Sourcing extraordinaire Mike "Batman" Cohen is not the kind of cat who pulls punches, which makes him the perfect guest for the podcast. In this can't-miss episode, the boys discuss the state of recruiting, sourcing ... and the imminent takeover (not so fast!) of the robots.
Enjoy this exclusive brought to you by NEXXT.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
Intro:
Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where hearse complained with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Bottle up poison.
Joel:
Yeah. Screw spidey senses. He got something better today. What's up boys and girls? You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host Joel Cheesman.
Chad:
And I am Chad Sowash.
Joel:
And today we are blessed to have Mike Batman Cohen, head superhero. I don't know what the title is of Wayne technologies. Mike or should I call you Batman? Like what's, what's sort of podcast etiquette?
Chad:
What's appropriate? Yeah, I don't get it?
Batman:
Publicly prefer Batman or like most of the time I can't get full adoption cause my wife and family refused. So I go by both.
Joel:
Batman. It is. Have you seen the Seinfeld with the Maestro who wants to be called Maestro?
Batman:
No, I don't. Why? I have a strong aversion to Seinfeld.
Joel:
A strong, okay, well this is a separate con... Why do you have a strong aversion to Seinfeld?
Batman:
My dad was a dentist and he had TV's over all of his chairs and he only played Seinfeld. So I only hear like the drill in the background while that show is on.
Joel:
So he loves the anti Dentite episode. I assume.
Batman:
He loves all things Seinfeld.
Chad:
Oh, that's good. Shit. Good shit. So let's, let's learn a little bit more about Batman. Tell us, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Batman:
Yeah, Um on the professional side been an agency side recruiter for 12 and a half, almost 13 years. I owned my own company now because I'm a fairly disgusted with the majority of the recruiting industry and how they're, how it's approached. It's a super low bar of entry with high potential. And so it floods with people just looking to make a buck. So I I actually created a new style of sourcing contract sourcing that isn't based on hours. It's based on a clear deliverables of delivering X number of candidates per role with, you know, personal contact data and then actually doing the outreach and making introductions that way. So I'm hoping to positively impact the industry so people stop spending money to companies who are giving them quote unquote, 40 hours a week with no like true SLAs and instead just say, Hey, you want this thing? Cool. Well, I'm going to give you this thing. The better I am at delivering that thing, the last time it takes me, the more money I can earn. So like we're in mutual alignment with each other.
Chad:
Makes sense. Deliverable, always nice.
Joel:
We got to touch on why Batman before we get to the Q and a, because a lot of people do not know you. They're hearing this podcast saying, who the fuck is this Batman guy? So why the Batman thing?
Batman:
Yeah. as a story, I'll try to condense it. So it's about four years ago, three and a half years ago, I was in New York city as four years and I was working for a boutique staffing agency doing tech recruiting. I had a bunch of like super cool clients, man at the time. And I wanted to work on my personal branding so that way people would want to work with me. Right? And I'm like, all right, Michael Cohen, what can I get? That's my actual name and what can I do with that right? I'm like, Aw, my initials are MC, blah, blah, blah. This was right around the time our current president started running for office, which it probably doesn't seem relevant to most people listening to this, but if you do any level of research or you can remember he had a lawyer and that lawyer was objectively, kind of an idiot and a jerk.
Chad:
You mean the one in jail right now?
Batman:
The one in jail. And he had some epic interviews where he just said some stuff that was just awful. And his name is Michael Cohen. So yeah. So I was like, great, I'm never coming up on the first page of Google ever. And so dude, I, you know, I love Batman. I didn't read comics as a kid at all despite what people think. I, I read my first and I was 19. It was a Batman comic. I fell in love. I figured he's the world's greatest detective, which, you know, as a sourcer and recruiter, that's kind of what we do. And I said, you know what? Let's give it a try and see what happens. And people seem to like it. So,
Chad:
Okay. So with this low bar that you're talking about, cause there's no question we agree with that anybody can get into the into the industry. And don't you find that because of the low bar that recruiters get tagged with being and sourcers get tagged with being a lazy just because of the influx of anybody, quote unquote, anybody can do the fucking job.
Batman:
Yes, but you used a phrase they get tagged as being lazy. I think they're just lazy. By and large. If you look at a group of people, anything, sourcers, recruiters, doctors, lawyers admins, and more than 50% of them are lazy. I don't think you're tagging them as lazy. I think just as a group of humans, they're lazy,
Chad:
But that's not fair though they didn't go to school to be recruiters. They didn't get trained to be recruiters. They weren't they, they came in because there was a job, they thought they could do it. They're really not recruiters. So if you take a look actually probably, but if you look at the core of recruiters who are actually recruiters, would you say that they're lazy?
Batman:
No.
Chad:
Okay.
Batman:
The number unfortunately the percentage is much smaller than it should be.
