the secret sauce for hiring and job seekers w/ david cabal

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals. We don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at tdssent, d-e-s-s-e-y-n. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. David, give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? And then we'll just go from there. That's awesome. So yeah, I'm the lead dancer at X-Men's. This is a rock show. It's a different area of software engineering, but growing rapidly.

No, I'm currently the EM for the team, engineering manager. I started there as a full stack dev. And we are currently building NFTs. So we're a crypto wallet company. Are you really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They go. They go. We should not only have prepped better, but also be on the same couch wearing matching shirts. We should. I would have totally lived with him next time. If you would have gotten it to me. Oh, I will bring you. I would bring you all the swag. It's not like I have tons and I'm always like showing it off or something. Sure. Sure. Yeah. So we're a crypto wallet company and we're, my team is currently building out the NFT experience at Exodus.

And if you don't know what that is, that's probably a whole nother conversation. That's awesome. Yeah. So David, so I've admired David for a very long time, just his energy and his presence in the market. David was a part of a really, really great engineering team where I kind of got to know everybody and we're going to talk a lot about today. A lot of those principles, a lot of those things he learned and that he's carried with his career. And so David, I want to first dive into kind of really around hiring, around culture, right? So what's the hiring the first right? Everyone's hiring right now.

There are companies over hiring. There are companies not being strategic. What are your just your general thoughts right now just to kick it off and then we'll dive in based off what you say. What are some general kind of do's and don'ts of hiring right now and maybe some things that y'all are doing well? Yeah, no, great question. And you're right, everyone's hiring is extremely tough to hire and I'm in charge of that from my team as well. So I feel that pain of trying to get good people. Number one, I always say try to set it up so that you have to hire as little as possible.

Treat your people well, pay them a lot. And like if you get into a position where they're getting hit up on LinkedIn, I mean, we'll get hit up on LinkedIn all the time, right? Yeah, I mean, I mean, make it to where the recruiter's hitting you saying like, hey, I got a position at X price and your people are like, okay, that's not close to what I make, I don't even care. If you're underpaying or even just middle of the ground, like you're, there's sharks circling your team constantly trying to snipe on the start. So when it comes to actually hiring, the, you know, I think the process has to be geared not just for the company to vet well, but for the person going through it.

I mean, you miss out on good people if you have a garbage hiring process. If it's not organized, if there's not almost daily communication, I mean, it might be four days before the next stage is freed up maybe. I mean, ideally it goes very fast, But even if it is, be talking to that client, or the person that come on board all the time. Let them know where they're at in the process. Pay them if you're going to do a code challenge. We do code challenges at Exodus, but we pay every single one. We value their time and we pay up front. Now, it's not like you can go to the website and be like, I'm applying and downloading.

Thanks for my money. You have to get past like an initial phone call. Yes, because you've got to get a ways into it before we get to that stage. But when we get there and we think, hey, we really like this guy. towards the end, let's really make sure they got the chops. We have a code challenge we put together. We pay upfront in Bitcoin because that's how we roll. You really? Oh, yeah, we I only get paid in Bitcoin, the whole company. Like there's no other option. And so, yeah, we love it. But you got it. Obviously you got to be into crypto and like that stuff if you're going to come work.

Sure. Yeah. But we pay upfront. And yes, that just asked the question you're probably typing out before I answered it. And so, yeah, and we've had some people. It's honestly, you'd think like, oh, you're gonna get scammed really bad. We can't do that. It hardly ever happens where we get that far in the process and we pay somebody and then they ghost us. Very, very rare, at least in my experience there. So yeah, yeah. Pay them for their time. And then when it comes to actually from the hiring manager side of trying to, you know, the how to hire good people thing, I approach it maybe differently than a lot.

I put a huge amount of emphasis on soft skills. If we get to that stage, I've seen their code challenge. I've seen all this other stuff. When we're actually to that final, like you're talking to me face to face and we're trying to figure out if this is a go. I want to know if you're going to mesh well with the team. You can be the most 10x rock star Ninja buzzword developer on the planet, but if you've got too much pride, you're going to hurt us. I would all day long take a decent dev who's humble than an amazing one in a million dev who thinks he's amazing.

So I probably shouldn't say this live because anybody interviewing for my team will have a leg up. Actually, I applaud them for doing the research. So. If they watched this like great. If they watched this and prepped forward, good on you. I actually look in the code challenge. I look for things to praise, but I specifically look for things that I can call out that they needed to improve 100% only to gauge their reaction of how they take criticism. I don't really care that much how they answer my, I mean, if they gave me some ridiculous thing about it, you don't know what you're doing.

