Reinvent Yourself or Get Left Behind: The Future of Recruiting with Jeremy Lyons

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: What's up, guys? Welcome to another episode of Recruiting is no Joke. I'm your host, Joel Algee, and this is the ultimate recruitment podcast that brings you a blend of entertainment, no nonsense insights, and of course, the latest trends. Join me as I expose bad takes in the recruitment industry and get real with talent leaders to give you an inside view of the industry here on Recruiting Is no Joke. Welcome to Recruiting is no Joke. I am your host, Joel Algae, the one and only, the realest recruiter. I got the biggest head in Italian Game and I love it when people tell me how cool I am. Oh, totally kidding, guys. But got an amazing guest today, somebody that I would consider a friend, a leader, a mentor, somebody that is really on the cutting edge of recruitment, technology, automation, AI, Iraq, ops, which we're gonna talk a lot about today. Just a real leader in that space. So, Jeremy Lyons, welcome to the show. I feel like this has been a really, really long time coming, like months and maybe even years. So welcome. It's great to have you on the show. For anyone who doesn't know you, why don't you give us just a quick intro who you are, what you do and who you do it for.

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. Well, and, uh, it has been a long time coming. I'm very happy. But you know, they say good things come to those who wait. And I think, uh, we've both waited long enough to make this so. Jeremy Lyons, co founder of RecOps Collective I have helped make RecOps more accessible and understood across the space. I've worked predominantly with tech companies, worked for 100,000 plus companies, worked for companies that were 10 people. And I created RecOps Collective about three years ago to kind of help with the global RecOps mission of doing it. Met a lot of really, really cool people along the way and I'm just excited to see how it's grown and where it's growing too, and just the amount of knowledge and excitement around it too. And I love to learn. So that has been what has taken me to the edges of every topic that you could think of. I'm trying to find people who can teach me how to do one small thing in make or how to uh, make a GPT be that much more responsive with fewer words.

Speaker B: So it's uh, how to vibe call unlovable.

Speaker A: I mean, you know what's funny is actually I haven't used a lovable yet.

Speaker B: I'm disappointed to hear that.

Speaker A: That I haven't used it.

Speaker B: Yeah, that you haven't used it. I'm disappointed.

Speaker A: I think There's a lot of tools that are out there, I think, uh, right now, as anybody could say, with everything we're waiting as the market to see what stabilizes, what comes to the top, what gets acquired, things like that. I think that my struggle is, it's like, if I'm going to build one thing and one thing, it's like, do I really spend the time to have three tabs open to try and see who's going to do it faster or who's going to do it more accurate and going through that. And I think that that's. I find people who do that kind of stuff and they're more than happy to show me, teach me and do that. And so I don't necessarily feel the need to play with every tool in the sandbox, but I know enough about it to be dangerous.

Speaker B: Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Recruiting is no joke. This episode was brought to you by Basic Capital. You're competing for talent, so why settle for the same old benefits? Basic Capital helps your 401k stand out by investing with your employees, boosting their investing power by up to five times. It's a new way to show candidates you invest in them too. Ask your team about adding Basic Capital and make your 401k a, uh, real recruiting advantage. I think it was one of our friends, Realistic Recruiting. Shout out to Mike Pedido. He did some content at HR Tech.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And he kind of made a joke video just about how many AI point solutions. It was like, ridiculous. And I do kind of feel like that as well with tools where I think there can be that pressure where people are trying to be an expert. With Juan Romanian, it's like, oh, it's so early. And it's like you said, there's going to be systems, I think that emerge. And I think you want to understand, really want to understand the differences between, like, what's actually going on behind the scenes and have an understanding of that versus knowing how to use the PS1. That's going to be a PS5 in three years. And like you said, there's people who are going to be experts. And I think depending on what your role is, like, it's hard to be an expert on every single tool. But you want to understand some of, like, the major themes here, which is why we follow people like you. We follow you newsletters. So Recops Collective as well. That is a newsletter, right? And like Community, like, built into the newsletter. Tell us about that. Like, how did you get started with that? Like what was the vision behind it?

