Recruiting at Intel is becoming smarter and smarter. Driven by PhD Tyler Weeks, the company is strongly committed to analytics and automation. The boys explore exactly what that means in this Nexxt exclusive.
Enjoy and learn something, would ya'!
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
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Announcer: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast.
Joel: Yo, what's up everybody? Got a special show today. We got a super fan on the line-
Chad: Super fan.
Joel: As well as being a super smart guy. What's up everybody? I'm Joel Cheesman. This is the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm joined today by-
Chad: Tyler Weeks.
Joel: And Chad Sowash, who said Tyler Weeks. So Tyler, superfan, head of the fan club, great style, by the way also. Welcome to the show. Give us a little bit about you for those who don't know, give us the elevator pitch.
Tyler: I'm so well known, I'm sure it hardly needs-
Joel: That is true-
Chad: Everywhere.
Joel: You are a bit iconic.
Tyler: Everywhere. I'm a bit of an oddball. I'm a physicist by training, jumped out of research and development, and right into talent acquisition. And I've been in the space for almost four years now. And I run a team called Analytics and Automation. And we're looking at how to be competitive using technology and machine learning.
Joel: Well, what a great coincidence that we talk about automation so much on the show that you happen to be a guest today.
Chad: Physicist. Let's break this down real quick. So how do you make the jump from being a fucking physicist to going to talent acquisition? I don't know how that works, I need to understand how that works.
Joel: And have you had your head checked? Like drug addiction, is that in there somewhere?
Tyler: Right, this is what it looks like when we wash out. No, actually, you know, it's interesting. Even in going through grad school I was really interested in business problems and I liked playing around with things in the business school and talking to VCs and was sort of set on having my own billion dollar startup. And I jumped into a career doing research and development but never lost that drive for business development. And at some point I kind of realized that I really wanted to get out of the lab and go tackle those types of problems and it took me quite awhile to rebrand myself and upskill.
Joel: What kind of timeline are we talking about? So you graduate at what age
and then you did that for how long and then it took you how long to get into talent acquisition.
Tyler: So I did that for about five and a half years. The research and development, I would say probably around about halfway through that I decided that I wanted to change, but I didn't want to just like jump into something I didn't want to do. So I took my time, spent a lot of time talking to folks about business roles and learning how to talk about business, crashed and burned in a lot of places with interviews that went nowhere and resumes that were garbage and all that stuff. And really learning how to tell my story became part of that journey and then I, through some networking, found this role in HR and honestly like, I was really skeptical about it because in my mind HR was just Toby from the office. And I was just like, I-
Joel: And you were wrong how?
Tyler: I was just like, "I just don't know what this thing is," but it was in talent acquisition and I had a few friends that were like, "No, this is actually a cool role." And I hopped in in a purely business role, it was running the recruiting strategy for all of Intel's manufacturing globally.
Joel: Where you at Intel previously or would-
Tyler: Yeah, so I've been at Intel for about nine years now.
Joel: So you convinced them to take this jump to take you from one profession to another one. How did that go?
Tyler: Someone who just took a big chance on me, they took a huge chance on me and I don't know if it is a good idea or not. And so I did that for about a year and then we had just adopted Workday-
Chad: Ouch.
Tyler: Basically that was Armageddon in terms of like, you know, just complete meltdown of all our analytics. It's like driving a cruise ship by just bumping into the shore. Right? Like, there was no visibility into what was happening. And so they asked me to join our analytics team and then... Because I'd kind of become this weird unicorn where I understood, after this crash course of a year, talent acquisition and the analytics. And now I'm here and I do a lot of storytelling and a lot of building our technology roadmap.
Joel: Intel, not a small company, but you lead analytics and automation and you lead that team. How big is the team? This is one of the things that got me, everybody listen, how big's the team?
Tyler: So I've got about 15 people globally.
Joel: Okay, wait, say that again?
Tyler: About 15. About 15-
Joel: 15 people globally, I mean you guys, just on your analytics and automation team, probably out number many of the recruiting like branding teams or anything like out there. Right?
