In this episode, Barry Klein, VP of Success and Enablement at Talroo shares some key insights about selling in the online recruitment space.  Topics include selling when your brand isn't well known, targeting the right customers, hiring the right people for your team, and measuring performance.

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This is the transcript for this episode:

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Mark Shriner  [0:00]  

Welcome to the grow fast podcast where we talk with leading sales, marketing and personal growth experts about how companies can accelerate sales, optimize marketing and grow their businesses fast. Let's go. Hey, Barry, how are you?

Barry Klein  [0:13]  

Good afternoon? Such a pleasure to be with you. 

Mark Shriner  [0:19]  

Likewise. Hey, I enjoy the autumn foliage behind you, there.

Barry Klein  [0:24]  

I am in the Sunnyvale conference room in our offices and each name. We're in Austin, Texas, but a number of the rooms are named for high tech cities. Oh, so this, apparently, is a landscape from Sunnyvale. 

Mark Shriner  [0:38]  

It's funny, because when I first connected on this call. I thought that you were because you were kind of walking to your table, and I thought you were just parking your car because it looks realistic, kind of, pretty cool. Hey, I'm you know, you have a tremendous amount of experience, 30 years plus, in customer facing, sales related roles. You've worked with both enterprise and startup organizations, and you get a great amount of experience, and I want to talk to you about some strategic things related to churn, some leadership issues and hiring in terms of, the context of building out a sales team. But before we do that, maybe we can take a couple seconds to tell us a little bit about your role right now at Talroo and what Talroo does, so we can kind of have, you know, understand the context of this conversation.

Barry Klein  [1:24]  

Sure. Thank you. Mark! I am Talroo’s Vice President of Success. In that role, I look after several cadres of customers. Talroo is a talent matching platform for job advertising and for hiring events, we specialize, particularly with the hiring of frontline workers. And I always laugh, you know, the folks who had to go to work during the pandemic, right? The rest of us didn’t. We're particularly adept at that, but even while able to help employers with a whole range of hiring needs, our goal is to, knowing that the world is dominated by some well known job site brands, which we are not. Our goal is to help our customers uncover talent that they might otherwise miss, because job seekers will use multiple job boards, multiple mailing lists, multiple sources. And so our goal is to try to get our employers jobs in the right place, at the right time, at the right price, so that they uncover talent that they might otherwise have missed. And my group looks after our old. I shouldn't call them old. Our original relationships with other job boards, each working with the other. We have relationships with a number of outstanding recruitment marketing agencies who represent the biggest brands in the world, and as well as we have a team selling directly to employers to offer our services directly to them, with no middleman, as we have with an agency. So yeah, I've been here for, going on eight years now, and worn a number of different hats. I've helped look after our marketplace, and for me, it's very gratifying, because I've gotten a 360 degree view of all of our customers and all of the issues that we might face. 

Mark Shriner  [3:09]  

You know, thank you for that. Thanks for sharing that. And you alluded to the fact that maybe you know your brand isn't as strong as some of the big players in that space, which does pose a challenge for any organization. I don't care what you're selling, right? You know, that brand, that IBM, nobody ever gets fired for, you know, for buying IBM, that whole kind of mentality there. So how do you and your sales people overcome that in the marketplace?

Barry Klein  [3:34]  

Yeah, it's a very big issue for us. Certainly, our marketing department is adept at providing air cover. We've got an extremely good mark at identifying our prospects and then targeting them appropriately, speaking with advertisements and information and press releases and such, in order to get multiple views to have a would be buyer or would be influencer, decision maker, you know, sort of run into us in their day to day. Will they see an ad on LinkedIn? Will they get an email newsletter? Will they have some communication from this company? Tell roo that they've never heard of and after they've seen us 20 times, you know, it might start to resonate. So our marketing team has done a remarkable job. And what we've that we're not doing is the scatter shot. Let's try to target everybody, even like in an ABM campaign. What we're identifying are the specific individuals, the specific roles, and trying to target the marketing to that, the related to that. Though, if you are a frontline salesperson for Talroo, or a member of my team trying to motivate a new representative at one of our agency partners to send a business our way. You're always overcoming, you know, the lack of brand name. I have a colleague who is in our sale, on our sales team, who's actually. With us, and just came back, which was great, glad to have him back. And he and I were reminiscing, especially about the good old days of six, seven years ago. And I thought he said it really, really well, Mark, which was, granted, you know, you're in a sales role, you have a quota, but when I'm calling people who I know haven't even heard of us yet, I have to be in a marketing mindset. I can't be in a selling mindset. I haven't earned the right to ask them for business yet. So, of course, I want to ask questions. I want to understand their pain points and then hopefully connect the dots for them. But more than anything, I just need some recognition from them to have the next conversation. Because if I go in too strong and, you know, no one wants a call from anyone they've, I've never heard of you, right? Again, credibility. You have no there's no trust. There's no rapport there. And I thought that mentality was well expressed, and it's not to reduce expectations or to lower the bar for a salesperson, but rather it's to be realistic. You know that you're selling something that this individual hasn't heard of. So can you? Can you be a servant oriented person, understanding what they need and trying to connect the dots to at least lay the groundwork for a future conversation?