Speaker A: Yeah, so the Recops Roundup, which is the newsletter, it's on substack, it's on LinkedIn. Substack posts Thursday nights, the LinkedIn version posts on, uh, Fridays. It's kind of funny. I went back because we crossed the hundred episode or 100 article line about 25 weeks ago. So that was kind of a cool thing to realize that for basically the last two years it's happened nearly every week for two years.

Speaker B: Uh, two and a half years if you're at like 25. Is that right?

Speaker A: Yeah, 125, um, years. Wow, congrats. Uh, 52 weeks in a year. And so what it originally started out as was it started out as me just posting jobs because I started basically at the end of 2022 when the market had really shifted and a lot of recruiting operations people were losing their jobs. And I started it as a way to sort of very specifically help the recruiting operations community. There are a lot of recruiting newsletters out there. There's a lot of people that talk about recruiting. What I found from my own experiences was those people who were doing that were predominantly doing it from their recruiting side. They hadn't been ops people. And so uh, I wanted something by ops people for ops people. And I wanted to make sure that what we were talking about was essentially the four or five pillars that everybody in recruiting operations had agreed. These are our pill. It evolved because what I got from people was well, hey, I get 60 vendor emails a week with updates. I have no idea what's going on. And I said, okay, I'm gonna start including that. And that got me in a very interesting space because initially at the time I started, I was just starting Recops collective out, still looking for a full time gig, still would be open to going in house. But the piece to me was I wanted to stay connected with what was going on and that forced me every week to pay attention to the names in the space, what's happening with who and how technology is being developed. That has grown into some partnerships that I've had, some articles I've written, Ashby gem, um, and being involved with pieces like that. So that's been really cool. And then people started to say, well, I want your thoughts on these things. And I said okay. So then I included a section on my thoughts. So all in all it's grown, it's definitely. But it's meant to give bite sized pieces of information for people. The articles that I'm reading so that people can understand because I think the other thing too is rec ops. There's a level of creativity you need in the recruiting operations space to get a problem solved. And if you just sort of only learn from one school of thought and you never meld those schools of thought, that's really hamper you from being effective in your role. It's going to hamper you from thinking differently. The other thing too is people who came into recops there was this like generation of TA leaders who just sort of went, hey, I kind of don't want to do, I don't want to cover the TA Org anymore, but I really want to stay in it because I have those skills. And so that became very recruiter focused. And the people who came up as RCs and people who came up from the biz op side or the business analyst side like me, we needed people like ourselves to be able to look at, model, have conversations with and think very differently about all these different solutions. I mean, bringing it back to AI. I think that AI has proven to be a really good use case of why a liberal arts education can be useful because you need specific words to get specific outputs and you need to think about things in a very specific kind of way. And if you're able to do that and you're able to deconstruct an idea, you're able to do more and more. That was my main thought, my main driver about why I keep the newsletter going. It's also my main idea and main driver for why the newsletter is not sponsored by anybody. I needed the information to be completely neutral and I've managed to do that, much to my wife's chagrin. I think my wife feels like she can say, hey, get sponsorship on there, get as much money out of it as you can. But ultimately for me, I think the neutrality in my newsletter is also what stands it apart.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. Wish I could say the same about the podcast. No, just joking. Look, I think like you said, cause I mean you do consulting too, right? So you like, you'll come in and help companies with implementations for ATS, CRMs, like helping companies think about their own operations. So I'm sure that kind of helps generate some of that interest as well. Sometimes putting that value out there up front, being known as, hey, uh, this is the go to person for this. This is a person who's kind of leading in this area. It's going to lead to good opportunities. Not everybody needs to sell out and do sponsorships necessarily that way. I mean I just. It can work. Not always though. And it Depends on how that's presented, but.

Speaker A: And everybody is different too, Joel. It's like I'm not pooing on anybody who has sponsorship in their newsletter. I think that that's great. When you are able to develop something that people want to sponsor, people want to give money to. I think it's phenomenal. And it takes a lot and it there takes consistency. There is a lot that you have to do to get it to there and to that point. And you know what? It just me, I just sort of said, if I start to take money to do this, then people might sort of say, well, hey, look, I bought you.

Speaker B: And.

Speaker A: And I want my community to get unfiltered information because I think it makes my community better. And I could be wrong.