Tyler: Our leaders, in talent acquisition in particular, have invested heavily in analytics.
Joel: That's awesome.
Tyler: And they've done that intentionally to try to drive up the ROI of the team. And we actually accomplished quite a bit of work with a very lean team of recruiters and sourcers in recruitment markets. If you look at the number of people we have worldwide doing talent acquisition, I think we're actually fairly small as an org. But I think it's because we invest strategically in things like automation and analytics to help us make smarter decisions rather than just kind of brute force, let's hire the planet and have a thousand RPO contracts all over the world.
Joel: And that today is why we're here. Right?
Tyler: Yeah, that's exactly why we're here.
Joel: So Tyler and I, after he got off stage, him and Allyn were on stage at SmashFly's Transform conference in Boston earlier this year. Got off the stage-
Chad: Allyn is?
Joel: Allyn is... What's Allyn's title?
Tyler: Allyn Bailey, she is Yoda. I think, she's our resident Yoda. She is our transformation program manager. So she had this role of basically modernizing how we do talent acquisition.
Joel: So putting the puzzle together is what Allyn does.
Chad: Sounds easy.
Joel: Yeah, not so much. So they had this amazing presentation around the infinity loop, which instead of using recruiting funnels, you should be using infinity loops. But anyway, afterwards I caught up with Tyler and said, "Look, you know, this is great stuff. You have so much data." And then we got into this kind of like ROI rabbit hole, which is how this podcast came to be. Tell us a little bit about that conversation and really where your passion is when it comes to, obviously, analytics and really the big focus on ROI when it comes to business impact.
Tyler: Yeah. You know, I think one of the things that I often find myself doing is helping build a business case or what's the story, what's the thing that we actually want to accomplish? Because constantly running into folks that are making... There's a few common mistakes that people are making. And one of them that I really try to challenge is people mistake their budget for their value.
Joel: Yes.
Tyler: And that to me is the biggest miss. Like if you were to go and articulate, what's the value of having a talent acquisition at your company? It's enormous. Like in terms of landing the right talent to hit your product timelines, drive your sales, to have your marketing team up and running, like pretty much.. I mean, I'm speaking to the choir here, but pretty much every component of your company is enhanced or kept alive by having strong talent acquisition. And when I see folks advocating for more head count or new technologies, they're typically articulating that the benefit to the company in terms of cost savings, "Oh, we have X
amount of dollars in our budget, we'll save this many dollars if we go get that new tool."
Tyler: Well if you're looking at the ledger for the company and if your company is making a hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, the $500,000, your saving is nothing. It's not really a compelling story. And so then you kind of go back with your tail between your legs cause they were like, "Well that sounds great, but we're not really willing to invest in that. We're going to go put our money where we're going to get a huge return for the company." So figuring out how to tie what you do to the actual revenue of your company is the name of the game. That's how you demonstrate ROI, not just to your manager, but to the company in general.
Joel: I want to go back to your team of 15 folks. When Intel made the decision to create a team of 15, or however many it is or how however many it will be, was it based on data that you already had? Was it a guess that this is where the puck is going and if it was a guess, has the guests been sort of come to fruition that it was the right decision? Like I'm kind of curious how you came to the 15, the decision that was made, was it a guess or was it a done by data?
Tyler: You know, that's a great question. I hadn't thought about it in those terms. I would say it's a little bit of both. I think there was some intuition there, that, "Hey, we need to get good at this," but I don't think it was as intentional as saying we are going to invest X amount of dollars. What really happened is that we invested in having a team that sat in Europe, a team that sat in the US, and a team that sat in Asia and kind of supported the three regions.
Tyler: One of the journeys that we've been on and really kind of pulled those people together, was moving from being a team that was just data. In other words, you would come and ask us for some data and we would spit out an Excel file and email it to you to providing insight and making that jump from just talking about how many hires you have to forecasting what your demand would be, or even defining what demand is, required the team to kind of work as a cohesive unit. And so over the last couple of years, that's really been part of my vision for the team. And what I've really driven with us is getting out of the business of just being data monkeys and really delivering value. I 100% focused on providing value for the work. How can the people on my team help you make a decision, because that's really what people want.