But it's 99% to see, like, how do you take critique? Because that's gonna be happening on a team. It happens in every pull request. It happens in, you know, check-ins of how you're doing at the company. And if you can't be humble enough to accept critique, then it's just not gonna go well. And that's something as an uneducated recruiter. That is something that is fascinating to me. And it's gotta be hard. It's gotta be so difficult because like, you know, in my marriage, right? Like I get defensive when my wife says something that I didn't do long, maybe. And it could be small, but then like, you gotta be like open as a software developer to be like, wait a minute, like, I have to sit, not sit, cause we're not like, we're all virtual, but like I have to be in a meeting and someone's gotta pick apart what I've done.

Yeah. And be vulnerable to a bunch of people that may be smarter than me. Right. And it's tough because you don't want to, you go into it with the idea of like, I've got to prove to them that I'm smart and I'm good enough. And, you know, the Gilbert great, like all the other things. And so it's kind of counterintuitive to think, if I get corrected, I got to own that. And honestly, sometimes if they don't, if I can't really tell well enough how they handle it, I'll even just ask a question later on, like, hey, tell me, you know, what was the last time you really screwed up on your project?

And like, how did that work out? And just put them on the spot and see how people answer that. And so far, we've had really good success on my team of getting people that work really well together. They come in, if they're humble, man, we jive as a group, and then we can build some really cool stuff if we get along well. How fast do y'all interview, right? Because I think that's one thing, I've talked to Ryan Burgess, who's an engineer major at Netflix, and I was like, listen, how long does it take for y'all interview? And he goes, well, I mean, we like 30 days.

I was like, man, like, all right. And but again, I mean, he's in another world. I understand that like fan is kind of its own or mag now or whatever you want to call it. Yeah. Is it since own another world? But like how fast do y'all move through the process? Like can you give some tips to hiring managers sitting here and saying, man, we can't, we can't speed up our process. Like what does y'all look like? Yeah, so it's in a perfect world, everything's going well. It can still end up taking a couple of weeks, but that's- Really? But a lot of that is that's including the take home code test and that also depends a lot on the interviewee when they choose to interview with me.

So if they pass the code test and I check it off, they'll get my Calendly and it'll just be like, hey pick a time and they might pick five days. Hold on, hold on. A higher measure uses Calendly? Shit's wild. We're crazy. What about Calendly? Like you have to leave. It's easy. Well, it's something, I mean, like, it's so 2021 to be like, are you free Thursday at four? No, I'm not. And in the half the time, I'm interviewing a dude in, you know, South Africa or something. I mean, I'm literally one of two Americans on my team. Every, I've ate away. Oh, we're, Xs is very distributed.

And so, wow, you have to use Cal and Lake. Cause it's like, hey, we only have two hours of the day that like we're actually both normally awake. So let's choose one of those two. Yeah, listen. If anybody's got a connection to Cal and I would love to rep them because like I am, like there's a few products that I'm super passionate about and Calendly has like transformed the way I do business. Like we book this live show through Calendly. Oh, it's great. It's actually great. But anyway, for our process, we try to move quickly whenever it's on us. So the recruiters try to hammer them through pretty quickly.

Once I get the code challenge, I prioritize in my schedule, like the next 48 hours, ideally 24 hours, I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna really spend time looking through this and deciding if they're gonna move. And then I want to very quickly put it back on the person interviewing to choose the Calendly link to set the next step. Because I've been there, man, we've all been there. I hate you go to, you're waiting, you don't have good communication and then a whole week is faster. And you're like, if they pass me up, am I number one on the list? I have no idea, that's terrible.

So let's give us a soft skills type of thing, side of things. And again, I mean, I think we talked about it for a moment live, talk about how the soft skill side of things and why hiring manager should be focused on the soft skill side of things and how it relates to the SDLC because you brought up some like really good thoughts and I didn't even think about that. So can you kind of talk about some tech stuff and how it kind of all, I don't know. Absolutely. Yeah. So the, you know, when it comes to the soft skills, the, anyone can be taught a new coding technique or a better way to do something, right?

Not a lot of people can be taught to be humble if they don't want to be. And so you get someone in that's not and it's kind of a losing battle, but you get people in that are humble and can work well together as a team, then you really can't go build anything. And if there's gaps missing in this, ideally you want someone who's really good and humble, right? But like my team, I've spent a ton of time on the culture side of it. And I know there's probably people that think it's because I just want to goof off or we're just wanting to have fun.

