Talent Operations – Optimizing Your Indeed Hiring Budget

By Jonathan Duarte

Talent operations is where Jim Durbin, the recruitment marketer Jonathan Duarte calls the Indeed Whisperer, now spends most of his time. He has mostly stopped building campaigns. Fixing a TA team's process, data and vendor instructions saves more money than new ad spend, and most teams have nobody whose job is to do it.

In this episode:

• What Jim Durbin wants TA leaders to know
• The data gap between apply and interview
• Why fixing recruiting operations makes people nervous
• Don't automate a broken hiring process
• Indeed's "invest in us" pitch
• When to add talent acquisition operations
• Knowing how to search
• Why this work matters
• About and contacting Jim
• FAQ
• Full interview transcript

Talent Operations: What Jim Durbin Wants TA Leaders to Know

Jim Durbin is Vice President, Recruitment Marketing at Respondable Recruitment Marketing, and this is his second time on GoHire Talks. Jonathan opened by calling him the Indeed Whisperer, a guy who has been "kicking around with Indeed for years." Jim's update was a surprise.

I have, funny enough, moved almost out of recruitment marketing and into talent operations. It's still sold as recruitment marketing, but the problem really is TA in general has to mature and grow.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

He still sells the work as recruitment marketing. What he actually does is make sure the projects work, which means a lot of time on the TA side, because vendors keep doing things they shouldn't when nobody gives them clear instructions.

So it's amazing how clear instructions make a difference, and I've found myself more and more into, how do I fix process? How do I fix conversion? How do I make sure this landing page works for this kind of traffic? So it's fascinating. I'm not building campaigns anymore because there's so much value in fixing our internal side.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

Jonathan put a name on the gap. Plenty of TA leaders have borrowed an HRIS person's time to wire up Workday. Very few have someone who knows the talent pipeline and knows recruiting. That person is what talent operations means, and it's the job Jim keeps describing for the next 45 minutes, even though half the episode is about Indeed.

The SHRM 2025 Talent Trends research found 69% of organizations still struggle to fill roles. Some of that struggle starts inside the TA function, which is exactly where Jim now spends his time.

The Data Gap Between Apply and Interview

Jonathan brought up a recent report from Madeline Laurano on what he remembered as the candidate engagement gap. Most candidates drop out between apply and interview, and no ATS tracks that stretch. Phone calls aren't in the ATS. Emails might be, but they carry no status.

Jim said the tracking exists now. Even intake calls get captured, and he named Sync to Hire, which puts what managers say into the ATS. The trouble is what happens after the data exists.

But even if you can, and you've trained your team and they're using the software and following up, the analytics are done so poorly. The APIs aren't done. And it's because what happens is we tend to go to our IS, we go to a partner and we ask them to build something, and there's almost no requirements gathering.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

Where did all the business analysts go, he asked. The best most teams do now is grab one recruiter and ask how things work, and the mistakes he finds are basic ones about how to hire.

Why nobody agrees what "hired" means

Recruiting analytics breaks down on definitions before it breaks down on software. Take the hire status field. Is a hire the offer made, the offer accepted or the first day? It depends on what the recruiter entered, what the manager entered, and whether anyone closed the job.

The saddest job in the world is not dentist. It's Power BI, a Power BI developer. It's gotta be the saddest job. Imagine your entire life is a waste. People yell at you they want something, and then they never look at the report.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

SharePoint, in his words, "is filled with millions of man-hours of bad reporting," and it isn't the developers' fault. In staffing, DNA means do not assign. DND means do not disturb. "If we can't even agree on what applicants and candidates are called, how are we possibly gonna go further?"

That's the first job of talent operations. Someone has to decide what the fields mean, make sure people use them the same way, and then build the report somebody will actually open.

Why Fixing Recruiting Operations Makes People Nervous

You'd think a team would welcome someone who finds the waste. Jim has learned otherwise. Good recruiting operations work exposes how long the waste has been sitting there, and the people who signed the checks feel it.

You cannot tell people that their baby is ugly, and you cannot be too good. If you cut budget so much or improves... If you're improving something 300%, everybody should be fired. So you have to actually learn to just improve things in small matters, 'cause otherwise when you do too well, people are like what were we doing wrong?

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

Jonathan reminded him of an earlier conversation, when Jim told a client he could cut 75% of their budget. The leader couldn't accept it, because it implied years of overspending on his watch. Jim called it "an expensive lesson I learned over and over again."

His audit habit is worth stealing. He doesn't start with the VP.

That's one of my secrets when I do an audit. I go look for the poor, the person paid the least, and I watch what buttons they push, because that's the person doing the work.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

Where recruiter licenses and job board budgets leak

Jonathan asked how many LinkedIn Recruiter licenses actually get used. Jim's answer: less than 50% are even logged into. Everyone swears they can't do the job without one, then the login history shows two months of nothing. Before you argue over LinkedIn recruiter license cost at renewal, look at who logged in.

Recruiters are reactive and req loads have doubled. A lot of teams also start with sourcing when they should start with advertising. That's why Jim now asks clients for fungible budgets.

I'm like, Just tell me how much you have to spend for the year, and we'll hit that in ways that work and that are defensible.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

Then there's attribution. LinkedIn tells a client it delivered 180 hires last quarter, and the client only made 126 hires all quarter. Jim says this happens so often "it should be a meme at this point." Without someone in talent operations owning the real numbers, the vendor's story wins by default.

Don't Automate a Broken Hiring Process

Jonathan shared a deal he's working on: a private-equity-owned healthcare company with 150 recruiters still scheduling interviews by hand. He put the cost at $1.9 million in labor that could be cut or pointed at better candidates, like nursing students at tech schools.

Jim offered a counterpoint. Around 2015 he used one of the early virtual scheduling assistants. You emailed the candidate, and a virtual assistant ("Alex or whatever her name was") traded times and put the meeting on your calendar. People loved it at first.

I started using that as well, and you know what I found out? People hated me. Because you schedule a meeting, they've had three or four interactions. They're excited. They know what that meeting is.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

To the person who set it up, it's just another entry on the calendar. Jim compared it to opening an interview with "let me look at your resume."

