Another episode of the podcast, and we are having a very interesting and entertaining conversation with Jason Jovanis about working with recruiters – either as a candidate, or as an organization who is looking for new talent.

Working with recruiters - Jason Jovanis

Jason came to his job after 20+ years as a sales leader, who in 2018 had the crazy idea to quit the VP of Sales job and start a recruiting business.
He knows what it’s like to need to hire people (lots of people). He’s wasted his own time and frustrated others by interviewing people he shouldn’t have, and he knows what it’s like to look for a job.

He’s been treated like a product by some recruiters, so he decided to start his own company. His firm is a boutique recruitment practice focused on matching talented individuals with progressive organizations and great leaders.

We are talking about the following topics:

  • Get to know Jason (and helicopters)
  • Value that a recruiter brings to the table and how his approach distinguishes himself from other recruiters
  • Tips to step up your LinkedIn game where 95% of all search activities take place
  • The recruiting process, including the behind-the-scenes stuff
  • Working with a recruiter as the hiring manager

You can find Jason on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonjovanis/, and his website is here: https://jovanisgroup.com/. via LinkedIn here:

Please reach out to us by either sending an email to hello@whatsyourbaseline.com or leaving us a voice message by clicking here.

Ep. 18 – Working with recruiters: Jason Jovanis – What's Your Baseline? Enterprise Architecture & Business Process Management Demystified

Additional information

  • No additional information for this episode – just relax and enjoy the conversation (and step up your LinkedIn game!)

Credits

Music by Jeremy Voltz, www.jeremyvoltzmusic.com

  • CP1 (Welcome)
  • RakeBeatChords (Interlude 1)
  • Wish You Knew Me (Interlude 2)
  • Airplane Seatbelt (Interlude 3)
  • South Wing (Outro)

Transcript

(The transcript is auto-generated and was slightly edited for clarity)

Roland: Hey, J-M, how are you doing today?

J-M: I’m not doing too bad. It’s been an interesting new year so far. We’re recording this in the middle of January and boy, I really thought there would be more time to just kick back and enjoy the beginning of 2022. But we are back at it my friend. We are back at it. 

Roland: I had five days of kicking back and laying in bed and suffering through the ‘you know what’, so it didn’t start the way I thought it would. But hey, by now when you listen to this episode, it’ll be March and everything will be fine.

J-M: One can only hope, my friend. One can only hope.

Roland: But things have started off this year on a great note! We’ve already had a couple of unbelievable interviews with podcast guests, and today is no exception. Today we have a good friend of ours. Jason Jovanis is on the call. Jason is a very experienced recruiter and obviously what we do is (and this is the first interview that we have on our second topic of the season. If we recall it, how do I run my practice) and a normal thing is you have some form of attrition. People come, people go, and today’s topic is, well, how to work with recruiters. Should you hire one? What do you do if you get approached by a recruiter? Should you panic? And I think Jason has tons of experience on this and will help us out with those questions. Welcome Jason!

J-M: Welcome Jason!

Jason: Thank you so much. Happy to be here. 

J-M: Well, it’s really great to have you here, particularly since you represent a perspective in the industry that I think a lot of our listeners are interested in and very few of them have. And that’s the big part of this mystery world of recruiting and hiring. If you’re a practitioner in enterprise architecture or process management, you’ve got a job or you’ve moved jobs, but the way in which that happens sometimes feels like alchemy, and I really want to uncover some of your secrets today. But let’s start talking about you, because you’re much more than just the job you represent. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jason: Sure, sure, so thank you very much for having. I’m excited to delve into the arcane topic of recruiting. But yeah, the quick intro on me is I have been a sales and marketing leader for the last 22 years. That’s where I’ve spent the bulk of my career building and leading sales teams. In 2018, I finally got up the courage or craziness (whatever adjective you want to use) to quit my job as a VP of Sales and start my own company, which is dedicated to recruiting mostly in the SasS space. And it has been an amazing and fun and educational journey for me. So that is me in a very short description. 

Roland: It just means you married well and your wife pays the bills. Come on, be honest.

Jason: She did for a little while, that’s for sure. I have a very supportive wife. She was tired of hearing me complain about my job and said “why don’t you just quit and do your own thing?”. And after a lot of soul searching and trying to kind of think about, ‘well, what am I? What could I do?’. I spent a long time just thinking about that. And the more I thought about it, the common thread through every job I’ve ever had has always been hiring people. And if you have good people on your team, everything is easy. And if you have the wrong people on your team, well, then everything is harder than it should be. So I was really blessed to kind of land on that. At the same time I was going through that soul searching, a good friend of mine that I used to work with also started his own recruiting practice and he gave me that nudge I needed to consider doing it, and it’s been a phenomenal ride since then. 

J-M: It’s amazing and you’re very fortunate to have discovered the passion that you have and the love that you have for this part of the process. I feel like a lot of folks go through and they’re like, ‘oh, I like my job, sort of’ and it’s like, well, you never thought about what about your job you liked? Because if you really dig down to that, I bet you there’s a job that does mostly what you like, not just a loose fit people find in their roles, and I think that’s something you talk about in recruiting as well as finding people – the tight fit. The good fit with their skill set and their passions. 

Jason: Yes, yeah, you want to. Hopefully you find a job that allows you to do what you really want to do. Not only are you good at it, but also you have fun doing so. That way you want to keep on doing it and you continue to advance and you don’t just take a job because somebody approached you or a friend recommended you. You do it in a more kind of strategic way that ends up in satisfaction on all sides. 

Roland: So how did you get there? And I’m trying to make the connection to our audience. How do you get into nerdy territory and come to this podcast where we talk about architecture and process management and then all these things have. Have you worked in that area before? 

Jason: I have to out myself here. No, I had absolutely no background in enterprise architecture at all. I guess the easiest way to answer your question is I am a closet nerd, so I was that kid who took apart my VCR and tried to put it back together and took apart radios and I’ve always been into electronics and computers and technology. So as I progressed throughout my career, I I tried to find things that allowed me to build, you know, and interconnect things where I could. Even as a sales leader, I did several things related to technology that weren’t in my job description but just I had fun doing. And I’ve always loved technology in that way. So when I started my business I met a sales leader at an enterprise architecture company and very quickly was like oh, what is this? What’s EA? And I really dedicated myself to learning as much as I could about it, and realized it’s this super cool space that not a lot of people know about and have really worked to establish a little bit of a niche in my business in it. And it’s been great, yeah.

Roland: And then stumbled over the shenanigans that we do on our website and reached out to us. And we are on, the rest is history, as they say. 

J-M: It’s funny – we talked to Carlisle a couple episodes ago and it’s the same sort of thing. Enterprise architecture feels weirdly underrepresented in terms of visibility. And so for you to discover that and be like, “listen, not only is it a good space, but it’s a great space to hire in”. That’s a cool little niche that you found yourself in, and I’m really glad that brought you to us into having a conversation about that. So, besides being, of course, interested in nerdy things, tell me a little bit more about you as a person. What’s your life like and what are your bucket list items? We always ask our guests ’cause it’s interesting to see what people are looking to do in their life before they kick it. 

Jason: So a bit about me. I have my amazing wife we talked about a moment ago who helped me do all of this. I have two great kids that are 17 and 5, so one is about to go to college and the other one is about to go into kindergarten. So that’s exciting. We live in New Jersey right now but just bought a house in Michigan, which is where my wife is from and will be moving there probably in June or July just before my daughter goes off to school.

J-M: Once they dig the state out (from the snow), right?

Jason: Exactly, yes, she tricked me. Yeah, she was like they get about the same amount of snow as New Jersey, and I quickly realized that that was a lie. So what are you going to do? Outside of that, if I’m not working on stuff that I love, I absolutely need to exercise. So whether it’s yoga or running or whatever, I need to move so that I can get the stress out. I also try to meditate. And I also really love anything related to military aviation or military history. That was my passion in high school – I wanted to join the Army and fly helicopters. I decided not to do that, but the love of aviation has stayed. So one day I will get my pilot’s license, but I’ll have to sedate my wife so she allows me to do that. 

J-M: Odd question. Have you ever read the works of Dale Brown? 

Jason: Yeah, oh wow; I quite enjoy him. That’s super cool. Yeah, we gotta talk about it offline – maybe we can make a separate Dale Brown podcast. So all that and Tom Clancy. I mean everybody. It’s great stuff. 

J-M: Well, that’s really wonderful to hear. And we did ask the question of bucket list items. What are your dreams? A couple things you want to do?

Jason: What I really want to do is I want to work enough to feel good about things. I don’t want to be a slave to my business. I want to enjoy every day. I want to make enough money that I can feel like I can provide for my family and I want to have balance. So I know that’s probably not the best bucket list item, but I think I spent a lot of time thinking about how to balance my life so that I’m not overly obsessing about work. 

J-M: You don’t think about buying a set of gold golf clubs? But who needs gold golf clubs? 

Jason: Yeah, I don’t really need a lot – I have everything I need. I’m good. So again, outside of learning to fly one day, I would say that if I had to pick one thing, it would probably be that and I’d love to go to Greece and Italy. I have that in my heritage, so I’d love to do that at some point.

Roland: I don’t want to break your heart, Jason, but I looked up the list prices for helicopters and they started at about $500,000, so I think you need to work a little bit. 

Jason: You know, I just want to fly it. Somebody else can own it. 

Roland: They do have a limit, by the way. If you haven’t heard that. It’s like 2000 flight hours or 12 years, and then they have to go back to the manufacturer and basically get completely refurbished. Just saying, I don’t have the money for that. But let’s come to the topic of why we’re here and we split that show into basically 2 aspects. 

Working with a recruiter from a candidate perspective and then working with a recruiter from a firm perspective. So if you want to hire something. But maybe the majority of our audience might be on the first side, might be approached by somebody like you. Hopefully they do it in the very same way you reached out to me (hint, hint) with a little video which flattered me. But yeah, so how and why should you work with a recruiter if you’re the candidate? 

Jason: So the value that a the right recruiter brings to you if you are thinking about a job, there are a few things, but probably the top of the list is they can provide a direct link to the hiring manager for that job, whereas in most cases if you apply for a job, where does your resume usually go? 

Roland: Always a big system and you have some bots going over it, and you don’t have the right keywords, and then they ghost you for six months, and if you’re lucky they send you an email months after they have staffed the position. 

Jason: Right, it goes to HR and you never know what’s going to happen when it gets there because they’re filling probably 100 roles, you know, so that they don’t really have the time or the bandwidth to understand what the job really is. They have a little job description that the hiring managers sent, and they’re trying to fill as many jobs as fast as they can. 

A recruiter will be able to get deep into each job and really get to know who the hiring manager is, and then be able to share that insight with you as a candidate. So that if you decide to engage, your probability of success is higher because you’ll have so much more intelligence walking in about who the hiring manager is and what the job actually is. That, to me, is the biggest value that a good recruiter brings. 

The other thing I would share briefly is that they can give a lot of insight into what the process looks like, what the internal dynamics are. An external recruiter? I can say things about the company, because I don’t work there, right about my client, that may be the HR person or even the hiring manager might not be comfortable or allowed to say. Because I’m a third party, so I can have my own opinions and I can give insight into where a company fits into a competitive landscape that will again just provide additional insight to the job seeker and help them figure out if they should dive in or not. 

J-M: Interesting, it feels like that might give you a better fit in a company when you’re looking at longer term plans. You’re not necessarily trying to turn around candidates who are going to spend 9-15 months in a job – like you’re not looking for jumpers. You’re trying to find people a home, and a home – it’s an investment on both sides, right? The company’s paying money and they’re filling a position with a human, but a person is dedicating a portion of their life, and if it is tighter then they’re going to have a better time feeling at home in that new space. And I really appreciate that. Particularly, the insights you have. So I would assume as part of that, besides the clients you serve in both capacities, you’re doing active research into organizations. You’re getting a sense of the landscape, so when somebody comes to you or when you go to somebody, you have that information available. 

Jason: Yes, so you’re kind of like an industry expert as well in that context, yeah. And so I had the benefit of being a hiring manager before I started my business. I worked with a lot of recruiters and the ones that I worked with the most did what you just said. They were really industry experts. They knew a ton about the business and their insights were very valuable. There are a lot more that didn’t know anything and we’re just trying to fill as many jobs as they possibly could. So when I started my business, my job was to focus on being on the former side of things where I’m working with a small number of clients so that I can truly understand where they fit and become really an ambassador of their brand and know the space hopefully, as well as the people I’m talking to. 

J-M: Do you ever get the question – I know it’s a weird thing to ask, but do you consider the company your client? Or do you consider the candidate your client? 

Jason: It’s a good question. I consider both my clients, but I also have to recognize that I get paid by the company that hires the employee, right? So there’s a natural somewhat conflict there that I constantly have to address of ‘who’s paying me’, but I also feel beholden to both parties because I want it to be a great match, right? I want to make sure that the person who takes the job, feels great about it, and then we stay connected and hopefully we have a relationship for years and years to come. 

Roland: And then there’s also the aspect of ‘hey, if you bring the wrong candidates to an organization at some point in time, they will just fire you.’ It’s about your credibility that you bring to it. So speaking of which, let’s talk about the process. How do you get found by a hopefully good recruiter? And what do you do before you even start reaching out to people? Because I think there’s a lot of work that you do that nobody sees, so if you could start maybe sharing your experiences when you start working with organizations, how would you get to the point when you start reaching out to individuals? 