And part of that is, yes, we want to have a ton of fun, but that builds trust. It builds a connection. We have game nights on my team. Like even through it. Oh yeah, there's a few of them are like non-gamers. And so I got Xs to buy us all like the same game so we can all play together. You're kidding. And oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll be like, hey Friday, at X time, there's this two hour block that the guy in Poland and Uruguay and me and everyone were all online at the same time and we're gonna hop in and play something. That's amazing.

And then we'll post, we're very async because we're so distributed. And so we'll post screenshots of it up and Slack channels to recap. Cause I wanna spread that to other teams and show them like, yes, we're not playing video games all day. You're goofing off where we deliver extremely well, but part of that is cause we have this trust, this bond with each other. And when I come in and say, hey, man, your pull request needs some more work. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it sucks. It's like, yeah, he knows where I stand. And it's not just like, we're all business, we show up to do our jobs.

And when I, you know, down your pull request, you're mad. You know? So, well, so let's, let me, I knew this would happen. I'm so glad David and I do not have a heart of a 10. And I knew we're gonna go long. Get ready. Yeah, so pivot real quick, talk about the importance. So I've been fascinated with this lately, especially with mental health. You know, I made a post yesterday, you know, a few people saw it say the least. I'm back in counseling, you know, I really have felt the weight of 2021 on me. Yeah. From leading teams from marriage, you know, as we can attest to just as husbands and, and I think, I think they're, I'm on to something or I think I'm on to something where I think you cannot work as much, but actually produce more.

100%. And I feel like as leaders within an organization like me and you, I feel like sometimes as leaders like if like the board, like board games or whatever, or just gaming or just things like that, like, like if you take out an hour, if you take out an hour or two, a week to do that, that's not ROI generating. But I would argue that you're going to propel your team to probably newer heights than if you didn't do it. Yep. Yeah. I totally agree. And that, you know, earlier you mentioned the SDLC and I think it all It all ties and I'll pull back to that.

The delivering well, delivering on time, a lot of times feels like that means overworking and the stars have to align. And if everything really goes perfect, it's pretty rare, but we actually hit our delivery day. Wow, this is magical everybody. And it doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be. Like you said, number one, the culture fit has got to be there. The team bond is a crucial piece of that. It's not a nice to have. It's not like if they all get along, that's great. But otherwise, we'll just build stuff. Doesn't work that way. Secondly, if we can kind of pivot into that a little more into the SDLC question you had, man, I really feel like delivering on time and delivering well is simple but not easy, if that makes sense.

It's a simple formula, but it's not easy. And I don't see it done a lot of places. It boils down to staying laser focused on the delivery date. And that's a buzz phrase. Like what does that actually mean in practice? Where some practice ways do that? We just delivered an FT's this last quarter and it was a big lift and there was a lot of talk of whether or not we could pull it off in time and we were actually early, like ahead of budget early. Like nobody overworked and I had people come up and be like, hey, how did y'all do that? Like what kind of magical formula you have?

And I was like, it's really pretty simple. You don't work on anything except the initially line feature set and you don't fix non-critical bugs. And that seems kind of counterintuitive. Yeah, like as a recruiter, I'm like, yeah, yeah, that makes, I can do that. But it's hard to do in practice. You're working as a dev and you're in there, you're in the code and you discover a bug and you go, oh, when I have this kind of weird scenario happen, then something bad happens. If it's not critical and it's pretty rare, we would put that into the backlog. And when we actually do plan to work on it's like it disappears forever.

But in most teams, you say that, but in practice, you go, why know how to fix this? It's actually a pretty quick fix. I'm going to jump in and just knock it out in a few hours. Well, then that's a poor request. Well, then we're distributed. And so the guy who's going to review your poor request isn't even online yet because it's midnight where he lives. And he gets on reviews it. And he has a tweak and you fix it the next day. Suddenly, it's a two or three day thing. And this happens every week. And the same thing goes with features. You're building a page out for some new app.

And then you go, hey, it'd be really cool if we had X feature. And this doesn't make it even better. You go, yeah, we should do that. And you go do it. All these things are good. All these things are making the product better. And you get to the end of the cycle and you go, why aren't we? We're still weeks away from delivery. Why? And everyone's looking around like, I don't know. We've been working really hard this whole time. And everything we've done has been with the right intentions. We kept a laser focus the whole cycle on just hitting that delivery date. And there's a phrase I like of being comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Like, we're not going to launch it perfectly. the first time. And that's okay. We're going to iterate, but it's going to be, it's going to be good enough. It's going to hit the vast majority, if not all of the original outlined product feature set. And we'll iterate. And if there's that bug that happens that you can reproduce pretty easily. Okay, we'll go fix that afterwards. But if it's not critical, we're not worried about it right now, we're just, we're hitting the deadline. Well, and I think that's so good. I think for me, I think, you know, leading teams, I'm sure you can attest us to people are wildly inefficient.