Jonathan's answer was that it depends on how it's done. GoHire doesn't automate the back-and-forth. Its text recruiting software texts the candidate back, and he said those texts convert at 92% because they're written well and don't look like spam. Jim agreed that "done right" is the whole point. Nobody wants the doctor's office that sends 13 reminders. If your team is weighing automated interview scheduling, that's the test: does the candidate still feel like a person is on the other end?

AI only beats untrained recruiters

Jim's harder point was about why automation keeps winning these arguments. Recruiters aren't being trained, so their work is bad, so leadership decides software can do it.

All these AI messaging tools, when you watch people do it, it only works if you're terrible. Good people don't need to use those.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

The AI's not better. It's better than your untrained recruiters 'cause you refuse to train or hire a manager, pay them.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

Adoption is moving fast either way. SHRM reported that 43% of organizations have integrated AI into HR functions, and 51% of those use it for recruiting tasks like resume screening and candidate communication. Our guide to recruiting AI covers where it helps and where it doesn't.

Jim's answer for TA leaders who want to protect their teams: make sure your people are good, and use the tools to make them better. Otherwise "why wouldn't you automate a bad process? You're losing less." Our guide to recruiting automation strategies starts from the same place. Fix the process, then automate the repetitive steps.

Eating your seed corn

The risk, Jim said, is that once a company cuts the people and moves the budget to software, it can't go back. Around 2000, Nissan North America called him for about 20 level two techs at an $18 bill rate, when the market was $22 to $26. Nissan had offshored that support to Kashmir, the region was being shelled, and the workers couldn't get to work. Nissan had to pivot back, but its budget was already planned around the cheaper model.

If you don't protect your internal knowledge, make sure your recruiters are trained, use automation effectively, you're just gonna teach the bosses that this is all automated.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

And when it stops working, where do the trained people come from? Staffing firms don't hire and train much anymore either. Half of the recruiting industry disappears every 10 years, Jim said, and no CFO is approving another 100 recruiters.

Jonathan pointed to his recent episode with Master Burnett. As Jonathan recalled it, a company cut its recruiting team to the bone and then spent $12 million on what used to be a $2 million spend on recruiting fees. The full story is in our episode on AI governance in HR tech with Master Burnett.

His advice to agencies was just as direct: "if you're a recruiting company, for God sakes, protect your margins." Finance teams want profitability now, and a firm selling cheap fees can't pay its own people.

Where people stay in charge

None of this is an argument against automation. It's an argument for putting a person in charge of the process before you speed it up. That's GoHire's position too. Software never makes a hiring decision. Your team writes the questions, sets the criteria, sees every answer and decides who moves forward. The EEOC's Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures still apply to any selection procedure, software included. And in New York City, Local Law 144 requires a bias audit within one year before an automated employment decision tool is used, plus notice to candidates.

Indeed, Recruitment Marketing Strategies and the "Invest in Us" Pitch

This is the part Indeed buyers will want to replay. Jim's read is that recruitment marketing strategies built on "give the job board the budget and let it run" are getting more expensive and harder to defend.

Recruitment budgets have grown for 20 years, and now CFOs are looking. For 10 to 15 years, whoever was in charge (Monster, then CareerBuilder, then LinkedIn and Indeed) got spend with little scrutiny. Jim says Indeed expects a 25% bigger share of your budget after growing last year, and is asking for multi-year contracts and guaranteed spend.

Integrate with us, spend a bunch of money, use our products, and that's how you get the best from us. It's literally in their investor report. And in- invest in us and we invest in you. Which is just mind-blowingly arrogant to say.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

The unspoken part, in Jim's view: if you don't give them money, your results degrade, because that's how the algorithms are set.

Talent intelligence and the truck driver problem

Jonathan relayed what Bill Boorman (now with the AIM Group, Jim noted) told a recent event for job board owners. Indeed uses talent intelligence to see how many people exist for a role in a market. If you need truck drivers and the pallet is sitting there undelivered, Indeed knows it and can charge whatever margin it wants.

Jim agreed that's the plan, but said every platform has those numbers. Indeed understands behavior on its own site. It doesn't know your brand, your competition or how you hire.

And the thing to remember with Indeed and any software is when they say, Oh, it performs better, performs for who?

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

His example was commute. Ask Indeed whether commute matters and you get a 25-mile radius. Jonathan added that Fremont is 20 miles from San Francisco by air and twice that by road.

Indeed sponsored jobs pricing is going up

Jim's warning for next year's budgets came later in the episode. He expects Indeed to start validating healthcare credentials (not full credentialing, which is a different process) and to charge a premium for it, something like a flat $200 for a validated registered nurse. Jim pointed out that checking a license is a simple lookup on a website, an NPI search. Jim also said call center costs on Indeed have doubled in the last six months, and so have retail jobs.

I've actually had vendors tell me Indeed is no longer cheap traffic, and that should terrify a lot of people.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

There are still tricks that work, he said. But agency models are built like software (pay, and let the computer do the work), and they don't split or test budgets. Rising Indeed sponsored jobs pricing makes that testing a talent operations job.

Jim is also working with Jason Gorham on demand-side platforms, the "big boy advertising" tools everybody else buys traffic from, which have never connected well to recruiting.

When to Add Talent Acquisition Operations to Your Team

Jonathan asked the practical question for TA leaders who aren't technical. TA has borrowed help from HRIS teams for years, but rarely has anyone dedicated. Is that where the money should go?

"Everybody needs one now," Jim said. Look at any new head of TA, and one of their first hires is the operations person.

The operations person isn't necessarily a leader. They're the one who likes to look at the ATS.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

Jim insists on full system access with every client: "otherwise I don't believe what I see."

What talent operations finds that recruiters miss

Jim compared it to B2B, when marketing ("look at all our leads") and sales ("your leads suck") finally started talking.

Talent operations connects your recruitment marketing spend, your employment branding spend, just what's going on in the market to the actual recruiter.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

His best example came from inside GoHire. Brian Wurtzel, who Jim noted is now at GoHire and previously worked at Appcast and TruGreen, saw that every March TruGreen got orders it couldn't fill for lack of pest control technicians. His plan was to talk to that leader two months before things went bad and save the revenue gap. He could see it all from systems he built himself.

That's how a team stops being reactive. Right now, Jim said, whoever screams loudest gets the attention and the budget, so teams work maybe 10% of their jobs well and the rest are "good enough." Talent acquisition operations gives a leader the data to say no.