Chad:
Well we wouldn't have a third party vendor system without lazy recruiters.
Batman:
I'm super grateful. That recruiters suck. I like, I increase like the quality of their recruiting industry, but like not to 100% cause I'd be out of a job.
Chad:
That's the name of this podcast by the way Grateful Recruiters Suck. That's awesome.
Batman:
Yeah, that's perfect. But maybe suck a little bit less. I'm sorry you asked what percentage? It's really tough. I, I think legitimately like how many really good recruiters are out there. I think 20% would be pretty generous. .
Joel:
So we jeez, we talked a lot about the death of sourcing last year and had some, I think pretty smart people who know a thing or two about sourcing. Johnny Campbell for instance, said what 98% of sourcing should be dead at some point. Like what's sort of your view on the present state of sourcing and the future of said profession?
Batman:
Yeah. So I'm going to come out right here and this is going to annoy some people. So bring it, you have my email address everyone. It's online. You can send me hate mail that way. So I'm going to make a blanket statement and say Hey, if you're not actively sourcing all the time, don't give me your fucking comments on sourcing. I don't give a shit what you think about sourcing. I can say the same thing about online training videos are going to be dead in X amount of time cause there'll be ways to automate that shit and people will do it for free on YouTube just recording themselves working. But like I don't know that cause you know I don't do it every day. So like that's annoying as shit. Do I think sourcing will be dead? No, I absolutely do not do. I think shitty sourcers that people who are recruiters who say things like, yeah, I do outbound.
Batman:
And you're like, cool, what are your favorite platforms? And they're like indeed and dice and monster. You're like, Oh cool. You're not, you're not going to have a job. In a couple of years. Once they get like the AI sourcing platforms down, like they're not going to be able to sustain, but like a true sourcer right now, look at people like Amy Miller or Steve Levy who are not approaching this as like, Oh, let me go to LinkedIn and type in the keywords I want and type in the X and Y and Z. Right. The way that we work at Wayne Tech, you're creative about the sourcing. It's not go to platform type in shit. See what comes back send message. It's like a great example. We're working on a CFO for a biopharma company. They need help raising money and IPOing. And so one of my recruiters was like, cool, I'm going to do research then on every biopharma company in a similar space, which is like the immunization space, who IPOed in the last seven years. And then I'm going to find their executive team and I'm going to look at the two or three people who were responsible for raising the money and bringing them through their IPO. And then that's the people that I'm going to reach out to for the role and like there's no tool that's gonna do that.
Joel:
That sounds like thoughtful recruiting. I'm gonna applaud that. Do you feel like sourcing will exist in every industry? So we had someone on recently and we all sort of agreed like high frequency recruiting and hiring will all be at some point. Like do you think that sourcing will only exist in sort of the higher profile jobs or do you think it will continue to exist in all sort of phases of it?
Batman:
I am not a futurist so I don't, I don't, I want to caution and say this is an opinion of mine. Not, not based on empirical evidence.
Joel:
That's all we do on this show.
Batman:
Oh great. Okay, perfect. Then I'll fit right in here. So I think that it will still exist and I think the reason it will exist is the online presence for those folks, right? The blue collar workers in general is not as prevalent and therefore finding them is inherently going to be more difficult. Right? Like so when I was doing a searches for CDL drivers and I was doing searches for like service techs for folks who would literally go out and like clean tanks for the oil and gas industry, the only way that I could find those guys was either, I believe you're not Craig's list or Facebook searching people and finding people on Facebook who work at companies that did that job or had titles like driver and stuff like that. But it's going to be hard to automate that because you know, who else has titles of drivers, people who like deliver pizza for pizza hut driver as their title or people who drive for Uber. And so it becomes a lot harder at that point to kind of automate a process of searching through different platforms and also LinkedIn and Facebook do a super great job of changing their UI just often
enough to fuck everybody.
Chad:
Oh yeah.
Joelr:
We actually have a, we have a live a camera at the Craig's list R&D department. Let's, let's check in on that. Okay. All right. (CRICKETS).
Chad:
You know what, that's not though. That's not their revenue department. That's for fucking sure.
Chad:
We'll get back to the interview in a minute, but first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of NEXXT.
Joel:
What kinds of companies should be leveraging programmatic?
Andy Katz:
Every Fortune 1000 company out to anybody with extreme volume of jobs. You're recruiting for 20 positions a year. You don't need programmatic. You can go to a recruitment marketing agency or a job board and do a direct email with your company only you're not in with another 20 companies in a job alert or you're not just on a career site or a job board. You can do banner advertising ,buy premium placements. So where programmatic again, is one piece of the puzzle. It's not going to ever be the end all be all. And I do believe all the programmatic platforms out there have ancillary services to support that knowing that you can't just survive on a one trick pony.