Jason: And to clarify the question, I’m going to answer in the realm of if somebody is just about to start looking for a job. How do they get found? So the best thing that someone can do when they are beginning their job search is to really think a lot about your LinkedIn game. Because LinkedIn now is, in my opinion, more important than any other aspect of your job search, including your resume, because it’s how you get found in 99% of cases. That’s how you get found. Unless someone you know writes a personal referral which you can leverage. That’s the best. But absent of that, like if you’re going to get found by a recruiter, dollars to doughnuts, that recruiter found you on LinkedIn. That’s where we all go to find people. So the more thoroughly complete your LinkedIn profile is, the better. I’ll give you a few examples. Things that I see that are obvious misses that would take seconds to fix. The first one is that people have no profile picture. Or they have a profile picture that looks like it’s from like 1981. That is not going to serve you in your job search.

Roland: Hey, I looked good in 1981 – I had hair!

Jason: Sure, but you want it to be something that someone could look at and go ‘OK that person seems engaging’ and even though we try to be neutral, we’re all human beings and we’re going to look at a picture and we’re going to, perhaps even in an unconscious way, have an opinion about that person in seconds. So your profile picture is really important. The other thing that I see sometimes is people have their profile picture, but their LinkedIn account is configured in a way that it doesn’t allow me to see it until I connect with them. So that’s a very easy privacy setting to tweak so that your profile picture is viewable by anybody regardless of your connection status. 

Roland: And when I think about the picture, obviously, I hope I’m right. You’re talking about a professional picture. You’re not talking about the last meeting that you had with Uncle Dave on the patio after three beers and whatnot. 

Jason: So exactly, yeah, no shot glasses in the back. It doesn’t have to be a professional headshot, but you want it to look professional. And now, with our phones as good as they are, you put your iPhone in portrait mode, go out in the backyard, and get some good light and take a picture. No big deal. 

J-M: ‘Secret Secret’ – that’s my LinkedIn profile picture. I had just gotten a haircut and a shave and I thought ‘you know what? I’ll take a pic. I’m feeling cute today. Might delete later.’And then I never did. Besides your profile picture, there’s a lot of publicly available information that you want to fill out on LinkedIn. What are you looking for? What are you gleaning? 

Jason: So I’m going to turn your question around a bit. If you’re in search mode, what you want to think about is ‘what can I put on my profile that will help me be found?’ So on my side, when I’m at the beginning of a search, I’m aware that most companies now are hiring nationally. So it’s not like I’m hiring in New York City or Boston most of the time. They could be anywhere in the country, and they need to have five years or more of experience. Well, that’s millions of people, right? So I need a way to filter that. So my job really is to come up with 10 to 20 different search parameters that I let loose on LinkedIn to try and find the right folks. So examples of things that I think are very valuable in the EA world would be certifications. So if you’re a TOGAF person, put that on there, and if you have other certifications that are relevant to EA, put that on there. Those are the easiest examples. Another thing that I see people do is they’ll put their dates of employment and their job title and nothing else. Well, that’s not enough! You want to fill out the details – what did you do there? Tell me more about what that job was, how big was your average customer? How many customers did you typically service? Give me some detail there so that hopefully one of the words you used is going to get picked up in the search that I do because you’re looking at texts across profiles, right? That’s how you find people.

J-M: So those key terms you’re using – give away the goose! What terms do you search for generally on LinkedIn, using those tools to find candidates for EA Jobs? What are the key terms you use? 

Jason: So I look at all of the different certification types I mentioned (TOGAF as an example), but as you guys know there are others, so I start there, right? And then I go through and I use enterprise architecture and then digital transformation / enterprise transformation. Those are probably the top and that yields way too many. So then I start to try and I’ll look at profiles and I’ll start to think about ‘OK, what does good look like here?’ And usually the people that I find – it’s not like they’ve seeded their profile with keywords. This isn’t an SEO play. If you honestly explain what you do, I’m going to find you, and the more you put on there, the better your chances are. So my advice to folks that are at the beginning of their searches? Just write. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about your job. 

Oh, the other thing that I would recommend is when you have that part of LinkedIn where you’re able to talk about experience – I worked at XYZ Company from 1995 to 1997. Don’t put the company blurb there. I don’t want to see a commercial for the company. I want to see a commercial on what you did. For instance, I started as a solutions engineer and I served clients of this size and I won these awards or I accomplished these things. This is your resume, right? Because that’s how I’m going to decide if I’m going to reach out. 

Roland: Yeah. Speaking of which, LinkedIn has a nice function where you can say open to work, but just show it to recruiters. Because we don’t want our boss to see this. And I never know if it really works, so I wanted to ask about it. 

Jason: It works. 

Roland: So how does it work? When you see those badges around someone’s profile photo, is that something that screams desperation? Or does it show somebody is self-conscious enough to say ‘Yep? Of course I’m looking.’ So how do you see that from your perspective? 

Jason: It’s a great question, so we’re talking really about two different things. There’s the “open to work” thing you can turn on your LinkedIn profile, which is almost like sending a beacon to recruiters saying this person is now open to opportunities. So in that section of LinkedIn you can talk about where you want to work, what job titles are interesting to you, etc. 

What you’re referring to, Roland, is in addition to that, you can put a little halo around your profile picture that says “open to work”. Those things are not mutually exclusive. The benefit to having the halo around your profile picture is that everyone can see it, even if they’re not a recruiter. Yeah, just available everywhere. What do I think about that? To me it doesn’t matter because I’m going to see the “open to work” side on the recruiter’s end anyway. I don’t know that it’s desperate, but I wouldn’t turn that on right away. I would do that if I’m in search mode for a month and I’m not getting any bites, then maybe I’d change my profile picture to reflect that, because it does give the air of I’m unemployed and I need a job. Yeah, yeah, from a branding standpoint, if you can avoid it, do it. But of course, at the end of the day, if you must have a job and you just want to get more up at bats, that will probably help. 

Roland: Yeah, at the end of the day, having a salary and having health care and all that stuff are somehow important in this game that we call business. 

Jason: Yes, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, yeah, that’s true. 

J-M: Yeah, and another question for you. If you have a job right now, but you’re open to conversations, is it advantageous to turn on the flag even if you don’t intend to leave? I’m thinking about people I know there’s lots of our listeners who are currently in jobs that they’re medium satisfied with. And we talked before about how there’s sometimes a loose fit, but you don’t necessarily recognize it. So if after hearing this podcast, people are like, well, you know what I’d be interested in finding out more about this, is there a downside to turning on that open-to conversations sort of thing? 