Oh, yeah. Like literally, I had to call the other day. And it wasn't with my direct team. It was with another team that I overview over the site, whatever. Words are hard. But basically, I was just like, yeah, so basically, like we found out like this person was basically doing like half the amount of workload. I got that like, this should have been doing. And it's like, you know, what, and again, I had to do this with my direct team when I was recruiting manager of VACO, it's like I sat down with every person like, what do you do it from eight to nine? What do you do from nine to 10.

And again, that's not micro managing, but I think as leaders, we need to help our people actually see how widely inefficient they are. And so they can actually be with laser focus and deliver more and what was crazy. We did that exercise. And then I did step out of recruiting major this year, but because of the work we did, we had three people qualify for our sales rewards trip that have never qualified before. That's awesome. So it's like, again, being laser focused and then not worrying about the extracurriculars until morning or after hours, I think is where it's at. Absolutely. And like you said, right there, a lot of it does boil down to the leadership in place.

The team lead, the higher engineering manager, tech lead, whatever you wanna call them, or maybe it's three different roles. But it starts there. They've got to try, like, one of my biggest focuses is to remove as many obstacles as possible for my team to work. Like we have extremely minimal meetings. Like we have like one half hour meeting a week is the only recurring meeting we have. It's a Monday meeting where half of it, we talk about what video games we played over the weekend. Like it's, we're very async. We stay very organized so that we don't have to have 10 hours of calls every week, rehashing stuff.

And I want to let them just run as much as possible. Yeah, that's so good. I do want to get to some comments. Yeah, absolutely. Comments since then. So going back here, you know, do you pay in Bitcoin? Yes, excess does pay in Bitcoin. Darryl, cultural fit is often so over missed. I mean, this is one of the reasons why I have this show is when I was a hands-on recruiter day to day, I was talking to all these like, talking to these hiring managers and developers and it's just like, yeah, we need this. But no one was talking about the culture aspect. No one was talking about the culture aspect.

And I was like, well, I'm gonna start going live and talking about this, because this needs to be talked about more. And it's so funny, the good hiring managers, the ones I respect either in the community like yourself David or others across country like Ryan Burgess is Everybody says soft skills Everybody like the higher it's not a coincidence. I mean, I mean like Alicia. That's interesting Alicia who was who was late because his fridge and internet without this morning, right? Like Alicia's another one. He focuses he cares more about the person that's interviewing instead of the skills now listen I've heard him say a lot skills have to hurt him say a lot and and then Seth going in here says for people who don't want to pay Cal and there you go and Cal and he does have a free tier they do but it's very little transparency agreed and some of somebody made a good joke John said did the fridge go out together was it a date that very good joke John you're very very funny to Alicia to great board games play through teams fake artists in New York and good sit a good critters I'm not to look up I want to work a big board game crew over here so I have to look that up Yeah, I hate board games, but that's just because that's because we played a metanas as a family We won't play them at our pizza party then we'll do other stuff.

We'll do let's just let's just talk That's right. Talk to my wife about just us. We got friends over. Let's just talk We don't got play board game like we just have a conversation Well, then you may not want to know when we invite you over for dinner because we're gonna play some board games You all play board games and I'll just make jokes at you all the whole time That's kind of how it all right Jackbox TV for our team games. I'll check that out Devonta Yes, we are live. If something happened, please let me know. Jack, best way to onboard team members to globally distribute remote team.

Of course, Jack comes up with the grants or Jack hoping to your well buddy. Jack was like one of the OGs on this show, by the way. Oh man. O-G-O-G. I think he's O-G at most things in life. Correct. Yeah, yeah, I don't even know what half the things Jack does, but he's O-G to pretty much everything. So, yeah, I can't answer this question, David. Best way to onboard team members in a globally distributed remote team. Yeah. If I was your average hiring manager, I'd be like, I don't know what do you ask? But I'm Dave Cable, so I say, I don't know why do you ask?

No, I'm just kidding. I want to make you feel awkward. Okay, right. And it was great. I was like, I was like, wait a minute. Was that me? I wanted to leave it hanging as long as possible and just see your face and it was worth it. Yeah, Jack. So the first week in Exodus, when you come to work with me, this is how it will go. is it's a much more synchronous week than we're very async as a company normally because we have to be. The first weekend, we identify people closer to your time zone on the team that can kind of sync up with you.

