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Jim Stroud Talks Automation, Ethics & Paranoia


It's THE recruiting and sourcing legend Jimmy Stroud. He's seen it and done it all people.

On this UNCOMMON exclusive, the boys cover everything from automation, the future of sourcing and why he doesn't want Google to know what he's up to... Wait did someone say DuckDuckGo? And we tackle the question of "Recruiter Ethics" posed to us by our main man Roy Mauer over at SHRM.

Grab a tinfoil hat and enjoy this most excellent episode.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:

Chad: I gonna be over at the top. Say hello to the easiest way to find interested and qualified candidates.

Joel: Dude, you need to tone it down. I was just napping. You mean Uncommon's automated sourcing that turns passive candidates into interested and qualified applications?

Joel: Wow, how much coffee did you have today?

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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 & Cheese Podcast.

Chad: It's Jim Stroud.

Jim: Hello.

Joel: It's the tinfoil hat edition of The Chad & Cheese Podcast.

Chad: Yeah.

Joel: As we were talking before the show, our good buddy Jim Stroud. I don't even know what title you like now, Jim, but everyone probably knows you that's listening, or they should.

Jim: You have a small audience.

Joel: Give us just a quick intro of you and we'll get into the paranoia that we've talked about before the show.

Jim: Yes, you can call me a consultant these days. I have been in sourcing and recruiting for two decades working for such companies as Google, Microsoft, Siemens, and a host of startup companies. Until quite recently, I was the head of sourcing and recruiting strategy for Randstad Sourceright, now consulting for my favorite clients.

Joel: Your Twitter handle and your new podcast.

Jim: Sure, my Twitter handle, I have two. One is @jimstroud. There I tweet about, excuse me, HR and job search issues. There is my other Twitter which is @jimstroudshow, where I talk about my podcast, which is The Jim Stroud Podcast, because I couldn't think of anything else to call it. There, I talk about future issues, like my latest show was on barcoding the homeless.

Chad: What?

Joel: What was that about? Was that like the microchipping of employees that we talk about?

Jim: No, no, no. It's not as insidious. Okay, so there's this company in the UK. They're dealing with the homeless problem in a very unique way. They are giving QR codes to homeless people. They are wearables. They are not tattoos, which is coming out.

Chad: Not yet, yes, yes.

Jim: Not yet.

Joel: Yeah.

Jim: So they're getting these barcodes, and if someone says, "Hey, brother, can you spare a dime?" You can say, "Oh, dude, I don't have any money." They can say, "Well, you know what? Download this app and scan this QR code and you can send me a dollar or $5 or $10. Whatever you so desire, and when you look me up on this app, it will show you not only my face and name to verify if you're talking to the right person but also will give you a brief history of how I became homeless."

Joel: See, I think this would be a great recruiting strategy for salespeople. So you can see ... You take the best homeless people that getting the most money, and you turn them into salespeople. Genius.

Chad: Now, panhandling's not easy, that's for damn sure, right?

Joel: Hell, yeah. You gotta sell your ass off if you're gonna make some money on the streets.

Jim: It is true. It is true. When I was researching this, what was more interesting to me was not only the fact of what it was happening, but all the comments people were giving in response to it. I thought some of the comments were like, they went from, gosh. They went from rude to snarky to just mildly sympathetic. Some, and they reminded me so much of The Chad & Cheese Show.

Chad: Mildly sympathetic.

Joel: Mildly sympathetic. That's good.

Jim: One person said, "It's a trap. If you try to scan it with your phone, then the homeless person will just snatch your phone and run."

Chad: It's a trap.

Jim: That's a Chad comment.

Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a trap. They're gonna take your shit.

Joel: So then, can they use that QR code to go into Starbucks or wherever and get a muffin? Is that how that works?