Speaker B: I love that. No, no, I love that. I love it. It's good. Because I think that is one of the things with just content creation. I don't want to go too, necessarily too far down this path, but it's such a fine balance, especially it's like a social media creator, somebody that's putting out a lot of content. And I do sponsored work. And I think one of the things that you have to balance is, you know, hey, is it powered by sponsored or is this something that I'm endorsing? And there's a fine line between the two. And I think either way, I think you've got to be incredibly careful with like, who you're working with, the brands you're working with, what they're about. For me, I learned it's a lot to do with like, the people who are building the product and like, are they people who like minded? And like, when I meet with them, um, I could tell that they care. Like, for me, caring about recruit, as. As corny as it sounds, like caring about the recruiting community is a big deal because I get vendors reach out to me and they'll say, hey, we're going to disrupt the industry. We're going to change this, we're going to do this. Hiring's broken. And then I dig into it and go, okay, so where did this come from? And sometimes it's like, oh, I just had a terrible experience myself. And I'm like, okay. And some brands though, I talk to are like, yeah, you know, I felt the pain myself. Like I sat in the seat like, I, uh, want to make things better. I want to make recruiters lives easier. And for me, that's what I can get behind. Whereas, like, just got to weigh it out because ultimately, when you do take sponsorships or you work with a brand, if one of your followers or someone you're connected to who is kind of like looking to you, if they sign up for something that's not actually good, it's like, well, then they're just going to associate that with your brand. So it can really kill your brand too. I think people get that. Right. Like, they understand that hopefully.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, I like to present, even at detriment to myself, all sides of the argument so that everybody, at least when a decision is made, all the known knowns were outright stated. And I think that a lot of this is kind of a future thought. But I think that in order for recruiting to really be seen as a business function, we have to start talking about it in a way that shows the business impact. And I think that what gets lost is that we want to be people, people. We want to be people of the people because we know what it means to interview and we think like that. I think that one of the things that comes into play with that, that's kind of an important element is talking to build out the architecture and the threading and show people the impact that they're making. And I think sometimes when companies get too big, they think that they don't need to do that anymore. And that can change sort of how people perceive recruiting. It's one of the reasons why changing language helps. It's why I don't call an intake and intake anymore. I call it a product launch. We're launching a product and the product just happens to be the role. It can go in any which direction from that.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's huge. And I think I've heard you say that before and it always makes me think of just. It's understanding your audience. And I think with every business unit now, one of the things I've noticed, and I see this a lot with job seekers when they're looking for a job and I read resume, I think we're. And I talked to an HR leader today about this as well. Like, I think we're getting to an interesting point where whatever business you're in, if you're in recruiting, if you're hr, if you're in marketing, sales, some of these cases it's easier to. And for some of these areas, it's easy to do this. But you have to understand what the overall business objective is and how you are playing into that and what's almost like the output of your work. And I think we're gonna start to see, and I'd be curious in your take on this, but like, I could see in the next five to 10 years kind of revolving from that. Hey, you worked 40 hours, so here's a paycheck. And we're just paying you for your time to. All right, I don't really care how much time you've worked, but here's the output of your work and now I'm paying you for the output of the work. And I think obviously if you get a grasp of this technology and AI and you're able to kind of scale the value that you're able to bring, then you're going to do really, really well. But it's almost like I see it a lot on resumes where the biggest problem is people just listing these roles and duties. And I'm like, okay, take a step back. Like, yeah, that you worked on this project, that's amazing. But, like, how did the project impact the business? Like, what was the lasting value? Because this next employer, that's all they're thinking about.

Speaker A: Well, there's kind of two thoughts that I want to add to that. I think one of the things too is it's very, very hard sometimes to understand your impact. Yeah, oftentimes you don't hear about your impact until you leave and then people remind you of your impact. And a really good example of that is this. Very early on in my career, I built a shared queue scheduling tracker. The idea was I wanted everybody on the RC team to be able to report on their own metrics. I wanted everybody on the RC team to be able to feel like they could take vacation. And, uh, I wanted everybody to sort of have this vision of understanding what rcs can do. And this was before scheduling tools were really a big thing like they are now. And so for me, I built this. I built it over the course of a week and I iterated on it. And I found out that the company was still just actually just in the last, like maybe year or last six months, deprecated that. But if somebody were to. If I didn't know that and hadn't had conversations with that, with people around that I would never know. But that's a hugely impactful thing. But that's something that's really hard.