TA operations now lets you to go, Okay, the problem is John. I spent 35% of my budget because he insists on a seven interview thing for part-time workers in that cafeteria.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

"In corporations, whoever has the PowerPoint wins," he added. Talent operations is how you get the PowerPoint.

What a recruiting operations manager does with your recruiters' time

Jonathan turned it into a test any TA leader can run. If recruiters say they can't fill a role, and you ask for data and they don't know what you mean, you need an ops person. A recruiter's job is talking to qualified candidates and hiring managers. Calendaring and data research aren't.

If you had a ops person, they would say, Look, we have five LinkedIn licenses. Why don't we get Hire EZ to actually do sourcing for us for those roles? That's how you operationalize that wasted time that the people are doing low-value work on.

Jonathan Duarte, Founder & CEO, GoHire

A good recruiting operations manager moves that low-value work to the right tool. Jeremy Piker made a similar case for fixing process before buying tech in his GoHire Talks episode on fixing hiring. And our pillar guide to recruiting automation covers which of those steps are safe to automate.

The budget signal

So when do you need talent operations? Jim tied it to spend more than headcount. Smaller companies usually run on a process set by the owner or long-tenured staff. Somewhere around $10,000 to $20,000 a month in recruitment marketing spend, the problems start to show. Even then, the real signal is when things that used to work stop working. If you keep bouncing between vendors, he joked, it's like bad dates: "you're the only one who can answer that."

Talent Operations Starts With Knowing How to Search

Jim's last theme was that "we can't find them" is usually half true. Sometimes the people don't exist at that price. Sometimes nobody taught the team how to look.

A prospect in Janesville, Wisconsin, wanted to know whether Indeed could find dentists there. Probably not, he said. You could pull every dentist in town from Google Maps, or every license from a registry search, before spending a third of your budget on ads and hoping.

His mix: advertising done right should fill 85% of your roles, and sourcing is the sniper rifle for the rest, with its own budget and its own training.

The housekeeper problem

Jim got good at Indeed by learning its resume search. Working on Marriott hiring at PeopleScout, his team needed housekeepers. Marriott called them guest environment experts, a title only Marriott employees used. About half the population writes housekeeper as two words. Then there's janitorial, cleaning and housekeeping aide.

There's far more people, not just on the job boards, but in our databases that we don't know how to search for.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

The 18-year-old and the TiVo list

For TiVo, Jim hired a neighborhood 18-year-old to look up everyone who had ever worked there, plus where they worked before and after. That lookalike list produced 84 names, and about a third were already in TiVo's database.

His friend Jason Davis, a longtime semiconductor recruiter, built a tool from his own industry data that doesn't need a resume or a job description. Jason wanted to sell it as software. Jim told him to keep it and make more money as a headhunter.

Why This Work Matters

Jonathan closed by asking about a LinkedIn post Jim had written the day before. Jim is helping run a staffing company in Dallas that needed part-time call center reps for heart and vascular health work. So he ran an interview day himself, standing in front of the client with no idea who would show up.

But the reality was that it was, like, good for my soul. It reminds me and it humbles you and reminds you that there are always real people, and that the whole point of this job is putting somebody to work.

Jim Durbin, Vice President, Recruitment Marketing

Jonathan said TA teams change more lives than almost anyone and rarely get to feel it. Jim's answer was shorter: people say they fell into recruiting, and he tells them, "No, this is noble what we do."

That's the real case for talent operations: fix the data and the process so recruiters can spend their time getting somebody to work.

About & Contacting Jim Durbin

Jim Durbin is Vice President, Recruitment Marketing at Respondable Recruitment Marketing. Jonathan Duarte calls him the Indeed Whisperer for his years of work on Indeed advertising. He was a headhunter, worked on Marriott hiring at PeopleScout, and now spends most of his time on talent operations for healthcare, insurance, staffing and software clients. He is also helping run a staffing company in Dallas.

• Connect with Jim Durbin on LinkedIn
• Respondable Recruitment Marketing

People and tools mentioned in this episode:

• Madeline Laurano on LinkedIn
• Bill Boorman on LinkedIn
• Jason Gorham on LinkedIn
• Jason Davis on LinkedIn
• Sync to Hire on LinkedIn

Frequently Asked Questions About Talent Operations

Give Your Recruiters Their Time Back

GoHire handles the texting, pre-screening questions and interview scheduling. Your team sets the criteria and makes every call, with a record of every answer.

Schedule a Demo

Talent Operations: The GoHire Talks Interview Transcript with Jim Durbin

From Recruitment Marketing to Talent Operations (00:00)

Jonathan Duarte: [00:00:00] Hey, everyone. We've got a great guest back again Jim Durbin, the Indeed whisperer. He's been kicking around with Indeed for years, and we'll probably ask some questions about his most recent escapades for clients. ... And just if you haven't met Jim, you'll get to understand who this guy is.

Really smart guy in the space, in tech recruiting and all kinds of recruit- marketing. Jim, give us a little quick intro about what you've been doing lately.

Jim Durbin: I have, funny enough, moved almost out of recruitment marketing and into talent operations. It's still sold as recruitment marketing-

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah

Jim Durbin: but the problem really is TA in general has to mature and grow. Yeah. And so I just try... I'm- honestly, I try to be a good partner to all the vendors that are out there, introduce Switchon, to just make sure the projects work. Yeah. And it's a lot of it is working on the TA side. Yeah. Because right now so many vendors are doing stuff they shouldn't be doing because they don't get any instructions.

Yeah. So it's amazing how clear instructions make a difference, and I've [00:01:00] found myself more and more into, how do I fix process? How do I fix conversion? How do I make sure this landing page works for this kind of traffic? So it's fascinating. I'm not building campaigns anymore-

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah ...

Jim Durbin: because there's so much value in fixing our internal side.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah I think that's true. It's the... and you and I can geek out on this but I would gather a lot of TA leaders are trying to think "What the hell you and I just saw- talked about?" Yeah. Which is it's the operations part. It's not the HRIS person that's helping you work, integrate in a work day, but someone who knows your talent pipeline.

They know recruiting. Like you, that- Exactly ... it's the one area and Jeremy Roberts and groups are on top of this stuff, right? Which is-

Jim Durbin: Yeah there's a lot of practice analytics as

Jonathan Duarte: well.