Joel: Do you expect the team to grow over the next five, 10 years?
Tyler: Not necessarily. It could if we maybe changed systems or we... Actually, I'm going to contradict myself. Yes, but not purely in analytics, in focused on analytics. You know, as we're adopting technologies and as we're bringing automations in, somebody's got to be watching the robots.
Joel: Because they're ornery suckers.
Tyler: Right. No, but there's this thing where like folks think that, "Oh I'm going to bring in this automation and then the ROI I'll get is I'll reduce my head count." No, you're going to trade your head count. You need folks that are sitting in the background making sure that you're not going to pull an Amazon and have some biased system that is systematically excluding people. You simply can't do that. And beyond that, beyond the ethical concerns of having automation, you would never go hire a human and not monitor their performance and make sure that they did the thing you hired them to do. I see, in particular in HR, where folks are not necessarily coming up from a pedigree of engineering, or science for that matter, that they want to go buy a black box tool, put it in and assume that it's solving the problem.
Tyler: I want to know did it actually solve the problem? You know, if we're saying that we want sourcers or recruiters to have great candidates, so we're going to put in a machine learning algorithm that matches resumes to Rex. Okay, great, well is that actually making their job easier? Does it actually do any... I don't know if anyone can actually answer the question if that actually does anything, right? It seems nice and it's easy to sell, but does it solve a problem? I don't know. And you need a team of folks that are focused on connecting the solution to the actual outcome. And when we talk about outcomes, that's all analytics. So, yeah, I think there is going to be a bigger demand for teams like mine, not just at Intel but at every company that's hoping to take advantages of these technologies,
Joel: Right. Because most companies have all that data, but it's just sitting there and they're not like looking at the outcomes or really trying to better understand what is going on within their systems. I'm going to take that a little bit deeper as you're talking about the data in back to what you'd said around product timelines, right? So yeah, we're looking for return on investment. We're looking for outcomes and those types of things, but the thing that we don't do, or at least I don't feel like we do enough in talent acquisition, is marry that back to everyday practicality being what does that product timeline look like with those three seats empty? And what does it actually mean if this product can't launch or we can't make X amount of widgets or what have you. What does this mean to the actual bottom line? Do you see us tying talent acquisition, people, brand, sales back to the bottom line enough when it comes to talent acquisition?
Tyler: No, absolutely not. We totally missed the boat on this. You know, talent acquisition likes to borrow lots of concepts. We like to borrow concepts from sales and marketing, from supply chain, from manufacturing, and those are helpful constructs. They are helpful but they're limited. We are like a sales org because we are selling our company. We are like a marketing org because we are marketing. However, where limitations come in is that, like you're going to hire exactly the number of people that you post recs for. So you can't say, "Oh my marketing was really good because we hired more people this year." Doesn't work that way, that's not your ROI. And so when you have to... When you're diving in and looking at what value you're providing, you immediately start bumping up against, "Well, what is my company trying to accomplish? What are our corporate goals and how am I serving those-"
Joel: Purpose.
Tyler: The purpose. And if I start to look at like... Look, everybody in the world, and there's probably people who are going to disagree with this, if they go and take the average or the median of their time to accept from the day they opened the rec to when someone accepts. For most people it's somewhere around 45 days and as far as I can tell for people that have been in the industry for a thousand years... But if you went and asked Jerry Crispin, he'd tell you, "Yeah, it's about 45 days, give or take." It's always been that and our experience from then to about the time somebody actually starts, there's a huge variation, but you know it's about another month or so in reality. Like you know folks negotiate that start date, so call it a quarter, call it 90 days from the time you open a rec to somebody sitting in the seat.
Tyler: Well, there's a huge amount of influencing that needs to happen because finance doesn't understand that. They're talking to the business and they're saying, "Okay, well you need this many more people for this product by the end of the quarter," it's already halfway through the quarter. It's too late already, they've already missed the boat. And then they'll come and they'll beat the shit out of talent acquisition saying, "Hey, you didn't get us people in time." That's simply not how it works, we have to go find the talent. And so being able to tell that story, that specific story of here's what it takes to find talent, even if you're the fastest in the world, here's what it takes to help you hit your product timelines. That all comes back to that analytics and really equipping our people with that story so that they can go influence.
Joel: And also taking those, we actually come up with our own terms, right? Like time to hire. That's not something that the CEO and board actually talk about, right? But how do you tie in when a CHRO goes to a C-suite meeting and they throw time to hire or time to fill on the table, everybody looks at them like, "Oh, isn't that cute? They came up with their own, Aw, look at that. That's cute." Instead of actually tying it back to that time to hire and then onboarding, like you're talking about, what is that actually costing the company?
Tyler: Right.
Joel: What is the cost for a senior engineer position to be open right now? How long is it going to take for us to fill it? How long is the onboarding? What does that cost to the organization, to the bottom line? That's, I mean... Are those questions being... Are those stories actually happening today?
Tyler: Those are, but here's the thing is I think that's just scratching the surface.
Joel: Okay.
Tyler: I think that is the most obvious connection and it's the place that we can go influence the business on is, "Hey, you're not going to hit your product timeline." I think there's a deeper layer of ROI that I really want to figure out. I haven't figured this out, this is just one of the things I'm pushing to look at is moving beyond the value of a hire, what's the value of a candidate to the company? Because if we can start to identify how much a candidate is worth to our company, then we can start to talk about ROI for recruitment marketing, right? We can say, "Hey look, we only hired X amount of people, we're going to hire X amount of people every year, so why would I invest?" This is why I think recruitment market teams fail to get investment is the company looks at and goes, "Well, why would I invest in that? What am I getting for it?"
Tyler: But they don't understand the value of a candidate. And the analogy I keep going to, that I think is helpful here but I haven't quite crystallized it, is if I look at the way professional sports teams scout talent they start in high school. They start in high school looking at who the best potential talent is. They start building relationships with them young. They have no intention of hiring them anytime soon. There's no rec open for point guard, right? Like they're just building a longterm relationship with them. They're understanding who has what skills, what strengths, so that when they have a position open, they already know who the best is. They have a catalog of like, "Hey, we've talked to this person, we saw this person play here, we know they're on that team, they signed this contract." They have like this... And that's their IP, like that black book, or that book of business of who the best talent is and who they've talked to, is incredibly valuable to them.
Joel: That's easy to justify when you have players worth millions of dollars. It's less so with everyday employees. Right?
Tyler: Right. So how do you scale that up? That's exactly the problem. That's exactly, I think, where the potential value is and when we... You know, you mentioned the infinity loop. Really what that is is talking about building those longterm relationships and that, and this was just referencing my talk at Transform, the places that I'm hoping that TA tech can start to innovate is helping scale up that solution. How do I know who the best talent is? There's that McKinsey report from several years ago called The War for Talent, and they basically say that to win you need the top 5% of the labor market. Well, who are they? If you bumped in the street, would you know who they are? And if we can start to talk about that top 5% and the impact they have on your company, and the value of having them in your CRM, or however you're keeping track of folks, and the value of that relationship with them, then you're talking about a whole different level of ROI. And a story that I think is much more compelling than simply, "Hey, we're able to fill recs faster," or, "We're able to have more people accept our offers."
Tyler: I think, to your point, those those have limited appeal to your C-suite. They're like, "Okay, all right, our accept rate is 80%, what do I get if it's 85?"
Joel: Yeah, but if you can tie those numbers together, it actually makes sense for them. If you can put a dollar amount to them, they can make the decision if they give a fuck or not. Right?
Tyler: Right, right. Exactly. And so I think talking about the dollar value... I know that sounds... Probably need an actuary on here to talk about the value of a life. But the the dollar value of having a candidate and having a relationship with them, I think there's a dollar value there or a way to estimate that, that is robust. Like something that I think your finance controllers can get behind and that your C suite can get behind.
Joel: We talk a lot on the show about vendors that provide a lot of services to this industry. And I'm curious, obviously Intel, you guys get inundated with vendors wanting you to buy their services. How do you, your department and you specifically, decide on what vendors to use, what do you build internally? Is there a process by which of that comes along with a service and you say, "Hey, maybe we should build this ourselves." How does that work?
Tyler: The best tee shirts, that's how we choose them, the swag.
Joel: And booze, right?
Tyler: Yeah. Booze and pens, very clickable pens really just sell me every time. No, so actually that's a really interesting question. So, I'm in the process of building a new function here, as sort of a build out for my team, that I'm calling an innovation lab because like every, I think, giant multinational corporation, we struggle to test new technologies quickly. There's so much bureaucracy between our purchasing and legal and IT that it takes us an ungodly amount of time to actually get in and pilot some new technology. So we might see it, we might talk to a really interesting company at HR tech and go, "Oh man, we'd love to try this." But we almost sort of like give up and we're like... Just the amount of work to try it is a barrier in itself.
Joel: And how about building it yourself? Is that an option when you view some of these services and solutions?
Tyler: That's certainly an option.
Joel: And is that more bureaucratic than deciding who to buy?
Tyler: Not necessarily. Let me wrap up the innovation, they all come back to building ourselves. So, the intent of this innovation lab that I'm trying to build, and this is for talent acquisition specifically, is to set a goal. Like a goal that we can march towards of can we turn around a test in 60 days? What would it take? What sort of agreements do we need with purchasing and finance and IT? And can we build a new bureaucracy? Can we just sort of like Neo The Matrix and just say, "Okay like-"
Chad: Streamline bureaucracy.
Joel: Nano bureaucracy.
Tyler: What world do we want to live in and can we go architect that, that will allow us to innovate faster. And that's what I really am trying to drive with this team, is that 60 day turnaround and we just pulled that out of thin air, but hey we figured if we can meet you at HR tech, decide we want to try your technology, we can run a quick pilot, we can actually calculate ROI or business value and then come back with a recommendation. It doesn't mean we have money to go do it, but just to come back to recommendation and say, "Hey, this actually solves X, Y and Z problems for us. We recommend that we go with this one." That's our end state. Now that to build it ourself, that is always a possibility. I think there's sort of a fault line here or like on the one hand it's nice to build it yourself because you can prototype quickly. I run a team that operates more or less in an agile structure, so we can iterate quickly, we can customize it.
Tyler: My challenge is that for some technologies, like anything that's using learning, the pooled experience of that algorithm across many companies with developers who are incentivized to keep it state of the art I think is advantageous. So I think there's actually, there's quite a bit of motivation, in my mind, to purchase solutions that include machine learning or natural language processing, that they have the horsepower behind them in terms of an ambitious company and an ambitious set of developers who are actively working on the problem. If we build it ourselves, we're going to build it and we're going to put it in and it'll do its thing, but it will do that same thing for a long time until it becomes a problem. We simply don't have the bandwidth to proactively be making it better all the time. We're going to get it good enough and then let it collect dust until it breaks.
Joel: So that being said, what are some solutions that you've tested or used or bought in the last 12 months or so that you've been impressed with?
Tyler: There's been a couple of different spaces that we've been exploring and wanting to make sure that we're really good at. Like one thing that I would love... And I keep pushing CRMs when I talked to them and maybe you know the who can do this but I haven't seen anyone actually do this. Is when you're building a recruitment marketing campaign, borrowing analogies from product marketing, you tend to look at just volume. Like clicks and impressions and... But all you're looking at is interest. How much interest are you driving without connecting it to what skills you're attracting? You have no idea whether or not it was successful.