Speaker B: So what's your advice then for like trying to, uh, let's say you're on a job search right now and you're looking at your last role and you're in this big crop, cross functional teams or whatever. What advice would you give people to like, try and understand what that impact is? May you just talk to other people or what?

Speaker A: I, uh, mean, I think it's. You write it down so you don't forget it. Talk to other people to see within the company or monitor the company too, if you left under acrimonious conditions. There was a company that quiet fired me and still uses how I wrote all their job descriptions and the documentation that I wrote about how they should structure their job descriptions and what needed to be in there and how to sell the company culture. I still go back and sometimes look at that company's career page to just sort of see like, why, why did you feel that you needed to push me out when you're still using all the things that I still built for you? Yeah, that just feels weird. But would somebody say that that wasn't impactful? I mean, at the time people might say like, oh, God, it's just one document, it's one process, whatever. But now you see it's like, well, actually they keep using it, so that should be impact. So I think that there's a way to go about looking at things to say, hey, this was what I drove. Now, going back to the second thing that I was going to say about this is, I think, at least in the recruiting space, our first generation of ATS were built as basically modifications of sales tools and the sales process. Then you had our second generation come in that sort of said, hey, let's build these things like HR tools that think of recruiting as people and as dynamically as. As all that goes. And that's where you saw certain tools rest. Now what we're seeing, which is really fascinating to me, is ATS tools that are built to track data. So we've kind of gone back to the original model. But what also has been really fascinating in monitoring that space is the number of conversations that you hear to your point about impact, which was in house teams and agency teams have always sort of had friction with one another. But now what you're starting to see is a lot of in house tools feeling the need to incorporate what agency ATS tools have had for a while so that you could track number of interviews, number of calls, number of submissions, and sort of be able to tie in like, value to what you've been driving. And that's an interesting mindset shift that's happening in our space right now because that bridge is starting to become a lot closer between your agency recruiters and your retained search and things like that, and your in house teams and both sides are trying to borrow from one or the other.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's, uh, I bet you Just had a. Someone reached out to me and said that they were looking to. Unfortunately, I think because just company direction, they're looking to reduce the amount of people on the talent team, bring in some more tech, some agents, things like that, and then use an RPO to kind of help augment. So it's. I think it's almost like you said at the beginning, like, just thinking creatively about things from like a tech point of view. It's like things are moving so fast, and I think there's still a lot of promises out there. I'm not sure how much it can always deliver. But it's just thinking of, obviously this function is changing, so I want to just do a quick pivot here in a conversation. Walk us through. Like, how did you get started in just recruitment as a whole? Like, how did you get into the space at birth? Uh, okay, fair enough.

Speaker A: I jokingly just got a call.

Speaker B: Got a phone, like, right in your head as a baby, and you're just making cold calls.

Speaker A: Well, the story that I tell people is this. You know when people ask me, oh, how long have you been in recruiting for? I say 30 plus years, nine active. And people were like, well, what does that mean? I said, well, my mother was an executive recruiter, and I've trained myself to do this. I've trained other people to do this. Don't say you fell into recruiting.

Speaker B: That's the answer. That pretty much. I think I've done 140 episodes and I think all but three people have said that.

Speaker A: It boils my blood because it makes recruiting sound easy. And sure, recruiting is easy to get wrong. I mean, it's like recruiting deals with the most combustible element on the planet. And that's human emotion. It does not take someone very long to go from like, hey, I'm your best friend, to I've got knives out. And it could be as simple as you signed off the rejection email with Cheers. But I say nine active because I'd always done sort of some level of recruiting. I recruited mascots for my college team because I was the manager of the cheerleading team and the mascots fell underneath me in my purview. So I always recruited new mascots. I've always recruited people to do programs that I'm involved in. Recruiting has always been something where you kind of have to do it. I've recruited people for the cheerleading team in high school when I was there too, because I was a cheerleader in high school and basically.