Jim Durbin: And it's growing. Yeah. Like intake calls now. You got Sync to Hire, which tracks everything for managers and puts it into the ATS.

Yeah. So we're filling in the gaps. HR data has always been so bad and so much waste, and we don't have a sense of it because it's hard to know all that. Yeah. And who has done everything, [00:02:00] who's done all parts of it? Yeah. Now it's interesting 'cause we're starting to fill in the gaps. Yeah.

And the more you fill in the gaps, the more visibility you have. You can say, "Oh, I know why this works." It's not just writing a check 'cause you've been writing that check every month. Yeah. It's actually digging in, and you're fascinated and horrified at the same time.

Jonathan Duarte: Yep.

Jim Durbin: But-

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: I call it- ... you're a lot closer to the work.

You can tell when- I, I- ... your work matters, and I think that's what people are looking for right now.

The Candidate Engagement Gap and Missing Requirements (02:30)

Jonathan Duarte: And it's the, Madeline Lorano had mentioned in a recent, maybe it was, like, two weeks ago, three weeks ago a recent report called The Candidate... I don't know exactly the title, but it was around candidate engagement gap.

And that is an applicant tracking system, if you look at the high-level sequence of steps, which is, post job description, candidate applies, interview, and then, onto the next steps. Between interview And the apply, or we should say it in sequence, but the [00:03:00] apply and the interview, that's where most candidates are dropped out, and no ATS tracks any of that because phone calls aren't in the ATS.

Emails, they may be in the ATS, but they don't mean anything. There's no status. So there's no tracking of that whole process. Never has been, but now we can.

Jim Durbin: And we're getting there ... there, there actually is a lot of tracking for it. But even if you can, and you've trained your team and they're using the software and following up, the analytics are done so poorly.

Yeah. The APIs aren't done. And it's because what happens is we tend to go to our IS, we go to a partner and we ask them to build something, and there's almost no requirements gathering. That came from the old software world. Like, where did all the BAs go to? N- I never see that- Yeah ... and no one actually says what happens.

The best they do is grab one recruiter. And it's fascinating to see the mistakes that people make, just basic mistakes on how to hire. Yeah. Yeah. Which is great for us. Us old guys that have been around, we remember paper. Yeah. We know why something occurred. And but no, you can see all that.

Y- anything on a computer you can [00:04:00] see. I can track it from your phone. All the scary stuff about privacy and all that, yeah, that also allows you to see everything that people do- Yeah ... but we're not connecting them. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And in many cases we don't want to connect them, because if you found that out, a lot of people don't like to see the ugly baby.

They don't like to lift the, they don't like to lift the log up and see what comes scurrying out. Because if... And this is the hardest problem in terms of how to prepare a market, how to go to market. Yeah. You cannot tell people that their baby is ugly, and you cannot be too good. If you cut budget so much or improves...

If you're improving something 300%-

Jonathan Duarte: Yep ...

Jim Durbin: everybody should be fired. So you have to actually learn to just improve things in small matters, 'cause otherwise when you do too well, people are like what were we doing wrong?" Yeah. So it actually creates this horrible kind of It's

Jonathan Duarte: a- I, I get... this actually happened to me on one of the deals I'm working on right

Jim Durbin: now.

Constantly. I bet you it happens constantly. Hey,

Jonathan Duarte: oh, it, oh, it, oh, it does. We hear the inefficiencies. Just it's [00:05:00] mind-numbing. But-

Jim Durbin: Yeah, someone moves, a password change, a vendor. That, it's normal stuff, but we're s- we've made things so lean- Yeah ... so lean that losing the wrong per- And it could be the person you pay the least.

That's the funny part.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: I have- That's one of my secrets when I do an audit. I go look for the poor, the person paid the least, and I watch what buttons they push, because that's

Jonathan Duarte: the person doing the

Jim Durbin: work.

Manual Scheduling and the Virtual Assistant Counterpoint (05:00)

Jonathan Duarte: If they're doing the work. Yeah. Yeah. Yep, I have... So I'm working on a deal right now, and the client isn't doing interview scheduling.

They're, or they're still doing it manually in healthcare, 150 recruiters And I'm like, "That's $1.9 million in labor costs that could either be eliminated or strategically be done to get the right candidates in and actually engage, tech schools for nurses and, do all these other things."

And they're a private equity company, [00:06:00] so guess what's gonna happen? If the TA team doesn't move on this, I'll just go right to the CEO 'Cause-

Jim Durbin: Yes ...

Jonathan Duarte: that's, it's private equity.

Jim Durbin: Allow allow me to have a counter to that.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: Rem- remember we had that, I forget who it was one of the voice ones where you could add your own assistant and instead of going to Calendly you just sent out an email, and your virtual assistant, Alex or whatever her name was, would trade it back and it would show up on your calendar.

And then everybody's like- ... "Wow, I love your virtual assistant." Do you remember that? Yeah. It was like 2015. I forget who it was. It was one of the early... not Aria or something. I don't know. But it was something

Jonathan Duarte: along

Jim Durbin: that. Oh, could have been.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: So what hap- I started using that as well, and you know what I found out?

People hated me. Because you schedule a meeting, they've had three or four interactions.

They're excited. They know what that meeting is. It's just a- And you don't even know who

Jonathan Duarte: they are ...

Jim Durbin: it's just another entry on your calendar. And if it's done wrong, you don't know, so you walk in. It's the equivalent of walking in w- an interview.

Go, "Okay, Jonathan, let me see. Let me look at your resume." [00:07:00] That's so demoralizing. Yeah. I'm just now gonna start to pay attention. Yeah. So you took time off, you followed up, you did all those things. I think that's something. So there, there's ways to do it. Obviously, the back

Jonathan Duarte: and forth planning is tough.

Yeah, ours is... We don't automate. We don't... Ours our automation is, essentially text the cl- text the back to the candidate. We're getting 92% conversion rates on that text because the texts are done right. They don't look like they're spam. They're done right. Yeah.

Jim Durbin: Very

Jonathan Duarte: important.

Jim Durbin: Yeah.

They're done right.

Jonathan Duarte: Entirely. Entirely.

Jim Durbin: It's not the doctor's office where they send 13 or 15 or 20 or all those.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: That's the problem, is done right, and that, that's why you actually prot- For leaders doing this, yes, you have to schedule some of this 'cause it is a waste, and also things get lost all the time.

But your recruiters should be involved in understanding how to do that. So if you want to protect the jobs of your recruiters- Yeah ... 'cause the problem is they're doing it so badly right now. It's not just that there's a labor cost. It's

Jonathan Duarte: not a,

Jim Durbin: It's not the human issue. They're doing it so badly-

Jonathan Duarte: It's just

Jim Durbin: that it's, you might as well automate it.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. It's,

AI Messaging, Untrained Recruiters and Eating Your Seed Corn (08:00)

Jim Durbin: it, it's- And you don't have a defense [00:08:00] when someone says- Yeah ... "Cut labor cost," because your people aren't good. All these ig messaging tools AI messaging, when you watch people do it, it only works- Ugh ... if you're terrible. Good people don't need to use those.

Yeah. And don't tell me that they're getting better, 'cause I get all the same messages, and there's no way. It whitewashes that over time. But if your recruiters aren't trained, think of that. Let's not train our recruiters. We're not gonna train them. Oh my God, AI's better than they are. The AI's not better.

It's better than your untrained recruiters 'cause you refuse to train or hire a manager, pay them. Yeah. So you're like, "See? Recruiting was a waste of time." You better hope that AI's perfect. You better hope it's not replicated. You better hope that everything works out, the token costs don't go up. Yeah. But it's a stu...

So how do we do it? You make sure your people are good and use the tools to make them better. Because if not, yeah, why wouldn't you automate a bad process? Yep. You're losing less. Yeah. It's a compelling argument. Yeah. And once you do it, what happens? Once you go down that route of now I'm paying [00:09:00] 20%, you'll never go back to humans, which means you can't correct your process.

It reminds me of Nissan North America. I can tell this story now 'cause it's been over 20 years. It was like 2000 or something like that, I get a phone call from Nissan North America in in Los Angeles. They needed like 20 s- level two techs. Yeah. I was pretty excited. Hey, I just made my quarter.

We're gonna put a bunch of people on, right? And they're like, "But I need them for $18." I was like Even at that time I was like, "Yeah, th- this is like 22 to 26 for these roles."

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: And they're like, "And that's the bill rate." I'm like, "Oh my God, what?" Then I pulled up the news and I saw what had happened.

They had out- they had offshored it to Kashmir, which is- ... in, in India.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. Yep.

Jim Durbin: Kashmir was being shelled at the moment by the Pakistani army, so all the people that were doing their tier two support weren't coming into work because artillery shells were falling on them. So because they planned that out, they immediately pivoted back.

They needed to fix something, [00:10:00] but in their budget they now plan for the new thing. And that's the same thing when they offso- when they offshore, when they outsource, when they move to automation, they've eliminated that part of their budget and there's no way to build that back up. They are- Yeah

literally eating their seed corn in front of you-

Jonathan Duarte: Yep ... '

Jim Durbin: cause they didn't plan it out correctly. And that- Yeah ... that's what's gonna happen to a lot of these companies. If they don't do it right, if you don't protect your internal knowledge, make sure your recruiters are trained, use automation effectively, you're just gonna teach the bosses that this is all automated.

And then when it doesn't work, what do they do? Hire more recruiters? Get a staffing firm. What new recruiters- Nope, they're going to staffing ... are out there?

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: Staffing doesn't have time for this. They're not... It's the same problem. Yeah. They don't hire and train anymore.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: It's fascinating to watch 'cause we've seen this happen a dozen times.

Jonathan Duarte: Yep.

Jim Durbin: This time they're t- they're hiring, half of our industry dis- half of our recruiting industry disappears every 10 years.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: It's people who just... It's an eas- low bar to entry, but it's hard to stick around a long time and do it right. Yeah. And you get better as you're going on. And what's [00:11:00] weird is I don't see how a company's just gonna say let's hire another 100 recruiters anymore," because there's no way the CFO goes for that.

Yeah. So when hiring doesn't work, what do you do? There's not enough trained people on your systems and your pro- I said, I'd... Every client I go into has things that are messed up. Normal. It's a normal part of business.

Jonathan Duarte: Yep.

Jim Durbin: Where are they gonna get someone who learns what the process is? It takes me months sometimes to figure it out.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. And you've seen it all.

Jim Durbin: So how... A- and I know where the, I know where the bodies are buried. Yeah. But that doesn't mean that there's not one person that does one something different or there's a password set out. Yep. So there, there's such a high risk, but there's so little respect for us. Yeah. So the key is who are your vendors?

What are you doing? Do a good job with them. Protect your people.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. '

Jim Durbin: Cause once they cut, that's the death of a company. Yeah. I w-

I had,

Master Burnett, Webvan and Protecting Your Margins (12:00)

Jonathan Duarte: I'll call that right now ... I had Master Burnett on last... one of the recent podcasts. And Master was mentioning similar train wreck stuff where they just cut the [00:12:00] recruiting team to the bone, and then nothing worked, and they spent 12 million on what used to be a $2 million spend on recruiting fees.

And now they're gonna come back, and they wanted him to come back and help them. He's like, "W- why?" And if you're- I have my, I have clients who are investing ...

Jim Durbin: if you're a recruiting company, for God sakes, protect your margins.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: I ha- I have this great story. There's this guy I know, he was a Java developer, and it was Webvan.

Do you guys remember Web- do you remember Webvan?

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. Yeah, the-

Jim Durbin: Yeah, so this is the, their first attempt at- 10 years too early. Exactly. So this guy was really good. His name was Boris Board. He was really good, and they came to him, 'cause they'd worked with him before, and they said, "We need you to do something."

And he goes, "$10,000." And they're like, "That's too expensive. We're not doing that." Couple weeks later, they call him back and say, "Okay, we do need you to do it." And he goes, "It's $20,000." They're like, "You just said it was 10." He was like, "Yeah, but now you've been messing around with it, and I told you." "We can't do that.

We have our own developers here." So he's like, "Let them do it then." They came back a third [00:13:00] time, and he's telling me this story, and then he pulls out this big old picture book of memories, and flips through, and doesn't do it, but just leaves the page open. Guess what it was? It was a check from Webvan for $80,000.

I love that guy so much. Boris was so fa- He had really good borscht too. He lived out on a boat. It was just crazy. But you gotta protect it because why? Everybody's a pro- profitability now. Yeah. So if you have a problem, the, the whole idea of selling, no, no one can afford to sell on re- Finance people are saying they don't want revenue now, it's profitability.