Chad:
For more information, go to hiring.NEXXT.com remember that's next with the double X, not the triple X, hiring.Nexxt.com
Chad:
So when we're talking about talent from a recruiter who is really focused on, you know, detective work, what is the best source for a company today? Cost,] really all for the ROI piece to be able to go out and actually find qualified candidates
Batman:
Ahh man. Do you want like candid response to that question?
Chad:
Yes.
Batman:
Cool. That's a stupid fucking question. And here's the reason. Sure. I equate, hi, thanks. Whoever hit that I assume was cheese. That is the equivalent question to me of asking a contractor or building your house, Hey, what's the best tool to build a house? Right? And if they're like, Oh, a hammer, I'm like, you're fucking fired. You're not building. Right? So the answer to your question is I don't know, what positions are you recruiting for? Where in the world do you recruiting for them? How senior is your team, what does your budget look like, how automated you need X and Y and Z processes. Are you a spray and pray recruiting company? Like all of these things play into effect as to whether you want to do something that like a Hiretual whose AI is great for turning back like tons of folks very quickly to weed through or whether you want to use something like Seekout where you have much more control with boolean. So if you're like a boolean and lover and master like, so for me seek out my go-to. Typically if you're like solely hiring for tech, right? It depends where in the world. But like particularly in the U S I'd go with human predictions globally, I'd probably go something like amazing hiring. If you are really a fan of paying a bunch of money for really shitty service, you can go with LinkedIn recruiter. You know, it just depends on kind of what you, what your unique use cases.
Chad:
So thinking about it from, from this standpoint, companies have spent millions, possibly hundreds of millions of dollars to be able to spray and pray and do all that shit over the last couple of decades. Right? And they've built massive applicant tracking system databases and they don't use that shit at all. So from my standpoint, and again, again, I'm not the expert here, that seems to me like the number one source that you would want to try to dive into or at least try to create a talent pipeline around so that you don't have this black hole experience that recruiters get blamed for a lot of times, Oh, the recruiters aren't getting back with them. Well fuck when you have that many goddamn applicants, how the fuck can you, so in looking at sources, why aren't we using the applicants tracking system resume database? Because we're buying these motherfuckers five, six, 10 times over.
Batman:
I mean, the short answer is because inherently recruiters are lazy on the front end. You have an overwhelming amount of candidates responding to jobs and putting in the data into the ATS is literally the last thing most recruiters want to do. So like they're not updating things like, Oh, what's their category, what are their skills or tags, what's their rating, what's their visa status, etc. They're just throwing shit into the system. And the problem with doing that is a year from now if you want to search for people, no one's actually categorized in any way in these huge systems. And so people have ATS is that for all intents and purposes are useless outside of process tracking, in which case just get like a Kanban board like a Trello and you'll be fine. The same shit at that point.
Chad:
Well we have all this data though.
Batman:
No you don't.
Chad:
The data's there. But it's not contextualized. Right. So just like you're saying, no, no. If that fucking visas don't know what's going on, all this shit is really just garbage data. How can you turn some of this tech that we have, like some, some that you were talking about on that data to make it worth a shit. Do you think we can or do you just think it's garbage? Get rid of it. Start from ground zero.
Batman:
There are tools that you can use to try to reinvigorate the data, right? So like this is where the idea of using a chat bot is super appealing. So a, I use XOR.AI. I'm big, big on Aida is doing some awesome stuff. She is great and, and Maldovia their tool I use to reinvigorate candidates, right? Cause if you have that many candidates, you don't want to have to reach out and then deal with, you know, a million responses.
Batman:
I instead would want a chat bot reaching out saying, Hey, just want to touch base. It's been a little while. You know, if you're open to looking for a new job or you know, updating our data so we can reach out in the future for relevant jobs, let me know. Right. And say like, yeah, sure. And the chat bot gathers the information of where you working, what's your title, what's the best email, blah, blah, blah, and then that will auto update the database. Now all of a sudden you're starting to make use of some of that data. If you're not willing to take steps to correct the bad data put in the system, it's useless. Just, I mean hang onto it solely for the reason of like, Oh it looks like we spoke to this person. You know, like last week. We should probably not talk to them again.
Joel:
Batman. I'm intrigued by the fact that on your website you actually list the tools that you use to source. That
Batman:
That's not totally up to date.
Joel:
Not totally up to date. So assuming, assuming you're not getting paid to list these companies, you're actually using them on
Batman:
I and to clarify that I do not accept any money from any of those companies for anything.
Joel:
I'm going to assume that you get a lot of pitches from a lot of vendors and so I'm just curious about how are they doing it incorrectly or correctly. What tips would you give to salespeople in the vendor space? And maybe what are, you know, if someone's looking at this and saying, you know, I have a budget for like, you know, three tools, what would maybe be your three must have tools that are in your tool chest right now?