Speaker B: Did you. Were you a cheerleader? That's what I Need to know. Yeah, I was all, uh, right, fair enough.

Speaker A: I was a cheerleader in high school. I also did ballet, also played football. People seemed very.

Speaker B: When very well. I'm, um, I was just gonna ask you with like that type of recruiting. Obviously it's like they're just similarities. Like when you're recruiting people, it's like just getting them what, like, envisioned for whatever you're doing and just getting people to go along with like what it is you're looking to accomplish. Essentially.

Speaker A: Yeah. Selling people on the vision, selling people on the benefits. Selling people on why it might be fun for them to be involved. And then I spent three years living in Japan. I got back, I got a job. My mom said, you're working a dead end job, you should think about getting into recruiting. And I all right, fine, mom. And I got an A contract RC role after doing a couple of other things. And I think what would be really fun topic, and you probably have this with your kids, Joel, is what are the arguments that you have with a teenager? Because I remember I would go toe to toe with my mom about my resume before college, after college.

Speaker B: That's hilarious.

Speaker A: And we would go toe to toe because I'd ask my mom, hey, mom, can you review my resume? And I think she would review it like my mother. But instead she was reviewing it as the professional. And I didn't understand that at the time. I understand it now. And uh, any future kids that I have, I will have to separate the pieces. But I think that has also actually helped in terms of how I think about everything. How I read a job description, how I apply to rules, all those things.

Speaker B: Yeah. And your mom's in executive recruiting. You're telling me before this, like, from your perspective and like, yes, okay. So she did executive recruiters. So like when you were growing up, she's an executive recruiter. Can you kind of remember, like what you thought of even like her job or like, did it kind of make sense what she did or were you just like, yeah, this is because it's gotta be. I just feel like at that level and with recruiting in general, like when you've been in it for a long time, like a lot of relationship building and it could kind of seem like a chill job in some ways, but then just like these crazy moments of wild stuff going on. So like, what was your perception of her, uh, in that job?

Speaker A: That's a fantastic question. And you're the first person to actually ask me that. But it was really funny, so I'll tell kind of Two stories. One is one of the companies that she worked for used to have, like, a, uh, bring your kid to work day. And I remember going with her to work that day, and I remember being so unbelievably bored because I just didn't understand what she did that I fell asleep underneath her desk for, like. I use it as an opportunity to take a nap.

Speaker B: And, um. Was this, like, kind of like a bullpen set up? Do they have, like, the gong and everything, or.

Speaker A: No? No. My mom had an office. And what was really interesting was, and I tell people this all the time, was the company she worked for had really, really strong corporate values. And it wasn't just words on a page. It was, like, actually threaded throughout. And those values ended up becoming my personal sort of values. So that's so very high accountability, very high thing. And I actually ended up working for this company as a contractor. Very first. Very first job, as in recruiting, which it was a great experience. I learned an absolute ton. I think the other thing, too, is that was in finance. I brought a lot of that rigor that you need over onto the tech side that I do, because you never want to get caught in an audit. And when you're in the financial world doing financial recruiting, you really have to be buttoned up. So there's that. I think the other thing that sort of played out, which was kind of interesting. So I was at an event recently. A lot of my mom's friends were there, and it was fascinating, the number of people that are my mom's closest friends who were candidates that she recruited.

Speaker B: Wow. Uh.