We have like almost like a buddy system when you first come on board. So there's people that you can get to know very quickly that we assigned before you even arrived. It's like, hey, I've got a new guy on my team start next week. He's an x time zone. I'm going to look at people on my team and say you're pretty close over here. You're gonna set up calls to help them get acclimated and start settling in. We get all the equipment sent to them before they even start. And so we'll even push back the start date a little bit so that they're not just around.

They're still having stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they got their laptop and headphones and everything. We send them. Which by the way, highly underrated part of onboarding, by the way, companies. Like, oh, it's not fun to be onboarding to a company and then like on day four you're sitting around like, well I don't have anything and I don't know what to do. But it's such, I posted this morning on Twitter. I said, I said, your onboarding process is a peek into your organization. What does that say about you? Yeah. Yeah. No, you're exactly right. We're trying to even improve ours as is. I think ours is one of the best I've been through and I still want to keep improving it to get harder.

So we've got to try buddy system, make sure they have their. Yeah, they've got someone synced with them from the very first week that they can just, it's like an immediate kind of friend that they can ping with questions or whatever. I synced with them on my team on their very first day, usually within the first few hours. And so we always have time set aside for that. So we make sure that happens. So I can give them a walkthrough of like how we use Slack and like all this, you know, kind of just generalized stuff. And then we have a really good HR department, I guess is what it would be called, of several different people that really walk them through the process of making sure they're in all the accounts they need to be in.

And all that stuff is just kind of ready to go. And so then by week two, it starts moving more async. They're in less meetings. You know, the first week's a lot of meetings. And first week's just like, how you use this, how you use this, here's how we do this. You wanna request them off? Here's how this works. And then the second week and beyond, they kind of slide into more of the async nature of how we operate. And I'll figure out a few good starter tickets for them to kind of start getting used to the code base. We'll have a car with the team, everybody can meet each other.

Usually, sometimes a pairing session with somebody on the team that they can kind of get used to and all that kind of stuff. So. That's awesome. That's awesome. Love that. Dominic, good morning. I love it from California. Soft skills are like working out calves and bodybuilding. Nobody works on them, but everyone needs them. That's great. I love that so much. That's fantastic. Dominic goes down here, he's not sure if this has been asked, but would you recommend reaching out to, and by the way, if you all have questions, like one of the reasons why I was talking to David about this beforehand, like if you have questions for David, ask, like, and please, I don't think there's any other platform out there where you get a hiring manager live and you can ask questions real time and get feedback.

So we have questions. Absolutely. Please ask, we're gonna pivot into the job seeker here soon and just the interviewer, but Dominic goes, not sure if this has been asked, but what would you recommend reaching out to, but would you recommend reaching out to hiring staff or recruiters to express interest in a position after applying? So I get this a lot, the follow up, the strategy. I'm over here talking like you should slide in a Davis DM and just have a conversation with them. So like what are your thoughts on this? Yeah, I'm all about the overcommunication. I don't think you hurt yourself at all, pinging the recruiter or whoever you have as a contact at the company.

And you may not know like that I'm the hiring manager for the spot you're applying for. You may only have the recruiter contact, but ping them. I mean, find people, I'll get random. Like, I don't know this person. I don't even know why we're connected, but they requested me my friend. And then I might see that later on, they've applied for a position in excess. And even if it wasn't on my team, I'm kind of like, ah, slick, nicely done. So yeah, you don't hurt yourself. I think it's good to establish that desire and let them know like, yeah, stand out a little bit. You know, we might get 20 applicants for a position.

And if two or three of them ping us and say, hey, I'm really excited about this. what can I do to prepare for the next stage? I'm like, let's talk to this guy. I mean, I've had people that I may be just on paper wouldn't have been as excited about and after some of those steps were taken, I was like, hey, we need to get to know this dude. Part of the reason why I have this show is to make sure everything I say on Twitter and the internet is correct and literally did. Exactly what I talk about. So I'm glad I'm not crazy. So let's move into, oh, here we go.

Good question, John. on potential language barriers. I'm actually fascinated about this question. Yeah, it's great. So they have to speak English as part of the one of the wrecks. So we do all speak English. But there's definitely varying levels of it. And it can be hard. Everyone on the team, I mean, it's a barrier. Like you said, it's a potential barrier. But it's something that we think is super important. And for exos, the nature of the company, the fact that we're fully distributed, we don't have a home office. If we limited ourselves, even though the founders are American, if we limited ourselves to only the American marketplace, like, I mean, we miss out on so much talent.