Batman:
I'm not going to name specific tools, I'm going to name functions instead. Cause again, I think the use case will be different based on the tool within the function. So your first question was regarding salespeople in these in these products, in these vendors spaces, what can they do? I find that too, these companies sell the product based on their knowledge of what the product can do as opposed to how the product is being used. So if you're able to talk to some thought leaders, quote unquote, whatever the hell that means in the space who are using the product, I would personally suggest, Hey, reach out to those folks and ask to do a screen share and just watch them use the product for 10 15 minutes. See how they're using it, and then ask questions about, Oh, why do you do that? What do
you do there?
Batman:
What do you do there? So, so when you're demoing the product and like, Oh, look at what we can do. Oh, look what we can do., who gives a shit what you can do? What, how are they going to use the product? So I'll step off my soapbox there and I'm going to get right back on my soapbox. And in, in terms of tooling, there's a few areas I think people really need to think about. One is sourcing obvious, yay. But like, get off of LinkedIn. Recruiters, stop using it. Yeah. It's so expensive now.
Chad:
But that's what lazy recruiters do though, right? They just go to...
Batman:
It's not their fault, it's what they were given. It's the only product they're given. Often times it's the only thing they know how to.
Chad:
Yeah, but they're crying for it though too. You know it. You hear it. Need my LinkedIn Recruiter.
Batman:
Of course they're addicted. They're addicted. You guys were at TalentNet to give a whole talk on addiction and the recruiting space, they're addicted to the way they've always done it, right? So one is, Hey, for the same price you pay for LinkedIn recruiter, you could literally get a better AI sourcing tool and an email automation tool and a contact information finding tool all for the exact same price. Right? And you can say, Oh well then we lose the ability to search LinkedIn for a, you know everybody, no you don't. There's a thing called Google and you can use that and you have access to all of LinkedIn still. So stop it. Stop using LinkedIn recruiter guys, I feel like I just, it kills me. So one is sourcing, the other is email automation. People don't necessarily realize PWC put out a study I think like 2017 so it's a little older.
Batman:
The average number of candidate touches it takes to generate a response. Right? And the number is, is shockingly higher than people think. I get the majority of my responses on my third and fourth emails to candidates. So like most people aren't doing that and if they are, it's taking an extraordinary amount of time to track who's responded, who hasn't responded, who would rather move from this list? I have to send these out to these people. How is that going to work? So like just use an email automation tool. There's a whole bunch out there. I'm not again going to mention names. I think it depends on your use case. That would be one after that, there's a few different things I think are important. One, I think our contact information finding tool is super important so that you can email people instead of InMail. The average cost of an InMail is somewhere between like a dollar 20 and $3.
Batman:
The average cost of looking up a personal email is between like 80 cents and a dollar. So it's, it's actually cheaper and you can hang on to the data forever and ever.
Joel:
And there's our money shot. Thanks Mike.
Batman:
Yeah, I think an ability to web scrape is important, right? I will call this out. I use ZapInfo. I don't know of a another tool in the space that can do anything close to it. So for me, I want to be able to search on any site and any platform and pull that data and I use spreadsheets for everything. So like I want to pull all that data out into a spreadsheet. I don't want to be confined to an individual tool because it doesn't play well with anything else or let you export into a spreadsheet or let it function with any other tools like fucking LinkedIn Recruiter.
Batman:
So hypothetically if that's what I was talking about. So that's one. I would also suggest that this is going to be a big shout out for our company because of the only thing I've ever seen like this. Check out, Honeit. H. O. N. E. I. T. Nick dude. Nick Livingston is doing some, some shit, man. It is. It's case for qualification calls and it is been like life changing for my clients. They've been able to cut out an interview round by me using it and hiring managers go bananas, so I think that's, that's probably one of the other, the other big ones,
Chad:
It's genius and if you haven't listened to it, we actually have done a Firing Squad with Nick and Honeit. He got big applause from both of us because it is a kick ass fucking platform. All you have to do Google Honeit and firing squad or Chad and Cheese. That shit will come up. Mike. Dude, we appreciate you coming in. Hope to have you back, but before, before we have you back, we want to, we want to be able to have all the listeners know where to actually find you, contact you. Where can they do that?
Batman:
Anywhere really. I LinkedIn, if you look up Mike Batman, I'm going to be at the top. I think if you look at Batman, I'm probably going to be the first one also or, or just email me at batman@wayne-technologies.com if you don't get the reference, we probably don't have a ton in common. If you do email me, just reach out. I'm always happy to help. You want to talk tooling? You want like a quick chat like street shop. I do want to help as best I can.
Chad:
Excellent, man. Thanks so much for joining us.
Batman:
Absolutely, guys, thanks for having me.
Outro:
This has been the Chad and Cheese Podcast, subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show and be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible for more visit ChadCheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome.