to use Gem effectively is to have Gem, depending on where you start your process. So for us, in some instances, we start in Seek Out because Seek Out allows you really cool piece that most people don't know about Seek Out, but Seekout allows you to look at addressable market based off of what your search criteria is. No other tool that I know of does that. So if you want, you can start in Seakout, pull people into a project in Gym, leverage Gem to do your reach out campaigns, or group people based off of whatever it is you want to group them by, and then push your interested people into your applicant tracking system to start their journey against your jobs. And why that's important is that's gonna reduce your time to hire, probably, but also it's going to give you the complete flow, leveraging the best part of each technology uh to solve that part of the funnel. And then the last piece with Jem is their reporting is really easy. Their dashboarding, yeah, I think personally is better than greenhouses. I don't use I use Ashbase dashboarding for most, but they do have really good reporting and they're and their CSM Yuki, amazing. Yuki, if you're listening to this, you're really good.

SPEAKER_00 25:27

So so you have seek out and gym integrate. So basically, you're finding the people in Seek Out, and then you're pushing them into Gym. Yeah, and you could I thought they were like somewhat competitive, but I guess not, right?

SPEAKER_01 25:39

If they're really they are, I do think that Gem is a better CRM than Seek Out. I think Seakout is a better search technology. So, Jim, I would say really good for like campaign analytics. Um, really they're one of the few technologies that allow you to do sequences that are both LinkedIn messaging and emails, which is really interesting how they do that. So I would say Seakout is the best external search tool outside of I'm blanking on it right now, but there's another search tool that everyone uses that I've used in the past. The UI is not great, but it's a really good tool as well. Um, those two are the top external search tools on the market, I believe.

SPEAKER_00 26:16

Have you ever worked with uh Fetcher?

SPEAKER_01 26:19

You know what? I met Fetcher last year at the uh convention in Las Vegas, and I thought they were interesting, but when I got here, we already had Seikout, so I didn't explore it deeper.

SPEAKER_00 26:29

Yeah, they I they have like a there's like a human element to it where it's it's like they have people sourcing primarily Light Am.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Yeah, Intelo did that too for a while, I believe. Yeah, I don't know if Intelo is still around, but Intel they would advertise as a live database, like a lot, and which was really unique at the time. But really, what they were doing was they had a group of people just constantly reparsing resumes. Um, and that's the other thing that Jim does that most people don't know is Jim, if you have a LinkedIn tied to it, will actually update profiles, which is the number one problem with applicant tracking systems. The data becomes stale very quickly, but in gym it doesn't if you're sourcing from LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

And you so I've heard too, Jim is primarily like you get the best results for engineers, or would you say it's across the board, engineering revenue? Like, where you know, where do you get the best return on gym? And then like maybe you could share some stats on like what percentage of hires come from gym versus like outbound just LinkedIn sourcing not through gym, or I mean so do you do all your sourcing through gym? Like, is that the funnel?

SPEAKER_01 27:34

So it's like seek out gym for everything, or we don't use gym for external sourcing, we use gym for engagement. So external sourcing for us would be like LinkedIn, you know what? Dualingo's really unique because our brand is really strong. That majority

How Duolingo inbounds candidates

SPEAKER_01 27:48

of our hires come from inbound, really. Yeah, very, very interesting, right? So, like you don't usually do that with companies, but majority of our hires do come from inbound, but we do classify inbound as LinkedIn ad posts and our internal website. Uh, so when we externally source, I would say probably highest ROI, and I can't give those stats out. That would be that would be in I'd be in trouble for that. But okay, highest ROI would probably be seek out or LinkedIn, obviously. Um, or events, you know, events are really events have become really popular again.

SPEAKER_00 28:23

Yeah, do you primarily virtual or in-person?

SPEAKER_01 28:27

Our university team, I I personally think is, and I'm not by I'm not trying to be biased, but I think it's world class and they put on crazy events, so they do both internal or like in-person and virtual. Um, so I think you have to do a combination when you overindex on one, I think you lose a large pool of people. So I think doing that, especially if you want to target different groups and A-B testing it, is the best thing to do because ROI on events is the hardest thing to actually correlate because you can't really you can't determine if someone went to an event, did they apply for our job? Like it's very hard to connect those two things.