And so it's something we're willing to take on to say, hey, that guy in, I don't know where, in some faraway land that has it. Yeah, he's got a very strong accent and maybe I have to really pay attention closer and he's working on his English as we, but like we're totally cool to do that. Because in the long run we get a global pool of talent to pull from. And that's huge, I mean listen, especially with what y'all are doing, getting paid in Bitcoin, not a lot of people can be down for that. Like, you know, like you kind of have to go global, but also too, I mean, we live, and I'd be fascinated, I need to bring on more HR people of like, what the process looks like of like, why companies can't hire globally more now, especially now, sure, everybody remote.

So I think that'll be on my to-do list. I do have a few HR people, like internal recruiters coming on, so I'm gonna ask them that. John had a good comment there, and you're right, more common phrases and slang does get missed. And I have to be careful of that myself not to be throwing out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Phases are things that are not something that, my new guy that lives in Catman Do or whatever is, what in the world is he meaning right now? And I'm just making a joke, right? So I've got to, I have to kind of be careful with how I joke and describe things to make sure that we're all on the same page.

Yeah, I love that. Seth, thanks for hanging out this morning, buddy. I appreciate it. All right. So let's go into the, let's, as we wrap it up. So let's talk about what you like to look for. And I know we kind of already touched on it, but what are just some tips and tricks that you have for people interviewing right now who, you know, maybe even newer in their career the things that you like to see? Yeah, absolutely. So this will come as no surprise based on what I said earlier with all the soft skills comment, but like, man, number one is be humble. Come in excited for the position, hungry for stuff, but be humble.

You will admit when you're wrong. You will end to say when you don't know the answer to something, but you don't have to just be like, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, you can say that you don't know and you're excited to learn or whatever. what kind of humility it's it's it's not I don't know like I don't know is good right right like it's it's so funny like I'm just gonna be open here like I'm working on trying to like trying to work on my apology game to my wife there you go I've learned that I do not apologize well because what we talked about was hey I'm sorry is good but making that person feel heard and obviously kind of repeating back to what they said y'all didn't realize they're gonna sign up for a therapy session this morning.

But this is strong. Yeah, but also, but when it comes to interviewing too, it's I don't know, but here's what I think I would do. Right, again, it's going that extra step. I think a lot of times people interview and lock up, they're so nervous and they're like, I don't know. Right, and if you're like, hey, I see you did XYZ in your code. Have you ever thought about doing it this way? And if you've never even been exposed to that, it doesn't mean you're not gonna get hired necessarily. And if it does, you probably don't wanna work there. And if they're like, oh, you know what?

Actually, no, I've not done it that way. Can you walk me through that a little bit? I'd love to hear more pros of that method. And you show that you're excited and wanna learn, that's great, that's a plus for me. That's you not knowing an answer, and I've taken that as a positive thing in that interview. So be humble, be nice. I wanna know that you're gonna come in and be somebody I wanna work with. And this is huge man. Have questions prepared for the interviewer for two things. Number one, you're interviewing them as well. Yeah, you need a job, but like, yeah, if you get in there and you start getting a paycheck and you hate life, is that worth it?

I mean, I know we got a pair of bills and sometimes you might have to take a job that's not great for a while, but you need to make sure that you wanna work at this company. And number two, it really helps you stand out. Well, like if I'm interviewing someone and we've got an hour set aside and I run through all my stuff, and it's pretty quick because they're not very talkative and we get to the 30 minute mark I'm kind of done. And then I'm like, hey, man. So what about me? Questions for me personally or Exis is a company, anything on the table.

And then they're like, no, I'm good. Yeah, bro. Sorry, that's not a good look. It's just not a good look. Have a great day. The end. If they come in and they've got like, and I love it, when I'm like, hey, do you have any questions for me? And they're like, actually, yes. And I can tell they're looking at a list. And they prepped and they thought about it. And I'm like, OK, this guy's excited to work here. They've, or girl, they've put time into this. They're prepped. So have a question, Tony, man. I talk about all the time. I think literally you can like, you can be in that I'm terrible at math.

Is it the 80th percentile or 20th percentile? Like, like what's the better one? The 20th percentile, the 20th percentile. Like the top. It depends on the topic. Unwittingness better. You can separate yourself from 80% of the field. If you come with energy and questions and intentionality, literally you could like not like, listen, This is not, this is, this is gonna be Bragg, I understand. I could probably get in the door at any company because of my high energy. Now. Yeah, the personality. Does that mean I'm gonna last? And there you know, but what I'm saying is like, I'm probably gonna separate myself. And this is one of the reason why I do this live show is because like there's not many people who can bring the energy live.

It's tough to do. But like being intentional, having questions, being engaged, man, like we can't talk about it enough. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, it's huge man. And it really does set you apart because it's not common. That you think it would be more common. But it's really not. And you know what's crazy? I had a guy interview. He's one of my rock star recruiters on my remote engineering team. And he, so when he interviewed with me and my boss, he went through our LinkedIn's and created questions on each main stop in our career. That's awesome. Right? be like, hey, I saw you went to South Carolina.

Like what brought you to Nashville? Hey, I seen you been at Vaco for 10 years. Hey, what's unicorn finders? Like he went through kind of this life. Huge. And I was like, man, this guy took the time and it felt good. And you know what, going back to therapy counseling, it made me feel heard because he took the time to look at my stuff. Yeah, yeah. No dude, you're so right that, and you look at a person like that and you think, And they put this much effort and specific energy into preparing well for this. What are they gonna be like as an employee? Let's go, right?

I mean, like that gets you excited to be like, I can't wait to task this person with some thing and watch them go at it. Yeah. So what else? What else we got? Ask questions, be con, be intentional. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I thought you were talking about the comments and you were asking other questions of them. You're asking me. Fantastic. Yeah. Be intentional. Resumes. Resumes. You look at anything. Like what do you like seeing resumes? I spend I spend a solid. I mean at least seven, sometimes 10 seconds looking at a resume. So it's a no, I'm joking. But it's it's keep it short and sweet, man.

In my opinion, I don't want to have five pages to look through. Three is usually what I Max, but I mean, typically your first page has got to have the most beef on it. Yeah. And like you said, even if there's two or three come in, I'm not like mad or turning them away at all. But I want it to be easily digestible quickly. Because if I've got, you got to put yourself in the shoes of the other person. I've got 30 I'm looking at a whole bunch of other things in my normal job that I've got to go do. And I want to do a good job here, but I need to knock it out.

And so if they're extremely wordy and every paragraph is kind of saying what the last one did, every single job, that's not a great experience. And again, I'm not gonna be like, ah, disqualified because of that. Right, right, right. But if I can look at a resume and pretty quickly see, man, quick hits of tech stack that we're using that I like and I like seeing personal stuff. I really do. I know the majority of it needs to be business related, but I love when I get to the end of a resume and it's just like, even if it's just a little blurb of like hobbies and I can see, because that's great for me and I can see like, oh, they have a personality, that's nice.

We're not retiring a robot. Well, like Jason Langstorff, and I he's a VP of Developer Experience at Netlify, like he and I caught up and then like, I went to his website afterwards and I was like, bro, you love corgis? He was like, yeah, I was like, I have a corgi, like we've bonded over corgis, right? So it's like, again, I mean, it's just small things when it comes to that. Dominic asks a really good question that I want David to answer here. Would it be a good idea to message the interview with a correct answer, post interview, if you don't know the answer, I would think so.

Yeah, it can't hurt you. I mean, worst case scenario is you go look it up and you message them and they've already made a decision and so it doesn't affect it. But that's what, I mean, who cares? The decision was already made. But if they're on the fence and they see that you come in, I mean, I would love that personally. Because let's be honest, again, Caribbean, from wrong, but in software engineering, you may not always know it immediately, but you gotta go find it. And let's usually don't know it immediately. Yeah, so let's be honest here. If we're like, we live on Google and stack over.

It was crazy. When I started recruiting, I was told that developers should never Google. Oh, that's funny. Yeah, good luck. And then now I'm like, wow, that was terrible. So yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah, we're going to always be learning and growing and finding out more stuff. And to show that you took it to heart when you didn't know an answer, and you went and checked it out and then came back with something. It shows humility and it shows that you cared enough to keep trying, you know? I would love that. So I'd say go for it. Yeah, Devonta goes, I personally liked personal projects by suspect most hiring majors.

I mean, here's the deal. So he's talking about hobbies, Devonta, not projects. So. Yeah, I'm talking more, and again, it's not like a huge chunk of your resume. It's more like at the very end, it's just a quick little snippet about you as a person. Cause then I can kind of even have, for me, some talking points going into it. I'm like, hey, I saw you love camping or whatever. You know, we can talk about stuff. No, absolutely. Anything else, ma'am? Any wise words of wisdom you want to leave the audience with if you wrap up here? Pass. No, I'm bringing it out. Yeah, this is really great.