So if you have this, "Oh, I'm gonna do a 33% markup," or, "We're gonna go cheap fees as they're coming in," those companies can't survive because they can't pay their own people.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: So it's all of a sudden you're getting- picky in your clients. Yeah. So companies think there's just somebody out there?

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: Who? Who's paying you

Jonathan Duarte: cheaply-

Jim Durbin: I wanna go- ... and surviving?

Cutting 75% of the Budget and Unused LinkedIn Licenses (14:00)

Jonathan Duarte: I wanna go back to a [00:14:00] post you... maybe we were, maybe it was from our first podcast, but you had mentioned I'm sure it was, like, a year and a half ago or so. You had mentioned, people come to you because, and a lot of stuff you post online in LinkedIn is about, bad optimization or how you can optimize your recruit- marketing spend, especially with LinkedIn or Indeed and LinkedIn.

And one of the times you said you walked in and said, "Yeah, I can cut t- I can cut, 75% of your budget." And the guy's He's like I can't do that." Like- Yeah ... because they... W- what does that mean? That I've been an idiot for five years in my role, and you just whacked all these people and my expenses?

Jim Durbin: Yeah. That's an expensive lesson I learned over and over again. And the reality is that when the, those things fall... But it's because there's waste and there's... it's just how that's set up. Yeah. And it's the systems in which we pay for a lot of that recruitment marketing.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: What's the value

Jonathan Duarte: incentive?

Yeah, and how many LinkedIn U- recruiter licenses are [00:15:00] actually being utilized?

Jim Durbin: Less than 50%.

Jonathan Duarte: Yep.

Jim Durbin: Less than 50% are even logged into. E- every time, man. Every... They all swear, "Oh, my God, I can't do my job without it." And then when you look, they haven't logged in two months. Over and over, because they're busy doing other things.

Because they're reactive- Yeah ... they're, the number of jobs has been doubled, and sourcing's expensive. And a lot of people do it wrong. They start with sourcing instead of starting with advertising. So there's just lots of little things, Yeah ... that go into that. But that is the problem. So I'm always asking for fungible budgets now.

I'm like, "Just tell me how much you have to spend for the year, and we'll hit that in ways that work and that are defensible." And that, that's what I end up doing for a lot of clients. Yeah. So it's great to run pilots and test, 'cause that's the other weird thing. Indeed, first of all, thinks they're gonna get 25% more of your budget, 'cause they grew last year.

After declining for years, they grew- Yeah ... because people are starting to spending, but they want even more, and there isn't. The, I've explained this to some of the time. All of our budgets have grown in the last 20 years. So anybody in recruitment marketing should have done better, because we went from thousands of [00:16:00] dollars in newspaper ads to growth and growth, right?

So now we have billion-dollar budgets. We have people spending real, what we call real money. 'Cause now advertising folks are starting to see it, and they're like, "Oh, maybe there is enough money in recruitment for us." But the problem is when you're spending all that and you're p- paying attention if your budget doesn't grow, the sector doesn't grow.

So now it's how am I using money? And if I get more money, the CFOs are paying attention- I have to tell you why. And we've had a bias for 10, 15 years of whoever's in charge, Monster and then CareerBuilder and then LinkedIn, Indeed. No one really looks at their spending and scrutinizes it. Now they're asking for multi-year contracts, they're asking for guaranteed spend, and they're not interested in working with you unless you spend.

That is straight up their new policy. Integrate with us, spend a bunch of money, use our products, and that's how you get the best from us. It's literally- ... in their investor report. And in- invest in us and we invest in you. Yeah. Which is just mind-blowingly arrogant to say.

Jonathan Duarte: Yes.

Jim Durbin: And yes- No, it's true. If you give us money, we'll spend [00:17:00] more time.

The unspoken is if you're not giving us money, your results will degrade. You'll get less, 'cause the algorithms are set for that. So you've seen some- Yeah ... skyrocketing spending occur from that.

Bill Boorman, Talent Intelligence and Indeed's Plan (17:00)

Jonathan Duarte: I just heard Bill Boorman talked yesterday on a, a podcast of, or a, I would say a webinar on or event with job board owners.

Yeah. And if you don't know Bill- Yeah, 'cause he's working for the

Jim Durbin: AIM Group now. I ...

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. And just phenomenal stats d- just he probably wakes up in the middle of the night and speaks of that no one's ever heard of. And he talked about how Indeed is now, they've got three levels, and you probably know this and you could probably speak to it way better than I, but he, they are using talent intelligence, like how many people are in this market for this type of role, and they can go in because they've got the data, and they can go in and say, "Okay, for this role, you're gonna need our services and a full platform of [00:18:00] services.

And this other admin role, you don't really have to." My guess is they're ... and Bill said, he goes, "Look, if you need truck drivers," they know the, that, that pallet is sitting there not getting delivered. And so they can charge you whatever margin. They're gonna suck up as much margin as they possibly can because you need that pallet to move.

Jim Durbin: That

Jonathan Duarte: is exactly the plan. And an

Jim Durbin: admin- That's exactly the plan.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. And the a- yep. And the admin person, they know that they're not gonna be able to do much. You're just not gonna work because you got 2,000 people applying for the same job.

That is- And they

Jim Durbin: sys- That is exactly is true. But let's- Yeah, and they systemized

Jonathan Duarte: it

Jim Durbin: just let's blow some myths here. Everybody has all those numbers and access to it.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: It depends on how to use it though. We know exactly how many people. Every, every single platform, there's plenty of stuff. You can always tell. It's not that useful anywhere. It's not like hidden data, right?

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Yeah.

Performs for Who? Commute, Data and the Saddest Job (19:00)

Jim Durbin: And the thing to remember with Indeed and any software is when they say, "Oh, it performs better," performs for who? [00:19:00]

Jonathan Duarte: That was like, yeah, Google

Jim Durbin: Ads That's very important- Yeah. ... to see that. So they took that Google Ad is what's called the healthy marketplace. We talked about that years ago. That's what Indeed says.

They mean give us money. They're not even hiding it anymore. There's flat out saying give us money, and I call it the Malcolm Gladwell effect. Just because you know something doesn't mean that you should then listen to the... It's actually a big problem with AI in general, too. Yeah. Just because you've cor- correctly identified something with the facts doesn't mean you then listen.