Jim: No, how it works is, okay. Once you're in the program, there are a few things you can do with the money, right? They have a good Samaritan or somebody on the backend who's actually monitoring how the money is used. So you can use it, and these are some of the uses that they cited. They don't cite all of them. They only cited a couple of them in articles I read. One was for a passport, because if you're homeless, you need a passport.

Chad: What the fuck.

Jim: Obviously.

Joel: What? Get out of our country, homeless person.

Chad: On the Euro side, right?

Jim: Yeah, and then the other example they gave was to collect money for a deposit on a rental space. So if you collect enough money through panhandling, you can have enough money to rent your own apartment, which gives the question of how you pay for it the rest of the year once you have your first and second month down.

Joel: Those sound like serious milestones.

Jim: Yeah.

Joel: Can I just get a cup of coffee? Like damn.

Jim: It was kind of weird. Kind of weird.

Joel: I gotta save up for an apartment?

Jim: So I gave, out of my pocket, I said, you know what? It did not address a problem to me. Kind of like, okay, so you're enabling someone to give money to stay on the street another day, since you're not really helping them. So I cited this site called Kiva.

Chad: Nope.

Jim: Have you heard of it? K-I-V-A? All right, it's, yeah, K-I-V-A.org. What it does is it allows you to do microlending. So let's say you have a lemonade stand and you want some money to buy some lemons. Well, someone can loan you as low as $25, and then once you make your lemonade money, you give back, I think $25.75 or something like that. You get a little kickback.

Jim: So I said, why don't you have the app do something like that where you help somebody to start a business. Even something small, like shining shoes in the subway station. You buy them shoe polish, or maybe you donate business advice or you donate clothes or if they're trustworthy enough, maybe give them temporary office space somewhere. So you can help them get on their feet, start a business to get them off the street, and then eventually hire other people. So that was my input into that whole thing on my podcast.

Joel: Well, these are all problems way too big for us to handle, I think, on this show. So why don't we rotate to recruiting.

Chad: I sent over a little piece that we talked about last week revolving around. It was Entelo's recruiting automation trends reports focusing on recruiters, what they're doing, what they're not doing, and then also, you can talk about the paranoia that's baked in, too. Maybe why they're not doing some of this shit.

Jim: I did not read, let me see. I know I seen that, because I saw it. I added it to my Twitter queue. I didn't read that specifically. Give me a couple of examples from that.

Joel: Well, the thing that struck me was phone, or email, sorry, is still the number one way that recruiters contact people. Phone and text were number two. Now, they didn't separate phone or text. I tend to think phone is probably lower than we think or at least trending lower. Then you get into InMail, which is like 13%, which is pretty low. So I guess, what are your thoughts on best ways for a recruiter to contact a person? What are your most successful ways? What do you think of the findings?

Jim: I think email is probably the most successful way. When I speak with sources, recruiters, that seems to work for them. Also look at it from a consumer side. People who always, when they're surveyed about what platform they want to be contacted by when speaking to companies, email is always at the top. I'm noticing though, from our previous conversation, you asked me about robocalls. Maybe that is factored in the Entelo report. I don't know. I haven't read it just yet, but I know that some companies will use robocalls to reach out to talk to people. I haven't experienced a recruitment robocall yet that I know of, which is really, really good. Basically when I get robocalls, it's some kind of political speech or something like that.

Joel: Let me give you some numbers about robocalls that came out recently from MarketWatch. Okay, so "US phones are inundated," this is from the story, "with 26.3 billion robocalls last year, which was a 46% increase over the 18 billion spam calls placed in 2017. The tech to make such calls has become easy and cheap to access, so more robocallers are jumping into the fray. The junk calls are driving people to avoid the phone altogether. With 52% of cell phone calls going unanswered. Mobile carriers AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile and Sprint have pledged to implement a security protocol within the next year to help weed out some of this spam." But it definitely is a problem and I gotta think it's affecting recruiters' abilities to call people.

Jim: I'd imagine so, and I also imagine it would damage a company's brand. If someone's calling me all the time that's a robocall, I'm gonna start thinking negative about that company.

Chad: Well, many times, they don't say what the company-

Joel: They don't reveal who they are.

Chad: Yeah, they don't reveal who they are. They're just calling in saying, "Hey, we have this great offer."

Joel: "Manage your student loan."

Chad: "Great offer," or whatever it is, and so from my standpoint as Joel was talking about earlier, I'll notice that calls are coming in from a local area code and they're just-

Joel: Spoofing.

Chad: Yeah, spoofing the area code, so I mean, I don't answer any call anymore unless it's already in my phone and it can pop up a name.

Jim: You know what I see on my phone? Maybe it's just part of that, because I don't answer the phone, but if I get a spam call, presumably a spam call on my phone, I see scam likely. So it lets me think that Apple is monitoring or someone is monitoring all of the scam or spam calls and put them into a system so that even when someone calls my phone, it says scam likely, or sorry. Do you guys see that on your phones?

Joel: No.

Chad: Nuh uh. No, I don't.

Joel: Are you an Android-

Jim: No, I have an iPhone.

Joel: Yeah, I have an iPhone too. My wife has an app that will basically filter robocalls so she doesn't get them, and the service answers the calls and tries to keep them on the line as long as possible and annoys them. So there are incredible business opportunities with this problem, but it definitely is a problem. She was getting robocalled a lot.

Chad: Now, is she paying for the service?

Joel: Yep. Yep. It's like 3.99 a month and it's well worth it.

Chad: Dude, that's like, yeah, no shit. That's almost like McAfee, right? You have to get McAfee or Norton, obviously, and it had always been said that they were the ones creating a lot of these viruses to ensure that you had to have some type of protection. So it's almost like-

Jim: Protection racket.

Chad: Exactly, it's a protection racket, man. You fell for the protection racket.

Jim: Wow. You know what a cheaper way to get around that might've been to go to the site, this other site's lacking. But one is called whocalledme.com. If you do a search on DuckDuckGo which is my preferred search engine.

Joel: I wonder why. Privacy.

Jim: Privacy, man. So you put in who called me on DuckDuckGo, and you'll see a bunch of these kind of sites where you can do reverse lookups on these robocallers-

Joel: Does it work with spoof numbers?

Jim: I don't know. I don't know. I just know that when people get a number, they won't be able to use the same number on you twice. They're using these IP things, I forget what they're called, but at least if they used the same number in the past, you'll be able to see who they are and leave a comment saying, "This guy's a spammer" or whatever.

Joel: Mark my words, SMS is next.

Chad: Yeah, no shit. Well that being said, 39% of recruiters rank emails as their preferred outreach method, and knowing that text and maybe in some cases, you have their email address, but you don't have their phone number. But text works so much better. Why aren't we kind of starting to gravitate toward text in this case?

Jim: I think, isn't that when someone sends you a text, there's a charge on your phone depending on what kind of service plan you're on?

Joel: I mean, that's pretty rare these days.

Jim: Is it?

Joel: Yeah.

Jim: I always thought that in the beginning when texts first started catching on, I always thought that was the reason why recruiters hadn't done texting en masse like they do email. When you send an email, it doesn't cost anything to the end user. But if you send a text to someone and it affects their bill, they're really not gonna like you. So I thought that was the reason why recruiters sort of stay away from it in the beginning, but they're doing it more so now because you're not charged so much now.

Joel: Do you use text in your recruiting?

Jim: Yes, but people have opted in to receive those. So different systems that they use, when you gather their information, they join a talent community and you have a little box there say, hey, would you like to be contacted by text for opportunities? And they hit a little checkbox, then you're gold. But if you don't have that and you see their phone number and you decide to try a text anyway, then no.

Jim: Then I think for some recruiters, it may backfire on them, because they don't have a system that allows people to opt in to receive texts, and you decide that they come from your phone, that can backfire you back and they could tell all their friends, "Hey, everybody, this person's spamming me. Why don't we all get together and spam him as one."

Chad: Well that's, I think that's why it's incredibly important why you use a canvas platform or text recruit or something like that where it is happening through a formalized platform where you can gather all of the information, number one, and you can have kind of like those opt ins in place automatically. Again, it'd be much easier to do a blast, let's say, for individuals with Java background as opposed to just everybody on your list, and then throwing a bunch of irrelevant bullshit at them.

Joel: Chad and Cheese sponsor Nexxt, with two Xs was really smart back in the day to ask resumes being posted if they wanted to receive texts or were they open to that, so they have like 10 years head start on most people with getting permission to send texts to candidates.

Chad: I have 8 million or something like that.

Joel: It's a lot, yeah.

Chad: Yeah. I have a shit ton.

Jim: I saw in real life, spotted in the wild, I saw this process that I thought made a lot of sense. Hardee's, there's a Hardee's down the street from my house, and they have on their sign, text 1123 to Hardee's if you want to work here.

Chad: Yeah, shortcut-

Jim: I'm paraphrasing their sign, but that's what it was. So when you text that number, it'll send you back a message saying, hey, would you like to receive notifications of new jobs here at Hardee's? Yes or no? So I'm giving them permission, and then they are texting, presumably, people within a certain geographic area. So a new job comes up, there's an opening, it's gonna text all those people in that area. They respond. It's a wonderful thing. So I see that being awesome for people who work in retail, who work in fast food restaurants, and they want people who are close because based on past experience, if someone works near the mall or near these fast food places, then they stay longer, because it's convenient for them to work.

Joel: Where are you with chatbots right now, Jim?

Jim: Oh, I like chatbots. I do. I do.

Chad: I like me a chatbot.

Jim: Chatbots are wonderful.

Joel: I like chatbots.

Jim: I want to be a chatbot when I grow up. I like it because if nothing else, it gives job seekers a feeling of connection or a feeling of closure depending on how the chatbot comes into play. A lot of times, job seekers, they snip their resume into a black hole, never to be heard of again, but at least with a chatbot, you have the illusion that you are getting somewhere in the process.

Joel: Yeah.

Chad: Yeah.

Joel: Because to me, the Hardee's example is great, but I think where it would be better as opposed to just saying, hey, I'm opting in for sort of messages about openings that texting in actually started a conversation. Like what's your name? Do you have a driver's license? Are you over 18? You can start screening people and having a conversation through chatbots, or in this case, sort of an SMS chat. Then you really get engaged candidate as well as you're building a solid brand, because people are like, holy crap. They really care. They're really asking me questions.

Joel: Then you could potentially even take that to, if they pass the prescreening, that you could actually set up interviews and get those people in front of a human being.

Chad: They have platforms that are doing that now on the high volume side of the house, right?

Joel: Yep. Yeah.

Chad: So Jobalign, Talentify, I mean, there are platforms that are doing that now, so I agree. Take it past just the collection of the information and start the engagement right there.

Jim: And take it even a step further. If I am talking to a chatbot right now about

an opportunity, and I'm going through the screening questions and I'm hitting every button for them, then why not just send a message to a recruiter in real time, saying, "Hey, I got a live one right now who's doing all the screening questions, and would you like to talk to them because I'm talking to them right now," the robot says. "They're hitting all of your requirements." Then the chatbot, then I tell the chatbot yeah, then the chatbot tells the job seeker, "Hey, you want to talk to a recruiter? Here's the link. Schedule something."

Chad: So how do we get recruiters to engage and embrace these new types of technologies? I mean to be able to really be confident, because again, the survey actually said 75% of recruiters lack confidence in their ability to leverage these new recruiting tools?

Jim: Adapt or die.

Chad: Adapt.

Jim: That's all I can say on that, because that is the future. It's not even the future. It's more like 15 minutes into the future. More like five minutes into the future. It is quickly becoming the standard. You will have to become Tony Stark. I don't think it's a situation where the robots are gonna take over and kick you out because there's some things that humans will always do, but you're gonna have to be Tony Stark to know how to talk to your Jarvis to do things, because all your competitors will be doing the same thing. If you can't-

War Games: Shall we play a game?

Jim: If you can't keep up, you gonna fall behind.

Chad: That's right.

Joel: Jim, you have a, I think one of our first interviews with you, you talked about the two kinds of recruiters, sort of the farmers and the hunters.

Jim: Yeah.

Joel: I think it was the phone answerers. Whatever it was, and you have an interesting perspective on that. Talk about that again and how having a chatbot that prescreens people is going to expedite the people who have manually picked up a phone and said, are you over 18? Do you have a driver's license? They become pretty obsolete in that new world.

Jim: To an extent, yes. Just basic questions. I can see chatbots doing that for sure. I don't see them replacing recruiters though, because recruiters can hear the different nuances in somebody's voice. They can ask more probing questions. They can say, why do you say that? Or their spidey sense could kick in. They can ask additional questions or probe deeper, and you can't get that with a chatbot. You can get those basic prescreening questions though that'll make the recruiter's life easier. So I do like that.

Jim: I think a lot of these tools will make recruiters, for better or worse, better on the phone, because if you have these chatbots who can say, prescreen people and you're talking to your desired audience, then all I really need to do is just focus on building relationships with the candidate and then further on with the hiring manager. It gives me more time to talk to the hiring manager and get that warm and fuzzy with them.

Chad: Yeah.

Joel: So what kind of recruiters are in most jeopardy?

Jim: The ones that are not really strong with maybe emotional intelligence. I think sometimes people prefer email, not just because it's more efficient, but because they don't want to talk with people if they don't have to. If you do a search on DuckDuckGo for ... for millennials losing interpersonal skills, you'll see a lot of research and articles about how the machines have taken over and how they prefer spending time with machines and games rather than engaging people, losing the art of looking somebody in the face and talking to them straight in their eye, or building up a conversation. So I think that that's one reason that email is so preferred by a lot of recruiters, not just for the efficiency], but also because they don't want to actually pick up the phone and talk to someone.

Jim: So someone who can be empathetic, someone who has all of the emotional intelligence soft skills, someone who can problem solve. That kind of thing. Those people will be in high demand.

Chad: So here's the thing, especially the people being in high demand because there's already a lot of pressure in recruiting as it is. Roy Maurer actually reached out from SHRM, the famed journalist over at SHRM, and he wanted us to actually talk about do recruiters need a code of ethics? We're talking about right now, right, as pressure starts to mount. So Steve Bates wrote this article, and he started off with "Low level recruiting jobs can be among the toughest in HR. Practitioners are under extreme pressure to fill client positions. That pressure can tempt recruiters to make some less than ethical choices." As we start to see the market squeeze even more, do we see that we need a code of ethics even more now, or maybe in the next five minutes as you were saying than we did in the past?

Feffer: Asshole.

Jim: You know what? Okay, this is a little bit of a rant for me, because I wrote this article, no I reposted it in 2014. I think I originally wrote it in 2012.

Joel: We love rants. Rant away.

Jim: The first article I wrote was called Resumes Are People Too, where I talk about ethics from a job seeker perspective. Then I wrote one called, A Great Idea That Never Happened, which was licensed recruiters, how it would be great if recruiters had licenses, but it won't happen.

Chad: Oh, SHRM would love that, man. They could certify recruiters and make a shit ton of cash.

Joel: Money, money, money.

Jim: Some people who see this issue and have actually taken actual steps in trying to make it happen, like ATAP, the Association of-

Chad: Talent Acquisition Professionals.

Joel: Talent Acquisition Professionals, yeah.

Jim: Yeah, okay. So they have a professional code of recruiting integrity, which is really cool. I think there area a couple of other people out there who was doing it. Even if SHRM decided to do it, there'll be something, but the problem with it I think is that you can't really penalize someone if they don't subscribe to the code of ethics, right?

Chad: Yep.

Jim: So if you have a Better Business Bureau thing on your business, then you can get some kind of penalty for not abiding by that seal of approval. You can't have the seal of approval on your business so people don't think you are as legit as somebody who does have it, right? If you are licensed by ATAP, for example, or maybe even SHRM and you decide not to abide by those ethics, then what's gonna happen?

Joel: Slap on the wrist.

Jim: You get a slap on the wrist. You might get a ding on your employment brand, but you're not gonna have any fines, and if you hit somebody in the pocketbook or the wallet, that's when change will happen. So I'll go, I don't want government taking over everything. If there was a government agency that watched over licenses for recruiting the same way it does for hairstylists or the same way it does with pharmacists, whatever like that, right? You get reported and investigated and it shows that you're not following those processes, then the government entity can say, you know what? We're gonna hit you with $1,000 fine for every time this happens, or a $10,000 fine. Once it gets out that you can get actual financial repercussions for not abiding by the rules, then the change will happen. Until then, it's just talk.

Joel: Do you have any horror stories in your pocket, Jim?

Jim: Yeah. Well, one of the horror stories that I could go to was what these military recruiters would do. So I read an article once about how military recruiters who were desperate to get their numbers up, how they would tell people how to get around drug testing so that ...

Joel: That's how Chad got in.

Jim: You know, I didn't want to say that.

Chad: Hey, just because you have a ton of testosterone in your body does not mean you're taking drugs, okay?

Feffer: Asshole.

Jim: So also they were giving out information about how to get fake diplomas, which is a booming market, by the way, on the dark web.

Chad: Wow.

Joel: Wow.

Jim: Yeah, I did a show on that too, fake diplomas. Make a lot of money that way. So those are a couple instances in that regard too. So when those recruiters were found out, they got some mandatory retraining. They got a little slap on the wrist and got in trouble for that, but there was no penalties, no financial penalties for doing that kind of thing, so that kind of thing still happens, not just with recruiters. You see it in corporate too. There's some companies that may post jobs that don't exist. It's just so that they can get an influx of candidates, and they may say, "Oh, you know what? We're gonna have a job like this again eventually."

Chad: It's evergreen. It's evergreen.

Jim: it's evergreen. Yeah. So they'll still post the jobs and get candidates, but you're basically wasting the candidates' time. It would've been better to have a talent community and say hey, we had a talent community, and sometimes we have jobs like this. Why don't you join our community and stay in touch with us? That would be so much better and ethical than just saying, hey, here's a job. Apply for this job. It doesn't exist. But again, there's no financial repercussions, so it's not gonna stop.

Chad: So what about Glassdoor? I mean, knowing that there's no financial repercussions now, but what about candidates going to Glassdoor or companies working with prospectively these different staffing groups going to Glassdoor, getting their anonymous bitch on?

Jim: Sure, I think it'll slow it down if it is done en masse. Usually when I look through Glassdoor, I see people complaining about a particular company, about the working conditions or the work life balance, stuff like that. I don't see, maybe I'm missing it, but I don't see as many people complaining about specific recruiters on Glassdoor, per se. I always see them complaining about the company. Am I missing it? Are you guys seeing that more?

Joel: There are some new site, they don't come to mind immediately, but there's at least one or two sites that are just recruiters, and we've talked about on the show. We don't think there's much of a market in there for people to go bitch about the recruiter that they had, so I don't think there's much future in there, but yeah, some sort of a review system would be nice. I like your licensing idea, because you're more employable if you have a license or maybe if you have an ethical background and have a secured license, you're more marketable, more employable. So I like that idea on its face.

Chad: What about these staffing companies, though? What about these staffing companies actually coming up with their own code of ethics and holding recruiters to those code of ethics, and if they step outside of those lines, it's not a slap on the wrist. It is you're out the door.

Joel: You're fired.

Jim: You're fired, yeah. I like that as well, but I don't know how many enforce it and I also don't know how many people are thinking, well, if we're on the straight and narrow and our competitors are not, then we're missing out.

Chad: Could be a competitive advantage to be able to go on and say, "Hey. We're straight. We're transparent. We've got a code of ethics, and here are the shitbags that we've kicked out to the curb."

Jim: That would be a ballsy move. That would be pretty good. I would actually applaud that.

Joel: My post-Super Bowl hangover made that really hard to listen to.

Chad: Especially after a shitty Super Bowl like that.

Joel: Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna pivot to something Jim, and you mentioned DuckDuckGo two or three times in this podcast. We're not sponsored by DuckDuckGo, but-

Chad: We should be.

Joel: Yeah, we should be, which is for privacy reasons. They don't track you, et cetera. You mentioned before the show that if you use Google, you're in a different browser, secret browser that isn't Chrome or Safari or whatever. I'm curious about you because you've been a sourcer recruiter for so long, and we talk about the show about the death of sourcing. We've had many guests come on and say, automation is going to make sourcing irrelevant. What are your thoughts on the current state of sourcing and where it will be in, let's say, five years from now.

Jim: I don't think sourcing will ever go away because there will always be new tools, new sites, new tech advances, new ways to hack, so there always will be a need for sourcers in that perspective. It's almost like saying, will we ever need to stop cybersecurity because once we've fixed all the cybersecurity of the day, it means no more new stuff will come out which isn't true, of course.

Joel: Well, you always need cobblers, right?

Jim: Yeah.

Joel: But how many are there these days?

Jim: Yeah, you always need some new stuff. So I don't see sourcing going away. I do see some of it being, a lot of it being automated. I see a lot of new tools coming out, as always. I see that there always will be those purple squirrels. I see that the sourcer will be need more so for those purple squirrel kind of things and less so for, I don't know, retail worker or fast food or things like that.

Joel: Will there be fewer or more sourcers in five years?

Jim: I think there will be fewer, but I think they will be better, and I say fewer because there will be some who will not evolve.

Chad: It's the thinning of the herd.

Jim: Yes.

Chad: Yeah.

Jim: But back in my day, a lot of sourcers, they went to Monster and CareerBuilder and that was quote unquote, "sourcing." That is not sourcing, young lady, young man, and as new things come about, there will be more stuff unearthed, so it won't go away. You'll just be finding people that are harder and harder to find.

Chad: So cream of the crop, the people who are just rounded out in skills, that's what we're looking for.

Joel: Basically finding Jim is gonna be really hard because he's not gonna be on any browser that isn't secure. He's not gonna be searching on anything. He's not gonna have a barcode or a microchip in him, and he's always gonna have his tinfoil hat on.

Jim: But the way they still give me after all of that will probably be some kind of programmatic recruiting, getting you with that advertising-

Joel: Automation.

Jim: The advertising that I can't resist. That's gonna be the way to get me.

Joel: And on that note.

Chad: Thank you, Jim.

Joel: Jim, we love you. It's always good to have you on this show, man. We appreciate you. Any last words, people where they should go, what they should read, what they should not do, maybe?

Jim: Sure. Go to jimstroud.com, J-I-M S-T-R-O-U-D.com and subscribe to my blog, listen to my podcast.

Chad: Oh yeah.

Jim: I give away a lot of free stuff on my podcast. Please download it because I get a kickback, just to be honest.

Chad: Love it. Excellent Jim. We out.

Joel: We out.

Tristen: Hi. I'm Tristen. Thanks for listening to my stepdad, the Chad, and his goofy friend Cheese. You've been listening to The Chad & Cheese Podcast. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss out on all the knowledge dropping that's happening up in here. They made me say that. The most important part is to check out our sponsors, because I need new track spikes. You know, the expensive, shiny, gold pair that are extra because ... well, I'm extra. For more, visit chadcheese.com.

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