Speaker A: Or connected to candidates that she recruited. And that part, to me, is also just a very fascinating thing about how we build relationships in this space. I mean, we were talking about it earlier. Brandon Jeffs and I, we built a relationship entirely digitally. And then we saw each other for the first time in person, and it was like two little kids, like, just bouncing up and down, very excited to, like, see each other in person. And same thing with meeting Mike Pedido in person. There are these relationships that we build, and they may not turn into anything professionally, but they certainly turn into something personally where you build up. Another great example of that. I was just this morning texting Brian Fink. Brian Fink is a mentor of mine. He's a great human being. A lot of people would say he was a great human being. So you build these relationships in our space, and I think that that's just a wonderful thing, that when you put the time into understanding the people and learning the People, you build these great relationships.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it's really, this is something I think about all the time. Just, I think maybe just because I'm hit up by so many AI tools, vendors and companies are, uh, looking to solve this issue of getting people connected. Right. It's kind of the mission, like, let's make it as easy as possible or, uh, let's get the people that you want to talk to in front of you. But this is like, I think in, in the role that I'm in right now where I'm doing executive recruiting myself and just seeing that I'm just meeting a lot of people and building relationships. And there's something like, very unhackable about that. That just takes time. And it's like there's this genuine part to it where obviously, like, if you're at a business and you need a role filled, like, it can be a little bit transactional. Like, hey, we have this need. We're going to find somebody that has information on a resume that looks like what we could have, and I'm going to interview them, we're going to see if there's a match. There can be a transactional bit to it. But I think in life with like, career, with like networking, recruiting, there is this very human relationship side which I always just think, like, is the tech always, like, helping reinforce that? Is it helping start those relationships? And a lot. I was talking to someone the other day. It's like, let's say you typically work with people that you know like, and trust.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And sometimes it's like people that you've known for years and it's like, that can just not be hacked in any way by. There's no AI tool that can create a relationship that's worth a relationship that's been around for years. It can, like, help solve a problem in a moment. And you know, obviously if you're a problem, you can provide a solution. Of course it can solve that. But it's just this very real relationship piece and networking piece that is very unhackable. And so hearing stories like that, like about your mom, where it's like these organic relationships developed over time, over years, if she's built trust, it's such a huge thing in recruitment in general and networking especially. And now I think we even seen it with like, sales and partnerships and it's kind of a partnership ecosystem. So it's super interesting.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think, to your point too, I think that there's kind of a curve in the transactionality of like, specific Things I think when people talk about recruiting, we're talking a lot about, like, the middle part of the curve, where we're saying, like, we don't really tend to talk about ex, uh, like executive recruiting and internship hiring in the same way that we're sort of talking about the general population hiring in the middle there. But I think to your point about the AI tools that come out, and a lot of AI tools reach out to me, and they're like, hey, tell me what you think here. And the biggest things you're. What you're saying is like, how do you build that relationship when the relationship is personal? But the thing I always turn right around and I ask these tools especially, because a lot of those tools have things that are like, oh, I don't want a job, Hopper. And I ask, how are you defining a job, Hopper? Well, change roles every year, Year and

Speaker B: a half to two years. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And I say to them, um, what's the story that you're telling about these candidates when you do that? Because instantly when you're doing that, you're trying to cut out volume. You're trying to get to a certain point. But there are some people who just are not good at picking the right horse. Early in my career, I wanted to get to the top. I wanted a big, fancy title, and I focused on that. And that pursuit in my career may have made me not the best person at building some relationships, because that was my main pursuit. Then I got a title that I felt opened the doors, that now people would start to listen to me. And it opened the doors, and people did start to listen to me, but I wasn't happy with the title. And then I looked at comp, and I realized I'm not really happy. Like, yeah, the money is great. But I realized about, uh, three years ago that really what I wanted was I wanted to go and work for people I could learn from. And I wanted to go and work in environments that encouraged experimentation. And that kind of part made it so that the job title really didn't matter. It was work. It was. Keeping my list of people I have identified that I want to work with active. And looking at that and them saying, I've had conversations where they're like, hey, look, I got a role on my team. It's not a manager role. It's not even really a specialist role. It's a coordinator role. I think that that's low for you. I go, I don't really care what the title is. My thing is, I want to work with you. And this project sounds interesting. So let's have a conversation about what we're actually going to build together here and the title, everything else will fall into place and we'll make this work. And I think that that's when you can get to a place like that in your career where you have that and you can do that. I think that that's a really, really exciting and important place to be.