Yeah. That's what humans do. Here's how I know something, Jonathan, then here's what I would do. And the idea is I've got experience in all that. If I look at something I haven't seen and go, "Here's data. Here's what I would do," that's a guess. That's a test. That's a hypothesis. Yeah. So if they say, "Oh, we know where are all the truck drivers.

Can you get them confirmed and hired at my company?"

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. '

Jim Durbin: Cause Indeed doesn't know how to do that. They have... They're great at understanding behavior on their platform.

But there's no way... It's too complex 'cause every company hires different. There's a brand [00:20:00] difference. There's competition. They don't know.

And you could do that 'cause talk to any of them about your internal processes. Ask somebody from Indeed if commute's important.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: 15 years of

Jonathan Duarte: them telling them that. They don't care. They don't care about... Nope.

Jim Durbin: Why would that be important?

Jonathan Duarte: Or they may be doing a geographic on, oh, they're in the city of San Francisco, so- Yeah

Oakland's fine, or Fremont, which is 20 miles by air, but 40 miles round trip. They don't-

Jim Durbin: What are the public access? What are the roads? How... there's a lot of that goes into it. In all fairness- Yeah ... most people don't, but why do you think they- Yeah ... set it to 25 miles?

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: So because, one, that's hard to understand, but that- simple not understanding of something simple like that. Our thinking disposition data is accurate.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: I keep hearing that. Appcast talks about it a lot. Indeed talks about it. I'm like, h- have you never looked at a system? I think sometimes that's the answer, but it's not- ... in, in all fairness, it's not their fault 'cause our own people don't know this.

Yeah. Our own people don't know what goes on and [00:21:00] how many... Do you know how many... The saddest job in the world is not dentist. It's Power BI, a Power BI developer. It's gotta be the saddest job. Imagine your entire life is a waste. People yell at you they want something, and then they never look at the report.

Use

Jonathan Duarte: it.

Jim Durbin: Yeah. They never log in. SharePoint is filled with millions of man-hours of bad reporting. It's not their fault. It- Because what is at st- Here's a example. Which one of these is correct for a hire status? Yeah. Is it hire offer made, first day, offer accepted? It is the most important, yeah.

There, it depends on what the recruiter put down, depends what the manager puts down Yeah ... if they even put it down, if they even bothered to close the job. So how exactly, if you haven't been taught that, and it's different with every company- Yeah ... do you know what DNA means?

Jonathan Duarte: Only the stuff in my body

Jim Durbin: In staffing it means do not assign, which is different than DND, do not disturb, do not...

It all depends on what you [00:22:00] call it.

Jonathan Duarte: Yep.

Jim Durbin: If we can't even agree on what applicants and candidates are called, how are we possibly gonna go further? AI's cleaning a lot of that up, new data's showing that, but why would you use that? They're acting like they understand hiring, and if they did, God bless them, they'd do great.

But-

Jonathan Duarte: Yep ...

Jim Durbin: it would be a vending machine at that point. And I just don't... I- I get what they're saying. I get where Bill's going, 'cause he has a bunch of fascinating stuff about that. But again, just 'cause a company knows how to do something and announces it in marketing doesn't mean they know it.

And the more... When the tide goes out, you can see he's not wearing swim trunks.

Jonathan Duarte: Hey, did you

Jim Durbin: see- You can see it again and again. So- Did you see Bill's, God bless them for doing it, but-

LinkedIn Staffing and Getting Back to the Hire (22:30)

Jonathan Duarte: Did you see Bill's post yesterday about LinkedIn creating a,

Jim Durbin: Yeah, I argued with him about it ... beta staffing? It's...

No, that's not staffing. I know this because I currently am helping run a staffing firm. Yeah. I'm doing the day-to-day. I'm sitting and talking to them. Yeah. And it's so different than it used to be. Yeah. And it's a big part of the market. And do the big [00:23:00] players have giant revenue? Yes. Yeah. But are they good at what they do, or are they just-

Jonathan Duarte: No it- and that's...

It's clearly- 66% of the market ... they're not even gonna hire. They're not even, they're not even planning on hiring people who are good at-

Jim Durbin: When you're hiring- They already stated that ... 200,000 people, yeah, there's a lot of waste- Yeah ... in that. And there's always room- Yeah ... to carve that out. Yeah. And all you have to do is talk to anybody at those big companies when they spin out into something smaller.

How many are there? They're all there. That's the- Yeah ... beauty of capitalism. Destruction of one company, fun for another. I thi- I think that's the problem. People have gotten so far away from the hire-

...

Jim Durbin: And then they want magic. And this is a TA problem. This is something we're, we need to address because no one...

Nothing we do matters until somebody goes to work.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah, yep.

Jim Durbin: What does it take to get somebody to work? And the nice part is we're learning, but we're relearning.

Jonathan Duarte: Yep.

Jim Durbin: But it's not- So you're- ... interview. It's not status

AI Slop Interviewers and the Coming Shakeout (23:30)

Jonathan Duarte: We were talking in the green room about the AI slop interviewers.

Jim Durbin: Oh, that's so

Jonathan Duarte: funny. The video interviewers. Ha- what have you seen, in [00:24:00] the, this general recruiting AI slop, AI interviewers is one. All these guys doing matching that's nothing more than 52-card pickup with a deck- Yeah ... of cards. Terrible at

Jim Durbin: matching, yeah.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. And w- what have you seen w- how do you think the market's gonna, clear this?

I it's a huge problem.

Jim Durbin: A lot of the AI companies are about to go bankrupt. A lot of the big ones are struggling. That's why- There's a lot of nonsense. You can never believe anything coming out of the press of one of the big ones. Oh- Oh, yeah ... OpenAI is gonna start their own job board.

What? No, they're not. Anthropic, oh, they're gonna have an IPO worth trillions, but they're doing an audit. It turns out they're counting their revenue including credits from other people. There's all this stuff that occurs. Yeah. How are they possibly gonna justify all that spend? The spend only comes from cutting revenue elsewhere, right?

Yeah, and then, and then- The data centers are being built, not fast enough. And when- It's hard

Jonathan Duarte: to do ... and when your CEO says, "Oh, we'd be profitable except for our expenses," you [00:25:00] really wonder if he should be a CEO.