SPEAKER_00 29:03

So it's okay though. Like sometimes like you just know that you're putting value out into the world and that's a good thing, and it's gonna pay dividends. Like, you sometimes you have to go through those motions, right? Without even having necessarily the best data to to back up the investment, because it's just you have to be like, okay, it's intuitive, or it's reasonable to assume that unless unless it's like there's no you feel like there's no return, right? Or it's somewhat obvious that there isn't. Like, I do feel like that's uh events are a good strategy. I mean, as Secure Vision grows, I actually want to have somebody that's like head of community, and I want them to focus on like basically events, in-person, remote, and building communities for like the top 10 roles that we fill for our clients. So, like engineers, products, salespeople, marketing, whatever it might be, and to build communities and events and even like private Slack channels and resource centers to where like we can constantly be adding value uh to the top position, you

Using events to create inbound demand

SPEAKER_00 30:01

know, the people in the top positions that we fill for our customers. And that way, whenever we have like a new job open for a client, we can just immediately tap into the community that we've built and been adding value to. So we're not we're not there yet. Like at this point, it would be too much of a dilution of focus. Like, we just need to focus on our core. But um, you know, that is something in the next couple of years that I want to roll out at Secure Vision, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:24

Uh, and there's two two points I'll add to that. And I think you're I think that's an incredible path to go on because I do think that's where recruiting is going. So the first piece is you also I think you got to look at Discord. Discord, especially for new inch technology, is like that is where you're gonna find great talent uh from a community standpoint. And then two, actually, I'll do two more points. I do not believe you at the beginning you talked about shoestringing your budget in the TA world or in the HR world. And I do think at most companies that is a problem. And so when they look at events, people, when they look at businesses, want to see direct return. When you look at events, events is about building your brand or building your community, like you're talking about. You might need multiple events, multiple touch points to get someone to come to your company. But if it gets you one person who is top talent in their space because they felt connected at that event, it's the employee brand and engagement and community piece that you really are getting the value on, which is not easily correlated to the cost associated.

SPEAKER_00 31:23

Right. And the other part too with that is that it could increase response rates on cold outreach because it's not actually cold. Like, how are you going to track that? Yeah, I mean, unless you have a list of everybody who went and you're targeting them, but you know, beyond that, it's like you're gonna see get going to see a lift across the board in the long run by making that investment.

SPEAKER_01 31:44

And that's where I think Jim can help you a little bit because you can, you know, have a landing page from Jam that'll capture those people against those events. So that could be a reach out group. You could also track click-through rates on links that you have on there. So maybe you're giving a link from the event and see how often people are clicking and referencing. So I do think there is technology to help you with that. But the thing that I think is actually most interesting, kind of tied to this point, is because technology is moving

How to curate your resume to get an interview

SPEAKER_01 32:10

so rapidly in the TA space, the way that internal teams recruit and the way that candidates need to expose themselves has changed dramatically, in my opinion. Like this idea of just applying to a, you know, a Netflix or a Google or an Apple, the probability of you actually talking to someone at Netflix, Apple, or Google is very, very low if you just apply, because they're using technology to highlight specific things depending on the need of the business. And so when we talk about like these technologies, if you're a candidate listening to this, just applying is not the smart way to get into your dream job. And I have a lot of conversations around this. And writing a beautiful cover letter is also not probably the smartest way to get into your dream job. It's highlighting what makes you unique. Are you a part of a diverse group of people? Great. Have that somewhere in your resume because that keyword is going to hit your profile. Are you someone that has a very unique skill set? I've had a bunch of consulting gigs come up for Airtable because Airtable has gained so much steam, but no one highlights that they know Airtable. So, like those types of things are allowing recruiters to distill or to surface candidates based off what their hiring managers are wanting very quickly. And if you're not curating your resume, so don't just apply to a million jobs because you're not going to curate your resume. Curate your resume towards the job that you want by looking at the job description and see the keywords that consistently pop up and fit that into what you're doing. That is the easiest way for you to get an interview. And people don't realize that that's the only way to get an interview with these big companies. When I was at Netflix, oh, I shouldn't say this, but maybe you'll have to cut this. But we're getting 10,000 applications a day. Like, how are you gonna you're not if you just apply and it's not happening?