Speaker B: And that's kind of like that whole kind of what I was getting at with like the bringing value versus it's just uh, the idea of like the trading time for income like a job. Like, I just, I think there's something happening and particularly for like young people getting into the workforce, which I'm sure there's some listeners out there that are maybe graduated and maybe you got kids that are graduating. It's super tough right now to get entry level roles because a lot of companies are looking at AI and saying, hey, we don't really need an intern. We can get an AI agent to do very similar work. And I think for a lot of parents that I've talked to that have kids and these like HR leaders, they're people who are leading really, really big organizations and their kids are graduating and like, it's hard to help them. And I think a lot of them are just at that point of like, you know, explore how can you give value and like, how can you just approaching work differently? Right. And it is so much more of like, how can you get to a place where you're doing work that's meaningful for you, you're involved in meaningful projects, and then how are you bringing value into it? And then you have to kind of like sell that value. And I just notice more and more like when people come to me for advice, you know, recruiters that are out of work, I'm like, all right, well, how else can you provide value to the market? Yeah, yeah, okay. There's not necessarily a lot of demand for your type of recruiting or you're having a struggle with it, that's fine. What about coaching people in their careers? What about working with people on their resumes? What about branding? What about this? What about taking on a contract role for a short, specific amount of time, like get a little bit creative? And I think people who have that mindset, that are curious, that are wanting to learn, I think there's still opportunity. And I think a lot of us are going to have to get more creative than just the steady, you know, nine to five kind of traditional work path. Because I just, I Don't think that's going to be necessarily as accessible as it once was.

Speaker A: Yeah, well. And I realized I didn't complete my thought, which is usually when I'm talking to these and it's going to build on what you're saying too. Usually when I'm talking to these, the AI tools, I'm asking them what I think is a very important question, which is if you were to turn around and use this on yourself, what would happen?

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And sometimes I think that is a light bulb moment for people that realize like you could be building something that's actually boxing you out and if your box, if your own product is then used against you, how does that make you feel that you've designed something to do that? So there's that. I think another thing to your point was actually, and this is a really funny story, so my mom had worked with a TA leader and right after I was starting out on my own path, I said, hey. She asked me did I want to reach out and have a conversation with this TA leader? And at the time I said, yeah, sure, I want to. And the TA leader's response was like, hey, look, I'm kind of busy at the moment. He's not really in the demographics of people I usually talk to. Not now essentially. And I was fine. Wasn't anything, no acrimony there, no nothing. Ended up having a conversation with that ah, TA leader earlier this year on the same thread, emails back my mom and says, oh my God, it was such a great conversation, so insightful. This was so great. And it was sort of this like moment M of three years ago. That conversation wouldn't happen. Now this conversation is happening. And ultimately it's not that I think I evolved and I changed. And to your point, I think that that's something that is we have to evolve, we have to change. We have to think about ourselves differently, we have to do things differently. There's still things that I get wrong all the time. There are still people that like I say the wrong thing. That's when you have an opinion sometimes that's not going to land well with other people and that's okay. And you have to understand, yeah, like who are you and are you open to change? Is a really, really core and key thing for how you're going to evolve, how you're going to use your skills, how you are going to show up in different places and show up in the market. When I think back to it, I one of the things I had started to do 20, 22, 2023, 20, 24 was people knew me for my spicy posts where I was just like, taking boot to butt or belt or whatever it was and saying things that needed to be said out loud. But ultimately that's no longer me. I don't need to do that anymore. And whenever you're posting content or, uh, thinking about content, thinking about who you are, you don't have to continue to be the same person that you were. You're not bound by that. And I think I'm very lucky in my career and in my life that I have reinvented myself. 1. I reinvent myself, like, every single day. But I really hardcore changed my Persona, the things I care about, the curiosity pieces no less than ten times. And, uh, luckily for me is I've gotten nicknames across the way. And so I can ascribe certain skills and things to that person now kind of makes me sound like I'm somebody who suffers from multiple personality disorder. But they're people who know me by different names. And that's fine to me because that's also allowed me to gain skills that like branding, tone, delivery, the style of things, all changes. If you're open and you're curious to be able to say, like, hey, look, that was me yesterday, that's not going to be me tomorrow, and what do I need to do to actually change and rebrand myself? And it's huge, but you got to

Speaker B: rebrand yourself, like, with yourself as well. I think that's something which, like, not a lot of people think about.

Speaker A: Are we doing the Austin Powers? I'd like to reintroduce myself as.