Tyler: Success does not mean more, success really means the right kind of people. So it may be that if I go set up a campaign for goat yoga in Santa Clara that I will get like 80% of the mid-career software engineers with experience in firmware. Right? Like it just might be that the people that are good at that are really interested as a population in goat yoga. And if I don't build personas around skill sets, then I'm not doing the right experiments. I'm not doing the right AB testing. Does that make sense? And I haven't seen... Where, I've seen CRMs starting to use AI, they're still focused on filling recs
Chad: In some cases, AI... And we actually had Amanda Bogan on from Upturn, they're an agency that's focused on equity and justice on the AI side of the house. And they were doing some research with Netflix just to see that even though the algorithm didn't have gender or race, it found a way to make what they were providing, from a movie standpoint, more bias. Which was weird. Now going back to the goat yoga piece, what if only white dudes that are like close to 50, like Joel and I, are doing goat yoga, right? Is that not just a way to perspectively... The machine's going to find in some cases, much like Amazon's did, they're going to find bias whether you input gender or race or anything into that.
Tyler: Yeah. This might sound controversial, but I don't think it is. I think when you're talking about non-biased algorithms, it's absolutely critical if you're trying to replace the recruiter. If you're trying to match people to a job and say this person is more qualified than that person, that absolutely you need to take all the bias out of that you can. When it comes to recruitment marketing, I think you want bias. You want to use it and I know that sounds... It's probably an allergic reaction from the entire set of listeners here, but what I mean by that is if your company is disproportionately white, middle aged men, and that's who you disproportionately attract, then you have to go intentionally build campaigns to attract the people that you don't already bring in. And you don't know if you're doing that or not if you're not looking at it. So, if you're saying... Like exactly to your point, it may turn out that goat yoga just reinforces the current makeup of my company, I will never make a change. I'll never make a difference if I don't look at it and go, "Oh, I'm actually not appealing to these 10 other populations that I really think are important to represent in my company."
Chad: Somebody in talent acquisition, or even vendors... I mean, what would you say today they should walk away with from an actionable standpoint, what did you do? What have you guys done at Intel that has really moved you toward understanding what ROI is and being able to really present back to the business, to big business, that you know you're worth more than just the budget. What's that step they need to take? What would you give them to take away?
Tyler: So I think at a very actionable point is to go look at what are your company's goals? What are the corporate goals? And most companies are going to have them, they're probably going to come in different formats. They're probably released at different times of the year. It should be in the form of, "We want to increase revenue for this department by X percent. We want to sell this many units. We want to expand into this many other markets." Right? What are those? And start by telling the talent acquisition story related to those problems and work backwards from those. How are we helping that? That's as simple... It seems obvious and it's a very simple thing. What you'll quickly see is like, "Oh, maybe I'm missing data. I can't tell this story because I don't know which projects I'm hiring for." Right? It may be that the only thing you're capturing is who the hiring manager is and which organization they work in, but really this project is a horizontal and it reaches across several departments and you have no idea if you're supporting that project or not, and it's maybe the company's biggest priority.
Tyler: You'll quickly start to see, "Oh, I don't know, we seem to be opening requisitions in the same quarter that we say we need the head count, but that's simply not feasible." And so then you start to kind of see where those gaps are. If you just do that simple exercise of taking the corporate goals, which usually include revenue in some form and just work backwards from there. When you actually start to do it, it's not as simple as it sounds, but I think it's an important exercise.
Joel: All right, I'm going to let you out on this one. And first of all, by the way, your answer to my last question albeit very diplomatic was garbage.
Soundbyte: That is one big pile of shit.
Joel: You didn't mention any vendors, you didn't put your balls out there. So I just had to say that that was pretty weak, dude. I'm going to hope that you save yourself on this question, it's sort of a fun one. We were talking about it before we hit record. It looks like around 2011 you guys hired will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas to be your what? Chief creative officer or something?
Tyler: Yeah.
Joel: And you had an interesting take on what having an outdated nineties music icon did to your recruiting. Talk about that.
Tyler: This is either going to be a great answer-
Joel: Don't be weak, man. Come on.
Tyler: Or I'm going to... No, it's cool. Like I'm willing to get fired for the [crosstalk 00:32:40].