SPEAKER_00 33:50

Right, right. You have to be a little bit more targeted, right? Yeah, and I think that's like, yeah, it's the know-how piece. Like people just like it seems obvious, but to people that aren't in TA or just haven't been, it's probably not. But then the other thing is it takes a little bit of effort, like yeah, you know, but I ideally it's like in your job search, it's you know, if you're gonna go spend a portion of your life somewhere, you know, we should be a little bit more critical about how you know, thinking about like putting together a target list, right? Like top 10, 20 companies and actually investing some time and not waiting till you need a job, right? Like just proactively kind of putting feelers out there, um, you know, doing what you just said, trying to build a few relationships, um, you know, engaging with people on LinkedIn, so on and so forth. I feel like that's that's the winning strategy. If you really want to like be as you know thoughtful as possible about your career progression, right?

SPEAKER_01 34:40

Yeah, it's really about building a brand. A company builds their brand, but as an as a

The importance of building your brand

SPEAKER_01 34:45

uh candidate, you need to build your brand as well. I can't tell you, and I feel for it feel for it right now, but all these people that have lost their job, how many posts I've seen on LinkedIn start with, I haven't been on here in a while, but I just got laid off. But you're so you haven't really built a brand. Now you're leveraging that to try to leverage your community to get a job. And I think you should do that. It's a good starting point. But it's interesting, it's interesting that that's the first reason why you go there instead of, like you said, enjoying it, enjoying the fruits of building a community based off of commonality, which should help you in the long run get your dream job.

SPEAKER_00 35:21

Yeah, and again, I think that a lot of people know that they should be doing this. Yeah, so like in 2022, it's like, come on, okay, maybe in like 2018, right? Yeah, um, but yeah, man, I mean it's it's like the other issue with that too, it's like you know, you're you're trying to build these relationships, and then like a day later, you're making an ask. Yeah, I find that kind of like I mean, I still try to help people, right? But if somebody like doesn't, you know, isn't I don't know who they are, right? And then out of nowhere, they they'll just start liking my stuff, and then they reach out making like a big ask for me to like tap into my network and ask a bunch of VPs, you know, it's like, dude, I like I don't know, it just it doesn't give the same vibe versus if you've built a genuine relationship over the past couple years, you know? Yeah, so it's it's just it's it's in it's in everybody's best interest to proactively do this, right? I mean, yeah, it takes time. I mean, and and that's like the other thing with the social strategy, it's not gonna give you the return in like a week, but if you hit it consistently for six months, that's where it's really gonna be most valuable.

SPEAKER_01 36:30

Yeah, and I think you know, the last point on the event piece, and this is coming from personal experience. When I was first coming out of school, I got into retail because it was 2008, the housing crisis, no one was hiring. I hated retail, did not want to be in retail. So I went to a bunch of community like job fairs, and I was the person that would go hand my resume out, not talk to anyone. I thought, oh, go into their booth and handing my resume was and I for I probably applied to like 200 places, didn't get a single response. Could not figure out why. This is a good story. It's it's good for people to know this. So didn't get a single response. Um, and and what I realized reflecting on that today is recruiters are there to find the best talent for their companies, right? And when you show up to one of these things, their purpose is to engage with you. But in order to engage with you, you need to engage with them. So if I would have done it differently, spend five minutes talking to your dream company recruiter because they want to talk to you, they're giving you a purpose to engage with them. And if you're not doing that, you can't be disappointed that they're not talking to you because I was in retail. No, to the outside perspective, no transferable skill set. Now I'm in a different situation. But when they see my resume, they're gonna say, retail manager, that's not gonna work for me because they don't know who I am as an individual. I didn't build a brand. So talk to people when you go to them, don't just stand there. All these people want to talk to you. They're all generally pretty nice. That's why they're in recruiting. It's the best way to make that engagement because personal connection goes a long way.

SPEAKER_00 37:55

Well, yeah. I mean, I so we're so we're sponsoring a conference called Saster. It's a bunch of have you heard of that one?

SPEAKER_01 38:02

I haven't.