Mark Shriner  [6:10]  

So I want to drill down on that. It's interesting, but I want to go back to the targeting aspect too, because I think that's really smart. I always say it's, you know, the foundational part of sales is product knowledge and product belief, because if you don't know your product, you don't believe in it, good luck trying to sell it. If you're not passionate about it, good luck trying to sell it. But then I got this great product, and I love it. Now, who do I sell it to? Do I sell it to everybody? Or do I pick some very smart targets, and I look at targets as organizations and individuals. Okay, so who do you know, what are the target organizations, and who are the target people that we want to reach out to? And it sounds like your organization is doing a really good job of identifying those targets and then engaging with them. And you said up to 20 different ways, which is really super smart. Let's go to the credibility thing, though, because I read the way of the wolf by Jordan Belfort, the, you know, The Wolf of Wall Street. And part of his straight line sales method was, you know, he said, when you first call them, they don't know who you are, and they don't know you know what you want and who your organization is. And he actually just said exactly what you said is, immediately you have to kind of develop some credibility with them both in terms of your organization. Here's what we do, here's how we do it, here's who we work with. And then you as an individual, like, why am I talking to you? You've got to demonstrate your expertise. I want some value from you. So let me kick it back to you. How does your team develop that credibility for your organization and for the individuals?

Barry Klein  [7:42]  

It's a great point. It's something I'm particularly passionate about because of one of my roles prior to Talroo, and even here at Talroo, where we're a small company, so we wear lots of hats. I'm in pre-sales situations as much as I'm in post sales, you know, being brought in to meet my counterparts, to talk technology, to connect the dots if we're doing an enterprise class sale. And in my former life as VP of sales engineering for a company called vignette that was also here in Austin, the whole topic of the credibility of I won't call it my sales team, but I will the credibility of my sales team was paramount for me, sure, because one of the challenges I had, we had a tremendously talented team of sales engineers, and 20 years later, to this day, I still get notes saying that was the best group I ever worked with. You know, we were good, but when you're a sales engineer, you really want the account executive you're partnered with to also shine. You want them to be good. You want them to be the orchestra director, you know, they're, they're in charge. They're the quarterback. But that requires some product knowledge, confidence, and one of the things that we would have to overcome there was that it was stereotypical, you know, Hi, I'm, I'm the salesperson. You know, we have a nice presentation set up, and here's my sales engineer to take you through the next 55 minutes, and I'm going to say hello and I'm going to say goodbye, and these times.

Mark Shriner  [9:06]  

Hey, lucky on the back!

Barry Klein  [9:09]  

Getting those folks trained and treating them with the respect they deserve to say, hey, wait a minute. You know, I'm guessing you don't know what you need to know, right in order to carry that credibility. And at Talroo you know these days, especially, we're not in front of people, certainly not often and truly in person. But when you do finally have the opportunity to be on a call, face to face, even over zoom, you have just a few seconds, a few minutes, to establish that credibility. And we are doing quite a bit, and have always done quite a bit. I've been sort of on point for a lot of it, to train our salespeople so that they can talk, the talk. Because our, to your point, the individuals we're speaking to, by and large, are directors of talent acquisition and other folks who live and breathe talent acquisition. You. If you don't speak their language, they're going to uncover you as a fraud pretty quickly, especially at the enterprise in a small company where the owner maybe is wearing lots of hats, and maybe they're not as expert. But when you get someone at a fortune 500 company, or even a fortune 2000 company, who's a VP or a Director of Talent Acquisition, they know the industry, they know the technology. They know their tech stack. And one of the first things they may ask is, oh, that sounds great. You can help me find candidates. Where are you going to fit in my tech stack? And we have a very specific answer to that, because it's very friendly, but you can get bamboozled incredibly quickly. One of the things that I try to emphasize to our salespeople when I meet them, when we hire new folks, is that what we do at Talroo is actually kind of simple, in that we are a competitor to, indeed, zip recruiter. People know what they do, yeah. And that's, I would tell my mother, what do you do for a living? I sell job ads, Mom, that's, that's, well, how is interesting, and that is where we can get in trouble. Because for us, it's all about the how, because the ability for our solution to uncover those right candidates, deliver them to the employer, get them to prove that they're qualified. Then, of course, the employer takes it from there. They're going to interview them, they're going to hire them. We approach it very differently, because we're not a destination website, we're not a branded.com we're sort of plumbing that's connecting job seekers with opportunities that's hard for folks to understand. And so even if, even someone who has been in talent acquisition for years decades, they're happy to learn something new, they're happy to understand something new and different, but you'd better be able to speak their language. You'd better be able to put it in the context of what they are doing. And so for us, it's a lot of training on not just our solution, but the industry, because there aren't a lot of people who show up with talent acquisition experience, and candidly, the ones who we might meet over time, people who have joined the company, went back to our original point. If they come from one of those well known brands, it's very hard for them, because it's very easy. Like you said, no one ever got fired for buying IBM. But what if no one's ever heard of you before? So if you're spoiled, in a sense, by saying, Hi, I'm with, you know, choose your 10 ton gorilla in the industry I'm with. Indeed, that's a, I hate to say it, but that's an easier phone call. Yeah. Then I would tell Roon you've never heard of me, but that combination of the technology and the space is a big focus. And then just real quick to wrap up the we're actually just talked about it this morning. We're getting much more serious again, near and dear to my heart, the sales engineering solutions engineering, I'll call it Solutions Engineering role. We're going more upmarket. I'm formalizing that role out of my group because I want a service oriented technologist who knows the language of sales. I want them closer to the prospect. I want them involved early and often, so that we're all clear about what jobs we're getting. We're all clear about how we're going to set up the campaigns. We're all clear about how budgets play into all these decisions. I want to move all of that as close to the prospect as early in the process as possible, because it makes everything else flow smoother later on.

Mark Shriner  [13:16]  

That makes a lot of sense. It's funny. You mentioned, about, you know, sales people working alongside a sales engineer or solution engineer, solution Solution Architect. And you know, I've had the opposite situation many times, where instead of me just going in and starting the meeting and then turn passing it over, if it's a non technical meeting, I want to run the meeting, and I only want my technical person to talk when they spot something very meaningful and or I ask them, hey, you know, what are your thoughts on this? Or if we get a technical question, of course, I want to include as many people as possible, but in a very tactical way. That said, then when we go into a technical situation and they've got, you know, five or six of their tech people. They're just looking to trip us up, then I'm gonna zip it and turn it over so you kind of have to know, you know, play to your strengths and when to have the right person in the right seats. You know, when it comes to establishing credibility, like you said, you need to be able to talk, your your your your customers talk, you need to understand the industry jargon, so maybe some of the industry trends can maybe what are your thoughts in terms of asking smart questions that you know both help you to understand what the customer is looking for, but also demonstrate your expertise.

Barry Klein  [14:38]  

Boy, that is a great question, because it's so easy to fall into the trap of the glib problem. Are you having trouble hiring people you know or no?

Mark Shriner  [14:47]  

No, we gotta. We're all good here. Nobody in the last 10 years anywhere.

Barry Klein  [14:52]  

If you ask that, the wrong way in our world, you end up getting niche by that prospect who's like, oh, what's my pain? Meaning, my pain is hiring this specific person and this specific geography, and then you're an enthusiastic sales person says, we can help you with that. Yeah, and then that's all we ever get from that customer. 

Mark Shriner  [15:10]  

And you just got the tree, not the forest. Yep. 

Barry Klein  [15:14]  

You know, we call hard to fill jobs, hard to fill for a reason. You know, we're not miracle workers. So, you know, you can, you can really step into it, I think for us, and perhaps for a lot of your listeners, the world today is so hinged upon what's going on. Where, US based. So in the US economy, it is an interesting time. It is a crazy time. Is the economy improving? Is it tanking? Our interest rates, going up. 

Mark Shriner  [15:44]  

Our interest rates going down depends on which political party you listen to and which political parties in office. Right now, that's all I'm going to say on.

Barry Klein  [15:55]  

I mentioned that because it's perhaps a more interesting way to begin the dialog, right? You know how the current economic conditions, impacting your hire? I like, yeah, how is that influencing your decision making? You know, back again in our niche, in the heady days post pandemic, when everyone had fired all their employees, they needed them back, and the competition was brutal, and job seekers were in charge. They could hop jobs, and could take the next best paying job. They could juggle one against the other, 2023 2024 the world changed. Employers got the message. They increase pay. Turnover is much lower than it used to be. Also what happened during the pandemic was that, especially the biggest brands, many of whom we work with, they establish their own we call them talent communities. They have a database of every human being in the country, they don't need to do more advertising. They have all these people captured. They can reach out to them. So our world has changed very dramatically. And so if you were to ask myself or one of our executive team, how is the economic world, the economic conditions shaping your business, it's a very different answer, sure, than it was three years ago, and I think that that kind of questioning, a finding a a hook that indicates that I'm I'm a business person who you can trust, who might have a different perspective from all of my counterparts, who are also calling you every day trying to get your business what unique value can I provide? What, What can I offer in a way of understanding, and for us especially, that's important, because a sophisticated initial conversation helps pave the way for a discussion about what is a sophisticated technological solution, sure which, which can help and sort of establish that that credibility for A salesperson, for the whole account team, as trusted advisors, as trusted consultants.

Mark Shriner  [17:45]  

Totally makes sense. Hey, I want to ask you because, I mean, a big part of what you guys do is help organizations hire. But also, you know, in Tower, you need to make smart hiring decisions as well, right? So, let's look at this from two perspectives. You mentioned that you know that your platform is primarily geared towards helping hire frontline workers. And maybe you can talk about some best practices there, because, you know, I'm assuming that time is of the essence for a lot of you know, filling these roles. And then let's kind of go up the food chain a bit, or up the career ladder a bit, and look at some of the more senior client facing roles in your organization, and we'll talk about how you you know, what's the hiring process there like, and what, what are some of the lessons learned? But let's go to the frontline workers first. And what advice would you give?

Barry Klein  [18:32]  

Sure, and it's one of our favorite topics. So thank you for asking. A common theme across all of this is for a recruiter and the talent acquisition team of the employer to put themselves into the shoes of the job seeker. Know who you know your persona, who are you actually selling to? Who are you trying to get to respond? So if you look today, so many employers who need frontline workers still have way too complicated online applications. People are on their mobile phone. It's got to be mobile friendly, it's got to be fast, it's got to be efficient, and you darn well better not ask for a resume, right? Because I don't have my resume on my phone, and so you just lost the candidate because they couldn't fulfill your requirements. And for the front line, typically, often blue collar, often high turnover. It's over. Yeah, have them. They can enter a few things by background. You can certainly ask some screening questions. Years of experience, whatever it may be. But more than anything, that initial touch point of having a fast and efficient application process can't be overstated. And then if it does go, you actually read my mind market. It does go to the team, to time, time, even in this day where job seekers aren't as powerful as they were two or three years ago, there's an expectation when folks are highly hiring for frontline work. And. That they're going to be treated rudely, they're going to hear back. Their application is going to be abandoned. No one will ever be in touch. And so you know, if you're out there advertising, whether your needs are through the roof like they would have been in 2022 or if they're more normal, you still don't want to lose the right candidate, right? So having a process that shows the respect for that candidate being creative with technology, you know, to get that when you receive the application, there are applicant tracking systems and other technologies that might allow you, for instance, to send a text message acknowledging it. That's the word. That's where your typical hire probably is going to be. They're not in their email. They're not at their best. Send them a text message. Oh, they got my application. Keep that communication flowing. Where are they in the process? And then, of course, you'd get them in front of the right people to do the interviews and hopefully have a strong process there. But the number of roadblocks that we see employers put up for themselves because they're, I get, you know, the perfect becomes the enemy of good, right? You know, you don't have to find a frontline. You know, we'll often describe them as jobs at, quote, unquote, anybody could do. So don't be overly picky. You know, have your standards. Of course, you're looking for cultural fit. You're maybe looking for an experience, for some appropriate experience. But don't shut people out before they've even had a chance. And even as you go up the food chain, as it were, into more white collar, low lower turnover jobs, even job seekers there will describe their frustrations. I filled in. You go on LinkedIn and read stories from anyone who might be open to work, as they call it. I've just filled in my 500th application, and no one ever gets back to me. Now, are they, you know, does your heart break for them? Yes. Are they perhaps being inefficient and desperate? Yes. But it does not diminish the fact that, wouldn't it be nice to hear back from an employer when you've taken the time to fill in their application. And for a professional job, those can often be time consuming and difficult too, which they shouldn't be. But there you might require a resume to be uploaded, okay, but I'll tell you what happens in that world. My favorite is this, you have an application where they require the upload of the resume, but they still want you to type in everything. 

Mark Shriner  [22:20]  

Oh, that drives me nuts. And so I could go on a major rant, I won't, but, you know, I think we've all been there where you see a job on LinkedIn, and you can just click and send your profile, but then they say, oh, upload your resume. And I'm like, Okay, well, your resume is kind of my LinkedIn profile. It's a little bit different, okay? And then you've got to go through their proprietary platform and enter, you know, job history, dates and it. And I'm like, Now, forget it, man, forget it. And, you know, I'm listening to you talk, and I'm surprised, and I actually, I wonder if some organizations would have their marketing people work side by side with their recruitment people to make sure that all communications are quote, unquote, on brand. Because, you know, if I think about a consumer good or consumer related company or a even if it's a business to business company, my experience as a job seeker with them if i i could be put off the brand if I was treated rudely, and I could build some loyalty if they were very considerate. And every step of the way said, Hey, thank you so much. You know, we'll be in touch. And then they do get in touch, and they follow through, even if I don't get the job. I had a good, positive experience with them. That's brand promotion, right? But I don't know.

Barry Klein  [23:41]  

Huge topic for us. And in fact, in the brief conversation we've been having, everything you just said, I use the word personas. That's not acquisition, that's marketing mindset. One of our more successful webinars that we ever did was for recruiters, how to think like a marketer. And in fact, what you're observing marks with marketing and talent acquisition working side by side. Yes, it's happening more than ever, as companies realize the value of the talent that they're trying to attract and the importance of the brand, what you just said could not be more important. Because, you know, people tend to think of, you know, I'll think at Christmas time people choose an employer, someone will walk into Crate and Barrel because they love Crate and Barrel. I had like to work here for the holidays. People think of it going that way. So you have this great land that brought someone in and now treat that person poorly. You think you're going back into Crate and Barrel to do their shopping. You just offended them. And of course, every statistic always shows that, you know, if people have a good experience, they don't tell anybody. If they have a lousy experience, they tell every single human being they know right now, like crap. I'm not going there anymore. I've been giving them all my business, and that's how they treat me. They didn't have to hire me, but they needed to respect me. And no disrespect to Crayton barrel, I'm just using that as a name. I have no history that that is the case, but there is no doubt that you are. Or anyone who is thinking of their consumers, your consumers are your best pool of applicants, and your applicants should become loyal consumers. There's no doubt, and getting that right is not easy and requires that good alignment, or at least good thought process that everyone's thinking like a marketer, putting themselves in the shoes of the person they're trying to attract, and how would they want to be treated?

Mark Shriner  [25:26]  

Absolutely and even for those higher level, you know, positions, I think that treating people with respect, consideration and, you know, having open, honest, transparent communications, even if the candidate is a workout and I get it the recruiters, they are under so much pressure, time pressure, and, you know, take tech, they are on the phone constantly. So I get that the dynamics of the job, but you have to treat people well, and maybe that person is not a good hire for this position, but maybe three months later you find something, and you and you say, like, Oh God, I should have been better with that person, or maybe that person will, you know, introduce people. So I think, I think it really, I know that a lot of times it's a numbers game, but if we can kind of keep that human element to it, we would all benefit.

Barry Klein  [26:15]  

Amen, yes, especially in a world of AI that can't be more important these days, you know, it's we're all going to be replaced by robots. But as long as we're here, we should be humane.

Mark Shriner  [26:25]  

My plumber is not going to get replaced anyway. It's like, these are the jobs that are secure. You know, the electricians, the farmers, auto mechanics will come. Mechanics is kind of going digital. But let me ask you this, when you hire somebody, and again, I would like to talk about the two different types of roles, but you got to make a decision fairly quickly. Is this person going to work out? Because you don't want to throw good money and good times after bad. A lot of times we hire people, we're like, well, we'll just give them a little bit more time, or just give them a little bit more and sometimes you have to draw a line in the sand. What are your, you know, best practices or advice in terms of those frontline workers, but then also maybe, if you are hiring a senior salesperson.

Barry Klein  [27:10]  

Yes, certainly the number one thing that I think about, and it's been ingrained in me through my career, and certainly at Talroo is cultural fit. We spend a lot of time talking with our candidates at Talroo about that. We have very strong, well defined values that, you know, we have them on our website, as many companies do these days, which is terrific. The question is, if you live them, and I'd like to think that we live them, and I'm looking for people who can live them along with us. You know, in my hiring for customer success, I've taken it. I've hired people with years of customer success experience, who have the right war stories and, you know, good experience and lots of things to draw from. We've hired former teachers, because I figure if you can handle a classroom of, you know, second graders. You can certainly handle adults, because the adults are worse than the kids. But the, you know, we've hired folks who have come out of straight tech support roles, that's been probably one of the more interesting transitions, because for most people, again, thinking about a customer success role, which is not tech support, you're looking at someone who's done tech support, and it took me a while to uncover the difference and be able to have good conversations with those folks, which is the tech support person is used to the tasks coming in. They don't have to ask for work. They just wait for it when it arrives, uncovering if that person is proactive, if they are a problem solver. And for me, mark the in our world, it really has become a touchstone for me by the time. Interviews get to me, and I'm meeting them, and I know they have the technical acumen, and they've met with our HR director to do the values alignment survey by the time, which is a terrific part of our process. More than anything, I'm looking for curiosity. Our CEO at Talroo,  always very complimentary of me that he remembers seven, eight years ago when we first met. I was asked a question, and I said, I don't know, but I'll go find out. He quotes that to this day. And I've come to appreciate that that is cool that I said that, and that is cool who I am, and I realize that I look for that in the people that I hire, because you have to have the confidence to say, I don't know, and you have to have the initiative and the curiosity to say, I'm going to find out. It's hard to get there. I know that. You know, a lot of times when anyone gets hired in any role, you feel like an imposter for a while, so you don't want to admit that you don't know everything. But I encouraged folks at a young lady who had been with the company. I was having a coaching session with her, and she was so hesitant to share things when she wasn't exactly perfectly confident in them. And I said to her, I can't afford that. You're 85 to 90% of the way there. When you don't know, you have two choices. Fake it if you think you can get close enough, I'm not telling you to lie or be wrong, but if you think you have a legitimate thing to say, say or I don't know, and I'll go find out you've earned the right to say I don't know. But then, of course, you follow that up with I'm going to go find out that curiosity, that entrepreneurial mindset, is for me, probably the most important thing that I look for across the board, because we are a small company, my team works remotely. Training people in that world is very difficult. We will bring them into the office as much as we can. But it's not like years ago, where we could look over each other's shoulders eight hours a day. So I have to have an enormous amount of trust in your autonomy, in your curiosity, in your ability to self educate, and your ability to ask good questions and not be bashful, but asking questions, the whole company is at your disposal to ask good questions, but we can't train you on everything you're going to have to ask, certainly on the frontline side of things. The cultural alignment, especially when I think of, of course, restaurants, hospitality, you know, you need that. Do you have the right mentality? Are you the right kind of fit with the atmosphere of the organization? But for those roles, I often think about punctuality and their appreciation, you know, and a candidate's appreciation for that. Do they understand?

Mark Shriner  [31:23]  

It's huge. I mean, they're getting paid, they're getting paid for their time, and that means they need to be at a certain place at a certain time. And, yeah, that makes sense. 

Barry Klein  [31:33]  

And there's a generational thing where, you know!

Mark Shriner  [31:38]  

I know! I've got three boys, I know the What time is your first class? Start eight. It's eight right now. It'll be okay, no, but that's a whole nother rant I could go on. Let me You know, I love that, that you do a Value Survey, and just, I think you called it, me was a value alignment survey. I think that's really important, that curiosity thing is huge. And I like the you know that answer that I don't know, but I'll go find out. I use that in sales situations all the time, because I guarantee I don't care how experienced you are, or how knowledgeable you're going to get hit with questions you don't know. And if I don't know, and I can't fake it, that if I'm not 99% sureI'm right, I will say that's a really good question. I haven't actually heard it that way before. Would it be okay if I check with the team and come back to you? Most people like, sure, you know, it actually gives you a little bit of credibility and you know. So I think that's a great, great response. I also like the the just that some of the best hires that I've ever made or been a part of or witnessed have been with people who maybe don't have the, the quote, unquote formal pedigree of, you know, all the right degrees, or, you know, logos and their experience, but they're, you know, they're just super, super curious, and they always want to be learning about their subject area, right? I'm actually leading a SAS startup right now, and a couple of people, I'm working with, our whole dev team for one, and then our CRO they're all doing things that are relatively new to them, because it's in this new context, and we're working with AI and large language models and NLP. And these fields are evolving so quickly that, if you're not curious, next week is already, you know, last week is already old news, and next week's gonna be something new. So it's incredibly important, and it's so fun, though, when you're working with people like this, because they're coming in every day going like, Hey, here's something new, here's a way we can solve this, here. Have we thought about this? And I think it just brings a whole lot of energy to the whole organization. 

‍Barry Klein  [33:57]  

Yeah, I remember the first time I heard about chatGPT, and I sat there, and I'm a computer science major by training, and I sat there and wrapped my attention. What was it? November of 2022 and the world changed. And I sent a note to one of our product managers and our CEO, and I said, look at the job description I just built for free by typing in what I needed, the kind of person I needed to hire. Now, at the same time, we were developing a product which is now out in the market called Ready, Set hire that helps, especially small businesses. Small businesses, folks who don't have the luxury of a recruiting team or other professionals to craft job descriptions right. Because the reality is that most job descriptions stink, and so..

Mark Shriner  [34:42]  

And we said, It’s a small organization, everybody's wearing multiple hats, and they're like, Hey, Barry, can you write a description for this? And you're like, Okay, so I, what have I seen? You know? Like, you know. So we kind of go to our prototype job description to try to, like, force everything into that format, and yeah, so go ahead.

Barry Klein  [34:59]  

With chatGPT, It was done in minutes. It was pretty, look, pretty darn compliant with, you know, what you would expect in terms of what an HR department might look for? 

Mark Shriner  [35:06]  

Well, that's right, yeah, you got clients to make sure you don't. 

Barry Klein  [35:11]  

Yeah. Well, some things that people can put in and I sent it off to our CEO and our product manager, and we were already involved with this, this, this effort of our own to automate the creation of job descriptions. And it's one thing of many that this product will now be done. But it was fun to share that. And then, you know, of course, they would have found out about it 30 seconds after I did. I just happened to be the one sending Hey, have you seen this? And you know now we've embedded that technology into our solution, and have evolved and grown with it. And like you said, 18 months ago, no one knew it existed. We were building something ourselves, and then we were able to find this, this incredible wealth of technology and tools to make our solution even better. Yeah, and if you don't have that curiosity and that joy in it, it probably isn't the right you know, high tech isn't the place to be, or a place that has lots of change isn't going to be the place to be. I remember early in my career, dating myself somewhat mark it was I came of age in the days of the x86 chips from Intel. And the employer I was with at the time was always getting early releases of them. And I remember saying to my office mate, this is exhausting. I just got used to the 386 now there's a 486 and now there's a Pentium, which they should have called 586 and they didn't. And I was very early in my career, and I had to take a deep breath and say, no, no, this is the fun part of Yeah, and especially when I got into the internet space that there's no there's no timeline, there's nothing left, yeah. So you're gonna learn something new every day and that also creates opportunities to be a leader, to learn something yourself, to then be something other people rely on. Yeah, so that, embracing that change, embracing curiosity, I think, is an absolute necessity in this world, or in our world, in particular, within anything in high tech.

Mark Shriner  [36:55]  

Totally agree with you. Let me ask you just one more question when it comes to holding your team accountable and then evaluating the performance. I mean, there are all kinds of you know, there's management by objectives, there's OKRs, there's revenue targets in the context of sales. What are some of the more effective performance measurements or accountability, kind of mechanisms that you've seen?

Barry Klein  [37:27]  

I am proud that we are very sophisticated with our data, and especially for our salespeople. Yeah, we know who's doing what, not to a creepy personal level, but how many calls did you make today? You know, emails sent. How many of them were automated? How many of them were sequenced? And the day to day blocking and tackling is probably, I'd say, where we start. You know, did you show up to work today? Okay, if the numbers are too big, it makes you wonder, did you really just, you know, process things, to get through it, and being able to judge the quality versus the quantity is, I think, one of our, one of our biggest challenges. Again, in a world that's remote, you can see the statistics, but what's the story behind the statistics? And so one of the things that I look at, especially being on the post sale side of things and hoping for the right customers who are going to bring us lifetime value and be with us forever, and all those good things. I actually look at metrics around the longevity of the customers who are brought in by the individual account teams to bring us good customers who stay, who stick around. And if the answer to that is no, because I see them contracting over time or certainly churning, would be even more dramatic. You know, why did we sign them in the first place? And that, and I stay close to those things, I actually have quite a voice in who we might or might not do business with, because you can't do business with everybody. You shouldn't do business with everybody, but finding that balance between the metrics and the soft accountability is a challenge, especially in a remote world. But I see it come out, like I said, post sale. I see it come out candidly even in trainings, questions. Who's asking the questions? What are they asking? Are they engaged even in things mark like, you know, I, I've said this, and I, I'm loathe to quote it, because it sounds so arrogant, but I've been with the company for seven years. I'm a technologist by training. I've done pre sales my whole career, and I've said frequently within Talroo if you don't have me on your deal. At some point you don't have a deal because not speaking to everyone you need to be speaking to. Now I say that like I said. I don't like the way it sounds. I have other members on my team who do an outstanding job, but the point is, have you brought in help, right? Have you met people? Have you got, have you established credibility throughout the organization, and not just set me up to. Sale with one point of contact, who then when they leave, we lose the customer, because we don't know anybody else you know. So let's get those relationships built early. Those are the soft things that I'm looking for, for selling methodology, a sales mindset, strategic thinking, enterprise class behavior. If we can combine those with statistics, we're on to something.

Mark Shriner  [40:21]  

Yeah, you know, it's interesting, because you kind of mentioned churn in your explanation there. And I think it's probably under-measured in a lot of traditional organizations. It is very much measured in the space that we're in, which is, you know, software as a service, because people are, your customers are signing about a subscription basis. But in the context of what you do, maybe you can talk a little bit about, you know, you know, what are some of the key metrics that you look at in terms of, do you look at cost of acquisition, and then lifetime value of the customer, and then the churn? And, you know, because they're all really tightly, what's the word related and and you kind of have to keep an eye on them. Otherwise, you could say, Hey, we're closing a lot of deals, but could be costing you a lot of money, or those could be really short term deals. But what are your thoughts?

Barry Klein  [41:10]  

That was us in 2022 Go, go. Days of 2022 we had too many customers. And it goes back to how we have a sophisticated solution. I need a relatively sophisticated customer. If I don't have one, they're not going to be a partner. We are not a set it and forget it kind of solution. We need engaged customers who truly have a partnership mindset, because we're going to work through things, with the first few weeks live with the Talroo solution might be a little up and down, a little bit of a roller coaster. Once we get it dialed in, and we get a performance where we want, then we're going to sing and dance, and then we're going to keep you for a long time. You know, one of the, one of the things I rail against whenever I'm in my car and, I put my satellite radio on, and I hear ads from some of our competitors, and they'll say things like, you know, how our customers get a qualified applicant within 24 hours of placing their ad. That sure we can do that too. But the point isn't to keep them for 24 hours. The point is to keep them for 24 months or beyond, right? And so we watched, because we went through a painful time in late 2022 into 2023 we have our numbers well nailed. We do watch cancellations themselves very closely. You know, we have a month to month agreement. There's no contract, okay, so that people can cancel whenever they want. We've got to earn their business every month, so longevity of our customers and combined with their average monthly spend become two key metrics that we can look at to say, Are we keeping them and are we growing them? And one of the things that I say over and over is, if we keep them, we grow them. By definition, we grow them. If we keep them because we're very good at what we do and if we're aligned with the right kind of partner slash customer, over time, we will be very, very successful and have a great, a great partnership. And certainly our CFO will then look at the lifetime value and put a $1 figure on that. But yeah, one of my favorite charts that was built for me by a fellow on my team, our business analyst, tracked the average length of time that a customer might be with us before they canceled, and the number of customers canceled, and when we began these initiatives, the number of customers canceling was way up here, the amount of time they This was way down here. And those two lines have crossed. So now we have an ever growing length of time that folks are with us and an ever dropping number of churned customers.

Mark Shriner  [43:44]  

And how have you been able to achieve that?

Barry Klein  [43:47]  