Jason: In my opinion, there isn’t. So I’ll just share a quick personal story. I was with the same company for 15 years. I was extremely loyal. I loved what I did and I never turned that flag on until I was at the point where I absolutely, positively decided to leave and it was too late. It was OK. It worked out, but I should have begun networking a year before like that. The moment that I started to get that feeling of maybe it’s time for me to go – it was probably a year from that feeling to me actually leaving, and I think that’s the case with most people. We start getting those feelings in the pit of our stomach on a Sunday night, way before we quit, where it’s like, ‘I don’t know if I want to keep on doing this.’ Yeah, that’s the time you want to put on that ‘open to opportunities’ flag so that really you could begin putting yourself out there and just networking. You might talk to a few recruiters or go to a few interviews and realize that you should stay in your current job. And after you go through the process, maybe you realize the grass isn’t greener on the other side, but it’s a great way to quickly figure it out. Am I getting paid at the market rate? Am I being recognized the way that I should? You know, basically, should I really start a search? 

J-M: Another question is about LinkedIn activity. How much do you consider the stuff people are posting on LinkedIn as part of their profile? Do you go and search through people’s activity to see what they’re talking about? Who are they talking to about it? 

Jason: Yes. And again, this goes back to LinkedIn being really a better resume than a resume, because I can do exactly that. So yes, as I am researching people, once I find somebody that I think I’m thinking to myself, I wonder if this could be good for client X. I’ll look at their recent posts and activity to help confirm or deny my thoughts because I don’t want to spend my time reaching out to somebody and either A) have them not respond or B) have them respond and be the wrong person. So I want to do as much legwork as I can to hopefully confirm that they’re the right fit. 

The other thing I think is more important to the candidate: if you’re in search mode, the more active you are on LinkedIn, whether it be commenting on other people’s posts or posting your own content, the greater likelihood you will be found, and you will more importantly build a tribe around you. So here’s what I mean by that. Let’s say that you’re beginning your search and you’re just starting to think about putting your feelers out. Well, find some people. I’ll use EA as an example. Find some people in the EA world that you know and respect that post a lot and comment on their posts. And what that will do is the other people that are commenting will see you and go, ‘oh, that’s interesting; Roland just made a really good point here. Who is Roland?’ And maybe they’ll connect with you. When you are active on LinkedIn, you’re playing the long game with your search. I’m going to share this key info (and I’m almost giving away revenue because this precludes using a recruiter) – in most cases, the best way to get a job is through somebody you know. But how do you meet more people? Well, you engage with them on things that you’re both passionate about, right? 

Roland: So the take away for me is that LinkedIn is important, period. So I think this is a big one. I’ve heard some people aren’t on LinkedIn, which I can’t imagine. It’s the greatest stalking tool in the world. But besides that, what are other things that you look for when evaluating a candidate? So, for example, does that candidate have a separate website? Do they have a side project like doing a podcast about EA and BPA or whatever, right? So hey, it’s the best podcast you have ever heard except for yours. (Of course when you get started, Jason). 

But in all seriousness, is there something else that he would look for you mentioned? You have a recommendation by somebody which obviously helps you know if that person has credibility in the firm. But if you don’t have that, but you want to get into this company, what do you recommend people do besides having a LinkedIn profile? 

Jason: If they have a separate website of their accomplishments, or they have something else that helps to demonstrate what they’ve done, that’s great. I can tell you, that’s the extreme minority. Most people I talk to do not have their own website and don’t have anything outside of LinkedIn. And if you don’t, that’s perfectly OK. If I had my choice between recommending somebody really spend the time making their LinkedIn profile as complete as possible versus starting a website, I’d say start with LinkedIn, and get that great. If you have extra bandwidth and you could spin up a site to talk more about yourself, great. 

Roland: Imagine you’re unemployed or you’ve already quit mentally. Before you actually quit the job, would it make sense to start writing or to produce something that’s tangible? Or is that more something where you say, “I would rather spend the time talking to people and upping my LinkedIn game.” 

Jason: If the object is ‘things you can do to get noticed and hopefully make contacts and get a job’, then it’s your LinkedIn game, because otherwise if you do a blog, but nobody sees it. Especially people that are looking to hire. What good has it done? So you don’t want to have that tree falling in the woods scenario. 

J-M: It’s also a question about other sources of recognition. Things like industry journals or conferences and webinars and things like that; I mean, how much do you look at those industry panels and hunt from there? Or is that just a lot? There’s too much data available and LinkedIn is the easiest aggregator. I mean, everything ends up on LinkedIn anyway, no? 

Jason: Yes exactly. If somebody includes that they spoke at a conference, then I can search off of that, right? That’ll come back. But to answer your question, yes, if I know that there’s an event that happens once or twice a year, and it’s related to a search, I will go and try and figure out who spoke there. But that’s a much harder road for me, and so 95% of what I do is inside LinkedIn. 

Roland: Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought. I was just thinking in my mind like, Oh yeah, it’s 95% LinkedIn. And then there’s 5% of all the other stuff that people do. 

Moving on, assuming you did your homework, you found the right candidate, and now I’m on the other side of the phone and I get, whatever, a LinkedIn direct message or I get a phone call. What do you recommend I do? Should I get a heart attack or panic attack? How do I evaluate that the person who’s talking to me is genuine. And it’s not just some spam. Maybe more importantly, once you validated that this is a real thing, this is a recruiter who called me, how do you spot a good recruiter? 

Jason: Well, unfortunately there are a lot of bad ones, right? And if you turn on that open-to-opportunities thing on your LinkedIn profile, you’re going to get a lot of recruiter outreach that seems very spamming right? Where a recruiter will send the same message to 1000 people and the only thing that’s different is your first name, because it’s basically a big mail merge, right? So the first piece of advice I would have, and I think we’re all pretty good at detecting spam, is just look at the message and see if the context of it makes sense and it fits with what your background is. Then maybe it makes sense to start a conversation, right? Would I talk to a recruiter immediately and book a call with them? Probably not. I’d probably hit him back and say I’d love to learn more. What can you send me? Can you give me either the company name or website or some more detail about what the position is? It’s OK to engage and ask more of those clarifying questions before you spend your time booking a call. You can even ask about compensation at that point if it, as long as you do it in a nice way. You want to remember there’s a human being probably on the other end, so as a receiver of that, if somebody says to me, “you know Jason, this sounds great and I’m intrigued. But I want to make sure that we’re aligned from a compensation standpoint.” That’s a lot better than “what’s the base pay”. 

J-M: Out of curiosity, when you are recruiting for positions, do you have a hard number or do you have a range provided in terms of being able to respond to that kind of question? 

Jason: At minimum, I will have a range, and in many cases I’ll have close to a hard number. Ideally, I don’t want to get into compensation before I’ve spoken to somebody. And the reason for that is, if a client has given me a range, they’re giving me a range based on who they think I’m going to find for them, but if I find someone outstanding that demands a higher number than the range, the client will pay that. That’s happened over and over and over again. So I sometimes see people that are looking for a job hear a number and say “oh well, it’s too low. I’m not going to do that”, but what they’re missing is if you’re as good as it seems like you are, you ought to talk to this company. Because if you’re this good, they’re going to want to hire you. And they’ll try to find a way.

J-M: Well, that’s good to know. Obviously, you’re not going to take on a call for a job where you’re 30 percent, 40% down on your current salary, but if there is some flexibility in the opportunity on both sides, then we have a better chance of finding that really good fit. And I gotta say, this has been this fascinating so far. 

But I know we’ve been talking for a while. I’m sure people want to take a brain break and to grab a sip of water and we listen to some fantastic music. Just a quick shout out for all the music you’re hearing on this podcast. I don’t know if we’ve mentioned it so far, but it’s done by a good friend and colleague of mine, Mr. Jeremy Voltz. You can find him at jeremyvoltzmusic.com and of course you can take a look at a lot of this stuff online. We’ll post more in our show notes, and a ‘big up’ to him, so I never forget about that. 

Meanwhile, I’d like to put a call to action here for everyone as we go into our first break, which is: think about where you are in your career cycle. Are you in the process of looking for your next role yet? How are you feeling with what you’re doing? What does your LinkedIn profile look like? When did you last update it? Are you using those keywords? Are you talking about yourself honestly, in a way that can help someone like Jason find you? And then lastly, what do you want someone recruiting for roles to know about you? So tell your story and think about whether or not you’re doing that right now. We’ll leave you for a moment to go and check your LinkedIn page quickly and we’ll be back in just a couple minutes with some more thoughts with our friend Jason.

Musical Interlude: “RakeBeatChords”, Jeremy Voltz

Roland: Welcome back to our second segment of the show. So, Jason, now that you’ve made contact with a recruiter, I’d like to talk with you about the interview process. So what do you see as the”typical interview process?” How does that go? 

Jason: Typically it’s a phone interview, either with somebody in HR or ideally the hiring manager. Kind of a quick discovery, right? Half hour to 45 minutes, just to align at a high level about who you are on a surface level. Are you a good fit, right? Usually after that, it’s one more in-depth conversation with the hiring manager. And then after that, I’m increasingly seeing some sort of a panel interview. So it would be maybe members of the team members of the leadership team. And usually at this stage the candidate is going to be asked to do some sort of a presentation, right? It shouldn’t be anything fancy. You should have plenty of insight into what it is that’s expected of you, and it should be something that you do in your regular job anyway. So I like those things. I think that they’re a great way for someone to show off what they do and how they do it. And it separates people from what they can talk about versus what they can actually do. 

Roland: That makes it ‘don’t try this’ in a Big Four organization. I tried that when we were hiring for people and our HR team came back with: “ No, no, we can’t do this. If we neglect or or if we say no to a candidate, they might sue us”. 

Jason: You gotta love HR.

Roland: I will not mention the company…. Look at my LinkedIn profile. That was like a super disappointing situation for me because then you’re stuck with one or two interviews and you take the candidate and he talks to person A and person B and person C and then you stick your heads together and say “yeah is that a good fit or not?”. I like the presentation style / case study.

Jason: After that it’s over; my recommendation to a client would be to have one or two more conversations after that. Maybe one more debrief with the hiring manager of “hey, here’s how we thought you did. Here are the questions that came up as a result of the case that you did.” And then maybe there’s one executive interview. So maybe it’s a C-level person that’s looking for some sort of culture fit. If it goes longer than that, and I know this is a hot topic, especially in today’s market. I think that companies are getting better at realizing that if they have a super long and complex interview process, they’re simply going to lose people because there are so few candidates out there and there are so many jobs. It is in the company’s best interest to make the interview process as streamlined as possible.

Roland: Just to share my personal experience with that not-to-be-known Big Four company. I had nine interviews and literally the last one was with the person who hired me then and said “Oh yeah, I think it’s time to move on. We should have an in person interview and meet.” And I just lost it and I said “really, 9 interviews and you don’t know who I am by now?” He said “well I think we’re good.” 

J-M: It looks like you’re trying to check a couple of boxes here. Like, what are the important things that are going to come out of that interview process and that discussion process? What are the checkmarks that need to be done before you can hire somebody as a company? 

Jason: I think it’s really the same on both sides. Whether you’re on the company side or whether you’re the candidate, you’re looking for: is there a good probability that this person will join the organization and A) can do the job that’s being asked (do they functionally have those skills) and B) will they fit in? Will they fit in with the culture that we have here? Those are really the two things you’re looking to figure out at their most simple. 

J-M: So then what do you do as a candidate? What can you do to best communicate that and overcome any biases? I know that when you think about interviews, oftentimes charisma and an outgoing sort of social nature may overwhelm any sort of technical shortcomings that come up, and I feel like there’s a bias towards that. So if you’re talking to somebody on our podcast right now who maybe doesn’t have all those skills, what can you do to best communicate that story without necessarily having to smoke-and-mirrors it? 

Jason: So the phrase I would give someone in that situation is be brilliant at the basics, so the things I’m about to share are going to seem really obvious, but I’m I do this for a living and you wouldn’t believe how many people flub on basic things. So, as an example, after an interview is over, it’s a good practice to send a thank you note to the person you spoke to. And that thank-you note should be more than just “thanks for our conversation. I look forward to the next steps.” That is not a thank you note, right? Well, I guess it is technically, but it’s not going to do you any favors. That note should have been: “J-M, I really enjoyed our conversation. Some of the things that you said, particularly around A, B, and C got me thinking, and I think these parts of my background relate to the things that you mentioned that you talked about being crucially important for this role. So I just wanted to point those out to you again. I’m free next Tuesday at 4:00 or Wednesday at 5:00 if you’d like to get into the conversation. I’m wide open for it.” 

Roland: So it’s another sales opportunity for yourself that you brought in there. 

Jason: I want to show the hiring manager that I listened to what they said and that I heard the things that were important to them, and then I’m going to tie together what they said with what I know how to do. 

J-M: That makes a lot of sense.

Roland: In the four step process that you just laid out, there might be certain things that you might want to do. How to prepare yourself or how to conduct yourself in the interviews. Are there patterns that you’ve identified that are successful or what would you recommend to a candidate when he or she is at the beginning of that process? 

Jason: There are a few things that I would think about as you’re beginning the interview process. Again, these things are going to seem quite basic because they are, but they’re easy to not do, especially when you’re in a spot where you’re starting the process. You might have

many interviews in a week, right? And it’s easy to just kind of jump on a call. Ideally, you’ll spend some time prior to the first call, really researching the company. If they’re publicly traded, maybe listen to their last analyst call. If they’re not, research them. Maybe they’re a startup – research them on Crunchbase. Do what you can to figure out where they are on their journey. How many employees do they have? How funded are they? The person you’re speaking to, you want to stalk them on LinkedIn. How long have they been in their job? Where did they go to college? Is there anything about them that you can link back to and say, “hey, we have this thing that we both are passionate about or we both did.” You want to go through that process with every single opportunity that you visit, and then when you actually get on the call, it’s all about energy. You want to get on that call and have it be a palpable feeling of what you’re bringing to the call that you’re excited to have the conversation. Maybe you’re standing up during that call. Maybe you have a mirror in front of you so that you can see yourself smiling and engaging. But the more you can do to really show up strong, the better. 

Roland: But when you’re in the interview itself. The situation that I was in in the past, it was a mixed thing. The best interview that I had was a very lively conversation with somebody, whether it was a push from both sides, you know, to say, OK, how much can I push the company? How much can I push the candidate? And there might be situations where you might not agree with what the person you’re interviewing with will tell you. So, how do you handle those situations? 

Jason: I’ll give you a very simple way to pull on that a bit, and that’s “tell me more about that, tell me why that’s important to you, or what has been your experience with that. I’d love to learn more about that,” Before I come out and directly disagree, I want to get a little more information to ensure that I’m hearing it correctly. And then maybe, well, I’ve had this experience. Wonder how they could overlap, right? I’m going to treat all this as a learning exercise. But ultimately I think you bring up a good point if that happens over and over again with the hiring manager where, as this person is speaking, you’re thinking to yourself “wow, like, I don’t feel that way at all.” Well then this probably isn’t the right job for you, and that’s so it’s doing its job. Listen to that. I’ve been to some interviews as a candidate, where I listened to the hiring manager, and I’m like, “wow, I am not liking this guy, you know, and so I don’t want to continue the process.” If I don’t like you on that first date, I’m not going to like you any more on the second or third. This should be where we are: we’re feeling great about each other. 

J-M: That makes a lot of sense to me. So let’s assume that the date does go well and you’re moving to the next step. You’re taking it upstairs, and upstairs is where we start to talk about other things like scope of work and things like money. Because obviously, if we’ve had a conversation that you’ve got a range or a general idea. We talked before about how there’s some flexibility as well as you as a recruiter. Where do we get into the negotiation side of things and that goes for both title and compensation. 

Jason: If the recruiter has done their job properly, you will have guidance or high level guidance around compensation before you even take the first call. Because you want to make sure that you’re roughly aligned. Otherwise, that recruiter will waste everybody’s time. So you’ll have an idea and you’ll know if you’re right in the sweet spot. Or maybe if your compensation is a bit higher than what they are recommending, we’ll know at some point we’ve got to come back to it, so I’ll kind of presume that we’ve done that. So now we’re at the end of the process and we’re at the point of having this conversation. If a recruiter is involved, a good recruiter, so I’ll use myself, shameless plug, I will have a conversation with the candidate and say, “hey, I feel like you’re about to get an offer. I feel like you’ve done everything that they have asked of you. They love you. Are you at a place where if the numbers make sense, do you want this job? Like are you there?” And if the person says “yeah, I think I am.” I’m going to say “great, what is the number that I need to go back to them with? I know I gave you a range before, but what is the number that I need to tell them: hey, I think the offer really needs to be this in order for J-M to accept?” I’ll be that intermediary. 

J-M So advocating. But on behalf of both of your clients. Yeah, but now you’re advocating bi-directionally because you want them to do the right thing for your prospect, who also wants the right thing to be done. 

Jason: If there’s a negotiation process and I’m involved, what value have I brought? They shouldn’t be doing that directly. I should be helping. Those are awkward conversations for people to have and I do it every day so I can do it more easily. I’ve been having those talks my whole career. It’s very easy for me to do it and so to me, that’s part of the value I bring to both sides. Now. If you don’t have that – either, maybe you’re not working with a recruiter, or the recruiter isn’t capable, or whatever of having that conversation – then usually the sentence you’d give would be something along the lines of: “you know, J-M, the opportunities that I’m looking at, and I’m really excited about this, and I think I can see myself being apart of the team. The other opportunities I’m looking at are in this range, and that’s really where I feel like I need to be. So I wanted to share that with you and make sure that I don’t want to waste your time and I want to make sure we’re aligned at a high level around that range.” Something like that. 

Roland: Well, that is now an interesting question. Because when do I price myself out of the game? 

Jason: Yes, who’s going to be the one that says it first? 

Roland: Yeah, exactly because you could say “OK, hey, in my previous job, I’m making this much.” Obviously everybody wants to make a little bit more when they switch jobs, because why should they switch jobs otherwise, right? But at some point in time, how do you reconcile this? Because to my knowledge, there’s no database of salaries in the United States where you could look things up.

Jason: Nothing reliable. 

J-M: Glassdoor’s ‘medium’…

Roland: Yeah no. But the point is, how do you walk that balance? Because for you, obviously, it’s easy. You know the more the candidate gets paid, the higher the commission will be. I hope so. I would assume.

Jason: Yes, but that’s not why I do it. I want to make it so everybody is happy. 

Roland: Yeah, for the candidate who says this and then gets the gut feeling like “damn I undersold myself” and now you’re stuck in that because as we all know what do you get your 3% raise or the inflation or whatever. It’s not that you make a 20% jump, except if you work in a large company where people do this right? 

Jason: So if the question is, who speaks first? Is that what you’re asking for? 

Roland: Yeah, that’s one. And how do you gauge it? How do you gauge what your worth is? Because typically people ask (which they’re not allowed to) “what do you make today?” And you could go the easy way and say, oh, I’m making $5. And then they say OK, we give him $5.50. You know, something like that. What are your recommendations? 

J-M: Are you actually not allowed to ask? 

Jason: It’s state by state. There are different rules around if an employer can ask for that or not. 

J-M: Because I’ve legitimately heard people being like “OK, show me your T4s.” 

Jason: In Canada it’s different. It might be acceptable there, and in certain states in the US it is OK to do that as well, but even if it’s not OK, people do it anyway, and if they don’t come out and ask “what are you making?” they’ll ask, “can you give me some idea as to what you’ve made historically” or “what you want” and eventually you’re going to wind up in the same place, right? The idea behind that question is I want you to tell me what you want before I tell you as the employer what I’m about to pay you. 

J-M: Are they going to base how much they’re offering you based on how much you’re making?