Speaker B: And like, to read, you have to, like, believe it yourself. This actually happened to me. I got into executive recruiting and someone kind of challenged me and was like, yeah, but do you even see yourself as, like, an executive recruiter? And I was like, my eyes went, like, in the back of my head, and I'm like, what does that mean? And I went in this different zone. But I just started thinking, like, okay, what does this mean? Like, I'm recruiting at this different level. And I'd been very much like, I had had the mentality of, well, I'm just me, so I just want to be me. Which I think that's okay, too. I'm not, like, that's totally fine. And I'm not saying, like, I became somebody else. But you do have that power to kind of shift your perception of even yourself and then the perception of others. So, like, these tiny changes, and so

Speaker A: it's all incremental change.

Speaker B: It's incremental change and it's giving yourself permission to do that and not feeling like, okay, hey, I'm not being real to myself. No. It's like, actually I'm changing, I'm evolving, I'm growing. And I think even like recruiters right now, uh, really anyone in any field, I think this is why we're feeling tension, is because we know we're going to have to change because as technology is coming at us fast, we don't know what we have to change into. And so it creates tension. Yeah. The word that I hear more than any other word, what do you think that word is? I hear more than any other word?

Speaker A: AI.

Speaker B: Yeah. Other than that word, it's uncertainty. I hear the word uncertainty pretty much every single leader I talk to. It's just uncertain, uncertain, uncertainty. Uncertainty over this, that, this. And I think when we're in this moment of time or like these past few years where there's been a lot of uncertainty, I've realized now that there's actually certainty that there's going to be uncertainty. And you have to like, lean in that, and you have to take that and go, I have to be willing to change. I've got to be willing to evolve and grow. And I think if you don't have that mindset, I think that's kind of like where you do kind of risk getting left behind or just finding yourself in a pretty bad situation. So. And I think it's not just with recruiters, it's with marketing people. I'm like, I'm watching Sora, that new app where you can just like, create AI videos. I'm just thinking, like, wow, what is the future of, like, ads online? Like, these UGC creators that are creating content? I'm like, that's not going to be a thing. But obviously there's going to be new things. So it's like, how do you get to that? How do you lean in? And it's a struggle for people. But I realized we haven't talked anything about recops, which is hilarious, but maybe we'll have to get you on again. We'll have to have a deep dive. Think what would be cool is if we did, like a roundtable event or something, and we maybe got a couple people in there. But where could people find you, Jeremy? Where people connect. And what would be the best way for people to just find out more about what you're up to?

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. Well, and I know, as with all of our conversations, Joel, we took it to different directions that are which is awesome.

Speaker B: I love.

Speaker A: And yeah, we will have to do that. So where can people find me? People can find me on LinkedIn. Jeremy A. Lyons. If everybody is really curious why the A is there, it's because tokens will tell me if you sent an actual targeted message or not. So there's.

Speaker B: And that's L Y O N S.

Speaker A: Uh, L Y O N s. Follow the RecOps Collective substack. It's just rec ops substack.com sweet. And yeah, feel free to reach out to me. I love talking with people. Sometimes you'll get me on a rant day. Sometimes you'll get me on a day where I'm like, please do all the talking. So reach out.

Speaker B: I love it. Well, guys, there's a ton that we're. We're going to unpack on this topic in the future as well and just love the value that we're able to just talk about today and like, where the conversation went. I think it was awesome. If you want to connect with Jeremy, definitely reach out to him on LinkedIn. I always say, like, just be patient. Send a connection request with a message saying, I heard you on the podcast because I know people get, you know, we get a lot of inbound interest. And as always, we will have another episode of the show next week. If you want to get involved in a show, if you want to be a guest, if you want to sponsor the show or learn about partnerships as well, you can go to www.therealrecruiter.com. this has been another episode of Recruiting is no Joke. Jeremy wants to. Again, thank you so much. Always good to chat with you.

Speaker A: Always good to chat, y'. All. Thank you so much again for having me.

Speaker B: Yeah, we'll see you soon. Thanks so much for tuning into. This episode of Recruiting Is no Joke. If these conversations resonated with you, don't forget to hit the follow button to stay updated on our latest episodes. To stay connected with me, head over to therealist recruiter.com it's your go to place for more content, connections and a deeper dive into the world of recruitment. See you next week.