Joel: But are you willing.i.am to be fired?
Tyler: Am I will.i.am to get fired. No, you know... Actually we were talking about the sort of hyper color, fab workers that used to be part of Intel's campaign. You know, they dance to like Island in the Sun and they had this whole thing, and I sort of offhandedly said that it was easier to hire back then. You know, Intel... If you know what Moore's law is, if your audience knows what Moore's law is, it's one of our, one of our founders-
Joel: They don't.
Tyler: Okay. So Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, has a thing called Moore's law that he had, which was basically an industry standard, which said that every 18 months we were going to double the number of transistors on a chip. That cadence has been the drum beat that's driven innovation in Silicon Valley for 50 years. That is like the heartbeat of Silicon Valley, it's why, for so long, your laptop shrunk and your phone shrunk and continued to get more powerful. Right? So there's a lot of companies around now that are the darlings of Silicon Valley, right? It's Fang. It's the Facebooks and the Apples, and that was Intel. Intel was that Silicon Valley unicorn that everybody wanted to work at and our brand was so strong, especially in the days of Intel Inside and the dancing fab workers and-
Joel: The '90s.
Tyler: And the '90s were great to us. And you know, you didn't have to have a strong talent acquisition strategy because you just open your door and the world lined up. Right? You said, "Hey, we think we might hire..." I'll bet you back then you could have done an experiment where you just opened a job with no job description and no job title and you'd still have applicants.
Joel: Just a blank screen with apply now.
Tyler: Yeah, just apply now, no information and people still would have applied. And I think, if you go talk to... I'm sure Facebook and Apple and a lot of those companies still enjoy that right now. Like where they're at in terms of their brand strength. And in some segments I think we still do, right? Like we're still known as a chip maker and every person getting a degree in electrical engineering knows that Intel is the largest chip maker in the world. So certainly in those segments that's where we still thrive but we are a growing company and we're trying to address a much larger market that includes things like autonomous driving, includes data centers and memory and all these places that we're not necessarily known for. Nobody thinks of us as an automaker.
Tyler: So where our brand strength is high, sure it's easy. Where our brand strength is not high, then we struggle just like everybody else to attract the right talent. But the will.i.am thing was funny because I think somewhere there was this idea.. This is where I'll throw you bone here. Somewhere there's this idea that Hey, we need to be cool. I'll bet you, I would bet money, that the conversation in the room was like, "Hey, how do we get cool like Apple?" And somebody was like, "Well let's hire somebody cool to go talk for us." And they're like, "Yeah my kids like the Black Eyed Peas, let's get William."
Joel: Let's get William.
Chad: Because Fergie was busy.
Tyler: Fergie was too expensive, I'm sure. We weren't going to spend that kind of money. And so like he even had like... He was even... I don't know if he hosted or he read like one of the awards at like the Grammy's or something but you could probably go find it. He like reads this card and at the end he's like, "And Intel is awesome." And then he like steps off the stage and I'm like, "All right, that's all all right, that's ROI right there, mother fuckers." But that was the same time I think Polaroid hired Lady Gaga to do the same thing. So you know, we weren't-
Chad: I don't know that I would want to put Polaroid next to Intel but hey that's all on you, man. That being said, well, go ahead-
Joel: You do you, bruh.
Chad: We'll go ahead and we'll slowly close out this, wind down this show. Tyler, we appreciate you coming on. We definitely want to have you again, because we have so much to talk about around just the business aspects, obviously, of talent acquisition and analytics. But appreciate you coming in, man.
Tyler: Yeah, this is a blast. You guys are fun.
Joel: For anyone who wants to know more about you and/or Intel, or wants to apply to your invisible jobs, where would you send them?
Tyler: Well, you know, there's obviously our site, our job site. I'm on Twitter @prostalent, like not poems but pros, pros talent, and-
Chad: Lever.
Tyler: I'm on LinkedIn too.
Joel: Tyler Weeks, pretty easy guys. We out.
Chad: We out.
Soundbyte: That's it, man. Game over, man. Game over.
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