Jason: Maybe.

J-M: But if you say something like “oh, I’m making a billion dollars a year”, they’re like, “goodbye.” But if you say “I’m making 20K”, they’re like “oh well, we’ll offer you 22K. How about that?” And their salary range for this is like 75k to 100k, and that feels bad. 

Jason: That’s bad. That seems like a crazy example, but those kinds of things do happen sometimes. There is no clear cut solution to the question that we’re asking. There isn’t a ‘just do this’ all the time. You’re going to have to feel out, you know, based on the conversations you’ve had so far with them, if you’re going to be the one to volunteer that information first or not. And again, to the question of ‘why work with a recruiter’, this is why. I’ve had this experience as a candidate too, where they can demystify some of that. The other thing is, if you’re not working with a recruiter, just the nature of going on a bunch of interviews, eventually you’re going to probably get multiple offers for the same kind of job, and you’ll get an idea through that experience roughly what your comp structure should look like. You’ll get it from experience. But the hard part is, what do you do for you for that first offer you get? Or maybe you haven’t been in search mode for 10 years and you just don’t know what the market rate is? It could be a little challenging.

J-M: I have a question about that first offer, because I’ve seen this happen with a couple of colleagues of mine. Oftentimes offers are time-gated. How much do you, as a recruiter, help to ensure that candidates have sufficient time to decide? Or is that just how it works? You have five days to decide the future of your life. 

Jason: If you need more than five days, something has gone wrong in the interview process. You should not need more. You shouldn’t need more than one day. Ideally, the interview process should be so good and you should have had so many opportunities to speak to so many different people about what this job is, that by the time the offer comes in, it should be a formality that’s unnecessary. It simply confirms what we’ve talked about all along. That’s my opinion on that. 

J-M: That’s really interesting. 

Jason: But you shouldn’t feel rushed, right? Like I see some situations where people are getting offers after the first or second interview. To me that’s inappropriate. And then that puts you in a pressure-filled situation where you don’t have all the facts. So that’s not right. 

Roland: And then you have the situation where the candidate (and I’ve seen that unfortunately a couple of times) either being a colleague of that person or being the manager of that person when they come back and say “oh, by the way, I just interviewed with your largest competitor and they’re offering me whatever 10% more, 20% more and whatnot”. So the question would be, well, how would you react to this? Do you say, “OK good riddance, I don’t want to work with you anyways?” Or do you really say “hey, it’s important for me to keep you and I’m opening myself. But now you need to understand I’m working in that big huge bureaucracy and it takes me six months to get an updated offer for you.” So I’ve seen those situations as well. 

But when I think about it, you know your favorite interviews that you had, whether or not you’ve got the job, dear listeners, what did you enjoy or what did you not enjoy in those processes? What do you think you’ve done well or poorly in the past, and what would you like from the next interview and process? We’re going to leave you alone for a couple of seconds with Jeremy’s great music and we come back and go into the part where we talk about the company’s perspective.

Musical Interlude: “Wish You Knew Me”, Jeremy Voltz 

J-M: Thank you so much folks, for taking that little time to think about your history of recruiting, interviewing all those good things. But now we want to shift perspectives because we’ve been talking about the candidate perspective. What does it mean to be somebody who’s being hired? But I know Jason, you provide a lot of services as part of what you do, to organizations. So let’s say we take that perspective. I’m somebody in an organization like an architecture team building a team. I need to fill roles with the right people. When and how should I reach out to a recruiter and what scenarios am I looking at from an HR-building perspective. What scenarios would best fit the need and the services that someone like you would provide? 

Jason: To me, this is around the ‘when’ and ‘how’. The ‘when’ is if you’re not getting the right people in front of you by whatever your current methods are, whether it’s your internal HR team helping you or by job postings you’ve done. If that’s not working, then it might make sense to pull a recruiter into the process. What a recruiter will bring is ideally two things. 1) is their own network of people that hopefully overlap with what you need; and 2) the ability to go out to market the way that we’ve described so far, where they can do a more precise search than perhaps your internal team has the bandwidth to do. 

J-M: And if you’re already sifting through a pile of resumes, like a ton of people who’ve applied either internally or since you posted on Indeed, or whatever, where does this augment or does this just add more noise to the chaos you’re dealing with? 

Jason: So most of the time when I’m pulled in, or when someone reaches out to me it’s after they’ve posted on Indeed or LinkedIn and they’re getting buried with resumes of people who do not fit what they’re looking for, and they don’t want to sift through that anymore. So usually it will be: stop doing that and start working with a recruiter. Because the idea behind working with a quality recruiter is you won’t get a ton of quantity; you will get laser-like precision. I don’t want to send 20 candidates for a job. I want to send four and have three of them be awesome.

J-M: But theoretically that means you’ve done a poor job of posting on Indeed, like you haven’t been more specific about the needs or you haven’t put gates. 

Jason: I don’t know about that because anybody could read something and say, “well, I don’t think maybe I don’t have these qualities, but I’m going to apply anyway.” I hear that all the time people like, “I just applied ’cause you never know.” Well, you wasted your time. You’re wasting their time, so as a hiring manager, I stopped doing job boards like Indeed 10 years ago because it just didn’t do anything. It was just a time suck. 

J-M: So then theoretically you need more time, but most companies have HR teams. You have an internal hiring group that can sift through these candidates for you and do some of the stuff. Where do you augment or replace some of the things that the HR group does? 

Jason: So usually it’s augment. Usually I work hand in hand with the HR team, and as I said earlier, the HR team might have 80 or 100 different roles they’re trying to fill inside of an organization so they don’t have the time to really get deep into one. So typically I will work alongside HR and I’ll take the most complex, hardest roles, and I’ll take those and they’ll take the ones that are perhaps more quick hits, right?

Roland: Yeah, that makes sense as a partnership. Yeah, that makes sense, but let’s 

take a step back, so obviously you run your own firm. Right, what services? If I’m the firm, you know who needs to find people? And I say, “hey, I know that Jason guy and he has his own recruiting firm.” What kind of services could I expect from a typical recruiter? 

Jason: At the end of the day, the service that is ultimately given is I’m going to introduce you to people that are, that hopefully are people you will want to hire. That’s really like if I boil it all down right now, that’s the deliverable. The deliverable is introductions and backgrounds of really quality people. 

How I get there is unique, I think, and I don’t talk a lot about it because I don’t want other people to replicate it. But yeah, I have my own methods of how I find people and how I gauge with people and how I do things so that I can hopefully separate myself from other recruiters out there and get a faster response rate for a lower number of outreach. 

Roland: Well, I’m pretty sure every listener to this episode will just pick up the phone and call you after this. 

Jason: Well, I hope so. 