It really has been a wonderful 360 degree project across the company, first assigning the right customers. There's that. It starts there. It absolutely starts there, having the right customers, who have the right technical setup, who have the right mindset to work with us as partners, who know what they're signing up for, right? We're not set it and forget it. So if we have all that good stuff lined up, if we're really selling to our ICPs, we're immediately set up for success. And then another key thing that we got much more sophisticated about was pushing our customers for their KPIs. You mentioned it earlier. Mark our day to day. Our key metric is cost per application. It's easy to measure folks in talent acquisition. Understand it, how much are they paying for every application that they're getting? The other one is cost per hire, because ultimately they're going to take how much money they spend with Talroo divided by the number of hires, and we better have generated some hires for them. Yeah, and we have industry metrics. We have our own metrics because we do billions of searches a month. We have so much data that we have our own metrics based on jobs and market geographies. But one of the biggest challenges is when the customer doesn't know you. So there you and what we have had to get comfortable with our customer success folks who report to me and our national account managers who, sort of, you know, take over post sale and help grow the account, which is, you know, a frontline person might say, I don't know what my cost per application is. I don't know what my cost per hire is. They're not lying to you. They really don't, but their CFO does. Yeah, their CFO knows those numbers, and we have to be able to cajole our day to day contact to say, can I give you a homework assignment please before we meet next? Can you please get that data? Because I can guarantee you that you're going to fire me if we don't know those numbers and target them and make sure that we meet or exceed them, or meet or improve upon them. It's inevitable. And you know, in talent acquisition, HR, everyone's nice, oh no, that won't Yes. It will, yes. It will happen. We need those APIs. And if we can combine the best of who we sell to with KPI based performance and then all the good service things we do, we have wonderfully nice people who are outstanding customer success individuals. You know, our customers like us, but they're not going to stay with us if we're not getting the results.

Mark Shriner  [46:13]  

Just a couple more questions, I said the last question, but you keep saying really cool stuff, and it just kind of makes me think of more, more questions, but what are the potential points of contacts? If you're selling recruitment, a platform service, or you're selling, you know, outsourcing, are these all the same contacts, or are they different contacts in an organization?

Barry Klein  [46:38]  

Generally speaking, for us, it's going to be someone with a talent acquisition title, okay, in their name, something similar, yeah, whether it's frontline or professional roles, there's some commonality there as to who to whom we are reaching out. Okay? Ultimately, when we get to the executive levels, it could well be, of course, a VP of HR who's overseeing all things personnel. A lot of companies are starting to figure out that HR and talent acquisition don't have a lot to do with each other, so they can often be separated. But when we get to the VP of HR, that's a big moment, and then usually we're going to go through a technical scrutiny that if we handle it well, it's not a big deal. If we handle it poorly. We can slow our deals down to a crawl because we were not we're not going to embed ourselves necessarily into their tech stack, but the assumption is that we might. So we eventually will have to get with probably not a Chief Technology Officer, but some influencers on the technology side.

Mark Shriner  [47:37]  

Gotcha. Okay. Last thing, what advice would you give to job seekers? And you can, you can talk about it in terms of segment, and talk about frontline and then looking for more senior roles in today's market, where you said, every company has a database of millions and millions and millions of people, and there's all different platforms out there. And so what can you do as a frontline worker, and then also as a potential executive, to differentiate yourself and be more competitive. And then what advice would you give to companies in terms of attracting better talent?

Barry Klein  [48:12]  

I appreciate that. You know what first comes to mind when I think about especially today's job market, where the employers are a lot more in charge than they were two or three years ago. We are hearing a, so not only are they more in charge, but they know what their needs are. The theme that we've been hearing all year is, I don't need more candidates. I need the right candidates. And so I think any candidate, whether it be front line or a professional role, I would encourage them to take a few minutes to think about how they're different than everyone else who might come through the door. I'm not saying to be phony and memorize the website, but I always like when folks have looked at our website and come up with an interesting question. I saw these two products, how do they relate? You know? Because sometimes we all know, on any given website, there could be futures there. There could be things that are outdated. There could be things that are contradictory. Show me that you looked at things with a critical eye and you just didn't just ingest what we said, you know. And then even take it a step farther, can you find a blog or a podcast with the CEO? Can you, you know, do you have friends who've worked there who you can reference some war stories? Things that you like about them show me that you're more sincere and more connected without I don't want you to invest your whole life in it. Take a little time to prepare for that, to show me that you know more than the other person who's showing up, just to tell me how wonderful they are, because, you know, we're interviewing you and you're interviewing us, so let's make sure that it's a fit. And then for employers, I think that as we've talked about throughout, thinking like a marketer, putting yourself in the shoes of the people who you want to attract, what would appeal to you, them, for your brand, for your business, your vertical. There's really no substitute for it. How does your website talk to them? You know, some very big thing these days is folks want to put informational videos up, which is terrific, right? So you're browsing the web, you see an informational video, okay? But they can't be 15 minutes long. We know, because the easy trap is more must be better, right? No, not necessarily. You know. What would you do as a job seeker? You're really going to watch a 15 minute video. You might watch a two or three minute video with interviews of existing staff who are nice and engaging and show their enthusiasm for the business. You might have a lovely campus to have a little tour of, but even things like that that are considered so employee friendly, so candidate friendly, can turn negative because they're just too time consuming. Yeah, you know, no one has the time these days. So simplicity, being laser focused on who you think you should attract and what's going to appeal to them. You know, interview your own staff. Why'd you come work here? What's appealing? What should we be highlighting to future candidates? They'll tell you. They'll know they came to work for you.

Mark Shriner  [51:11]

Yeah. So some great advice. Well, hey, hey, buddy, I, you know, you've shared a lot of really valuable information, and I really appreciate that, and would like to cross paths with you in person one day, so if you're ever up in the Seattle Bellevue area, let me know. But thank you so much for being on the grow fast podcast. 

Barry Klein  [51:29]  

It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Cheers.

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