I'm losing you. No, it's. We've said it a bunch of times. I don't want to beat the dead horse. But be prepared, ask questions, be nice, show your personality. Come in with some hype. Don't be a robot. Because with the industry, we're all people, and we're going to work together. And I'd like to know that I'm going to enjoy working with you. And it's intense. I know, and it's scary to sit down and interview with someone, especially if you really, really want the job and you're just sweating and nervous. I've been there. But just take a breath of fresh air. It's going to be OK.

And ask them questions, man. If you get through the interview process, you're like, wow, that was garbage. and they were really unorganized and like, it wasn't run well. Don't be stressed out. Like be glad that you're not gonna probably work there because you probably don't want to. Any final advice for companies hiring managers right now during this crazy time of hiring? Oh man, that's good. Again, I know we talked about just kind of summary. Yeah, some of it is outside of the control of the hiring managers. Which is really hard. You gotta pay counter offers this week with other candidates. Really? Yeah, I mean, just.

You gotta pay well. I mean, if you're coming in at the low or even mid band, it's going to be hard. So I was 135 to 200. A company told this person at the end of last year, they didn't have any money. And they got an offer and they threw $65,000 at him. And it's like, well, we didn't have more than this is what we meant. Here's, you know, a lot of pay. I mean, you've got to pay to play. You have to. Yeah. You got to sharpen the pencil. You want my skill, you pay my bill, right? At the end of the day, that's how it works.

And so you got to pay well if you want good, if you want good people. And you got to have a good recruiting team. Vaco. But you do, you got to have people out there getting them. And if you don't have that internally, you need to go find it. You can't just throw one job post up on, you know, indeed. And then wonder why you're not getting any hits on it. It is, it is a lot. And I will tell you this, somebody posted this the other day. I think as Joel Agree, I had him on the show. Here's one of the OGs on the show too.

He said that recruiters are basically developers right now. Like everybody needs recruiting talent because everybody can't find developers, but people need recruiters to find a developer, but there's no recruiters right now available. So it's just kind of this like, everyone's logging right now. It's crazy. Oh, totally. Oh, totally. Yeah, it's so true. Cast a white net. You got to bring as many as you can. And then, you know, but again, some of that's really tough. Like if you can't control the salary and your company pays poorly, good luck. Yeah, I love you're finding an uphill battle, especially if you want people on site three days away You got to hold another conversation there.

Oh gosh And that's the thing is you can work with your other people the decision-makers your company doesn't have to be pure money If I come in mid-level on money, but you say hey, we do a four-day work week here or we provide You see my post the other day. Yes, I said now the four-day trend because you can do that and and you can structure your organization to still be extremely successful with less hours and And, but do the other perks, like sending them free stuff, let them work remotely. Nobody cares about Ping Pong table. I don't think I'm out of here. I don't think I'm out of beer tap in the fridge.

I don't care about all that. Our Cincinnati office nonsense stuff. I'm helping our Cincinnati office with content. Shout out to the Cincinnati office if any are watching. They have cold brew on tap. Now, now. I like going into the office when there's cold brew. I don't have to stop on the way. So I guess that's a thing. Some people do like going in an office. I'm not. I'm a lot of the most. I'm not the office. And I always stay. If you have an office and people do come in for whatever reason, make it really nice. Like give them a lot of free stuff. But on top of that, give them like give them their computer.

Like what are we talking about? A couple of thousand dollars. Like this is not some crazy expense really compared to like, oh, we can't pay 40 grand more for the salary, but we can give them to their PC. Send them AirPods. Send them a new office chair, let them design their home office well. Like all that stuff, even though it's not, you know, the biggest line item on the sheet, it really makes a difference on developer happiness and having that kind of stuff. But yeah, man, if you can't pay more, give them more time off, give them more vacation, four day work week perks, like that kind of stuff.

Not like the silly, like, oh, we have a ping pong table. And we, you know, I don't care. All right, y'all well, that's it David. Thanks again, man. Stay online real quick. Thank you y'all Thank you again for hanging out this morning. I'm guys comes 2.0. Listen Monday kind of crazy. I have a tick tocker Coming on I messaged her on I messaged her on Twitter because she has a crap ton of followers on TikTok And she's a software developer and she's freaking hilarious. Her name is is Nimay Nadalo, she's from Nigeria, she's in the US, and she's freaking hilarious. She does a lot of short skits on like the software engineering side of things.

Highly recommend following her on TikTok if you're on TikTok. Well, she's gonna come on the show on Monday. So we're gonna talk about content, DevRel, that whole thing, so y'all won't wanna miss that. So again, y'all have a great weekend, and we'll see you on Monday, peace. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode, And I am very grateful because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes. And I myself rarely finish an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others.

And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please, like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, tailor at vaco.com or at TDESN on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.