J-M: Except for the fact that it does cost right. And not not to give specific numbers, but just a general idea. If you’re looking to engage someone like you and then your firm to bring somebody in and you’re going to have to pay, what are people looking at in terms of outlay for getting a roll through you versus getting a roll from their internal team, which is just salaries already covered? 

Jason: Of course, so, and just to just to quantify here or to separate a bit the numbers, I’m going to give are only what the company would pay. If you’re looking for a job as a candidate, you should never, ever pay anything, and I know there are some unscrupulous companies out there that try and charge candidates for different services that should never ever ever happen. So I just needed to say that that happened to me when I was much, much younger and I got taken advantage of. 

Roland: So I was like to tell people that I’ve never seen that. 

Jason: Yeah, there’s audacious things happening out there, so anyway, from a company standpoint, there are really two types of recruiting services that are out there. There’s contingent search and retain search. 

Contingent, as the name implies, is the company doesn’t pay unless a hire gets made; the payment is contingent on a placement getting made. Retain search means that as the name implies, an amount of money is paid to the recruiter up front for maybe an executive level search and they get half the money in the beginning and perhaps the other half at the end. Or maybe there are other gates along the way.

For the purposes of this conversation, I’m going to stick to contingent ’cause that’s most of what I do, and I think most of the audience that’s probably where they would fit in terms of hiring means they might have. Generally, the range I would give is between 20 and 30% of the person of the candidate’s first year base salary. That’s the amount that would be paid to the recruiter from a fee standpoint. 

J-M: OK, and again, that doesn’t sound so bad.

Jason: And no, and that doesn’t get paid unless a hire actually gets made. So there’s a lot of work that goes in that I’m putting out there before payment comes in. And so yeah, it’s an interesting business, but it works out well.

Roland: But I think it’s also money well spent when I think about the scenario that you mentioned before, where the HR department is sifting through the resumes and can’t find somebody, but you still have the need for your star player, you know. And then the question is, what is the risk of making the wrong hire? Or Jason finds the superstar not just the stock ended, but the superstar, so I think it’s money well spent. It might not be. Your mileage might vary. It might not be your first step, but once you have a certain experience in your search and you see you come too toa stop, that might be the reason. When you start picking up the phone. 

J-M: Or if you’re taking a long time you talked about before, like, what does it cost to just have this open position just hanging out there for weeks, months while their business is trying to continue? And no ones in that role. So with you, what do you expect in terms of a turn around for finding a candidate? How long should they expect as a company engaging your services? 

Jason: It’s going to depend, but I would say as a general rule, if it takes longer than 4 to 8 weeks from the time I start working with a client before we’re at a point where we have offers out there, I’m kind of. I’m scratching my head saying OK, what are we doing wrong? You know, usually a month or two is the range that makes sense for non-executive level roles. 

J-M: Executive roles, I’m assuming there’s a like a more in depth vetting process, and there’s a lot that goes into that, but that’s a pretty quick four to six, and 4 to 8 weeks is a pretty reasonable amount of time. 

Roland: Yeah, now you pick my curiosity. How long does it take to hire an executive, and how do you define executive in this context? 

Jason: So in this context, I would say maybe a C-level person, right? So if you’re looking for a chief sales officer or a chief revenue officer, or someone at that level, you’re going to probably put them through a more lengthy process. And want a more diverse, very, very wide slate of candidates. So just by nature of the type of search, it’s going to take a little bit longer. OK, maybe a few months longer. 

Roland: Yeah, that makes sense. So when I think about it now that we’ve spoken about what it costs, how long it takes? Obviously, as the firm I want to streamline that process. So what would you expect me to prepare that your job is doable and it’s successful? In those time frames that you mentioned. 

Jason: So the best advice I can give someone if you’re going to work with a recruiter, is think of that recruiter as your partner in the search. So simply saying, here’s a job description, and here’s what I want to pay, and good luck. That’s not a recipe for success, so the clients that I work with most productively, we talk about what they want and why they want it. We talk about candidates that they love. We talk about candidates they don’t love. It’s an investment of time on both sides. But the the more that you can share with your partner. Around what good looks like and what bad looks like the better. 

J-M: That makes sense. That makes sense. Well, we’re going to give you a chance to pitch your services in our conclusion section, but for now, we wanted to leave people with some thoughts on this and take a quick break. 

So think about your organization, your team, even if your hiring manager, or just if you’re part of a group. What are some open positions? What’s outstanding to fill, and what kind of candidates have you been looking for or have? Or are you looking for right now to fill these? Are you looking internally, or are you looking? Externally, and perhaps not finding the right folks to fit those roles you have, and if not, have you thought about working with anyone? Just like Jason? We’ll leave you for a moment to think about these questions and we’ll come back with our conclusions and a little bit more about how you can get in touch with him and maybe fill some of those open roles in your org.

Airplane Seatbelt (Interlude 3)

Roland: And welcome back, hey Jason, this was an awesome interview, so thank you for being on our show for obvious reasons. Now that everybody is all excited about working with you, how can an interested person being at a candidate or a firm reach out to you? And do you actually want this? Do you want people picking up the phone and call you and say I need a new job? 

Jason: Well, maybe not a phone as a starting point, but the best place to find me is on LinkedIn. As you can imagine, so you could just look up my name Jason Jovanis. There aren’t that many Jovanises out there, so you should find me right away. Connect with me. Follow me. That’s a great way to kind of start a relationship. I also have a website which is jovanisgroup.com. Again, it’s jovanisgroup.com. There’s a way to fill out a form there and have me reach out if there’s something important where there’s a hot search that you want to begin right away. So happy to connect that way. 

Roland: Yeah, and we’re going to put all those links obviously in the show notes. 

Jason: Perfect.

J-M: And speaking about the show notes. Giving away the goose my friend everything is available on whatsyourbaseline.com, and we talk about this at the end of every episode. But we’ve had some great people reaching out to us over the past few months, and thank you so much to everyone for listening in and for giving us that two-way communication we love so dearly. Keep doing so. Go to whatsyourbaseline.com. Go to Anchor, leave us a voice memo. Go to your pod catcher of choice. 

Leave us a review or just connect with Roland I on LinkedIn. And make sure you follow the What’s Your Baseline page on LinkedIn as well. Great ways to be noticed by recruiters just like Jason. 

But seriously, this podcast would not be available without the love and support of all of our listeners. So thank you always, as always. Now, of course, you can find the full transcript and show notes at whatsyourbaseline.com/episode18? That’s going to be a great way to get all that great information as well as lots of links from today’s conversation. So again, thank you so much to Jason.
And as always, I’ve been J-M Erlendson.

Jason: I’m Jason Jovanis. 

Roland: I’m Roland Woldt.

J-M: And we’ll see you in the next one.