SPEAKER_00 38:03

It's pretty cool. It's um uh a lot of startups grow stage companies, even enterprise, um, primarily SaaS, but also just general tech. Uh San Mateo, I think. Um, so South South Bay area, Silicon Valley. Uh, there's gonna be a ton of companies, man. Like just a ton. It's in September. Actually, I have some free tickets if you want to go. I can get you one.

SPEAKER_01 38:23

I was gonna say, should I should I shoot you the ass? Because we just talked about not asking for something. No, this is ticking, James.

SPEAKER_00 38:29

Yeah, but you that's this is different. You know why it's different? Because you're you're giving value to the community, right? You're actually producing real value. Um but yeah, yeah, for sure. If you want a free ticket, it's September 13th to 15th. Um, it's gonna be really cool. Gonna be a bunch of great speakers from leading category leading tech companies. It's gonna be awesome. I had a point though. Um, yeah, the point was is that we we're implementing like a similar strategy for like engaging with people. It's like we're we're engaged, we're reaching out to all of this like speakers, speaker companies, and all of the sponsor companies now, like sending them emails, like introducing ourselves, like putting our name out there. We also put together a um like a trip. Like if you stop by our booth and do a discovery call, you could win a free trip to Paris, all inclusive. We're gonna pay for everything, right? It's like five G's in value, a little bit more, probably. So, yeah, you know, we're doing different things to drive engagement, but you know, and then I also we had an op specialist go through my LinkedIn and uh like everybody's um follow everybody's profile that's a sponsor or a speaker, and hit that little bell in the top right corner so we see all their posts, and then I'm just constantly like you know, liking and engaging with their content. So by the time I go to this thing, hopefully everybody's gonna like is gonna recognize me, right? Um, yeah, so I mean you can leverage that and and can it. I mean, this is just like good marketing for yourself as a candidate for a company. This is the way to do it, opposed to just showing up cold, too. It's like try to try to build some of those relationships proactively.

SPEAKER_01 40:01

Yeah, I make it a point of I get a lot of companies reaching out to me, telling me like they want me to demo their their technology, and I'm blessed to work for companies that have great brands, right? Like that's just it's been it's helped me build my brand. But what I do is I always respond, and most people won't always respond. And I'm sure you've had this where you reach out, you might reach out multiple times and they don't. And to your point, I think what that does is create like it's a social investment. I look at it as a piggy bank. Every time I respond, it's a positive investment into this piggy bank. And now when I go to these different conferences, for good or for bad, people come up to me and like actually talk to me at these conferences. And I think it's because I was one of the hundred people that they reached out to, but I actually engaged with them and took a call with them, even if it was to help with their pitch. Um, so I do believe that your strategy in any capacity is going to be valuable for your brand. It's time invested. Time is the most valuable thing you have. Invest your time where you want to invest it, and you'll see returns, not maybe immediately, but definitely in the future.

Wrap up

SPEAKER_00 41:00

Yeah, for sure. It makes a lot of sense. So I hope everybody tuning in takes it to heart. And and look, this has been this has been a great conversation. I've I've really enjoyed this. We're coming up on time here, and I don't want us to be like going to another topic and then be rushed for the last couple of minutes. So I think I think it's a good time to hit pause. Um, and uh just to be clear, again, this was really valuable. So if you ever want to come back on, uh, we got a spot for you if you want to ever do a round two with us.

SPEAKER_01 41:24

I'd uh you know, I'd love to. I was I was didn't know where we were gonna go. We went super philosophical, but I appreciate the invite. It was it was a good conversation.

SPEAKER_00 41:32

Yeah, for sure. And um, Jared, if if people want to connect with you, where can they find you online?

SPEAKER_01 41:39

Uh the best place to find me right now would probably be LinkedIn, just Jared Long, Duolingo. I do have an open job. You know, if someone wants to come join me on my team, senior rec ops manager, come join me. Uh, I promise you'll have a a good time building for a really cool company.

SPEAKER_00 41:55

Nice. Um, so when we publish this and go live, I will uh I'll do like a LinkedIn post about this combo. And in that post too, I can reference any open jobs you have.

SPEAKER_01 42:06

Sounds good. I appreciate it. James, thanks for inviting me. I really enjoyed this.

SPEAKER_00 42:10

Yeah, this was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it as well. So thanks for joining us. And uh for everybody else tuning in, thanks as well. And we'll see you next time. Take care.