Jim Durbin: Really. They're trying to get the government to interfere and do some regulations. Like that guy that said that we're all gonna die.

Jonathan Duarte: Oh.

Jim Durbin: Dude, that was a psyop. I don't know what's wrong with people believing that kind of stuff. Like, why do we always assume that, "Oh, we're all gonna die from this. We're gonna die from that." And it's possible, but don't tr- don't trust the guy that's trying to make a trillion off of it. "We're all gonna die."

"Then why are you building it?" "I don't know what else to do. Please stop me from building this humanity killing device. And oh, by the way, we're also coming for your jobs." Yeah. That's kinda... That's it. Yeah. But what's gonna happen is a lot of those companies, they've run out of runway. Remember there's a cycle in terms of VC.

So they're- ... we're seeing the consolidation happens. Some of them have very good tech. Some of them came with the best intentions, and they just didn't understand the industry or the, the timing is wrong. It's been hard the last couple years. Money's a lot more expensive, harder to make a unicorn.

Rippling and Deel are coming around and sucking up all the different stuff 'cause they're going employee of record. So they're... A lot of these things will go away 'cause it's so [00:26:00] easy to code them, and they- Yep ... they don't work. And now you have security. And what's really gonna happen is people who took the time to know their business, all the...

it's kinda like the revenge of the nerds, who really took the time to know their business, are building some amazing things. I have a friend of mine, Jason Davis, who's been a- ... semiconductor recruiter, Semiconductor Jobs. Yeah. He was the recruiting.com guy from 20 years ago. Yeah. He still head hunts.

Wow. He built a tool that is better than anything else I've seen out there, 'cause he has so much data and knowledge in the industry of semiconductor jobs. He literally doesn't need your resume or a job description. Where did you work? What time? What was your title? And then he can took... And he actually...

His internal system compares and makes his own. And he's like, "We should sell this as software." I was like, "No, dummy, you're a headhunter. You should just use this to make a lot more money as a headhunter because it's not gonna be the same for anybody else." Yeah. It's a matter of scale, and this is my big concern with most AI projects.

Nobody is smart enough to slow it down.

And that is [00:27:00] killing you. If I- or

Jonathan Duarte: has the authority

Jim Durbin: They always want more.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: Yeah. Oh, I've got 10,000 people in my database. Call them and you'll email them all. Now AI lets you do it magically immediately.

What do you do day two?

Like that there's a reason things get slow, because once they, once you've ruined that... if you apply for Indeed you'll get 30 emails, 30 emails telling you. Even if you get another job, you'll still continue to get them until you turn off on the platform.

So if someone offers the same job for five bucks more, you paid them for the candidate, they're still telling the candidate, "Here's more jobs."

In their defense, if you close the job and they said, "I got the job," they wouldn't keep sending it to you.

But also that's convenient for them.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Durbin: I think that's what happened. A lot of the myths are just falling away. You can see the AI backlash.

I think the biggest damage is AI convinced a lot of executives they don't have to pay for people anymore.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: And that is... Yeah. Stay away. If you're good at what you do, stay away from that. Ask for full price. Do your job well. Get [00:28:00] smaller. And honestly, that's what I've been doing. I'm not trying to get huge, and I've got... I'm s- I've been really busy. I... More busy than I've been since I started the business a couple years ago.

Wow. And it's all based on projects. Yep. And it's outcomes. And when you see that the outcome's working, it becomes very obvious why. It was... We stopped thinking about recruiting. It's

Jim's Projects, DSP Advertising and Indeed's Rising Costs (28:00)

Jonathan Duarte: so- So what are you... So what are you do- what are you doing now? What kind of projects are you working on?

Jim Durbin: I've got a healthcare company, I've got an insurance company, I've got a staffing company, I have a software company a couple of healthcare companies.

And now I'm actually working with Jason Gorham of Talent Xi trying to figure out... He's he's got access to a, a consumer tool that is, It's basically, it's the same, it's the same tool that everybody buys traffic from.

So they're called DSPs. It's real advertising. It's big boy advertising.

The problem is that's never connected well to what we do.

Jonathan Duarte: To talent, yeah.

Jim Durbin: So it's great for branding or impressions, but we don't do impressions or clicks anymore, and our jobs go up and down all the time, so they can't stand working with us. Yeah. [00:29:00] But more and more people are looking at it.

We're looking at our conversions. What do you do when Indeed comes next year? One of the things they're gonna do is they're talking about validating healthcare credentials. Not credentialing, which is a whole different thing. Yeah,

Jonathan Duarte: totally different model.

Jim Durbin: Yeah. That's required to do that. Different process.

So they're gonna pre-credential people with the third... And guess what happens when they do that? Which, by the way, is a simple look-up on a website. Yeah. Jonathan Duarte. NPI.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: Yeah. It's... they're gonna charge a crap load for that. They go, "This is a valid, this is a validated registered nurse.

This is somebody with a license. Now it's $200 flat."

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: And people are gonna start to pay for it. But that, that limit, they're struggling to get new people from that. And so I think a lot of people are gonna freak out because costs keep going up. Call center cost- ... they've doubled in the last six months.

Retail jobs doubled. So it's no longer... I've actually had vendors tell me Indeed is no longer cheap traffic, and that should terrify a lot of people. And then again-

Jonathan Duarte: Finally they're realizing it.

Jim Durbin: It was cheap traffic, [00:30:00] and it still can. There's still lots of tricks, it's just- you have to be...

The models for agencies aren't very good because they're built on a software model. Pay, let program- the, the computer do all the work.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: They don't know how to split things up or test or run everything on the same budget or- Yeah ... split. It's it's pretty- it's pretty wild to watch.

Are you,

Minding the Store and Vendor Attribution (30:00)

Jonathan Duarte: do you have many clients doing that stuff? You're actually trying to help them optimize their spend-

Jim Durbin: I,

Jonathan Duarte: it's funny- ... or is it mostly the whole- ... I just

Jim Durbin: kind of- ... the whole ops ... do that now. Yeah ... I tend to work more with the vendors. I'm still doing it, but it's more, what I've found really is that people just need to, call it minding the store.

And again, this is not the vendor's problem. You're not gonna learn anything with half an hour once a month in your test.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: That was the argument. Give me all your jobs. We can... So you're not posting individually. Give me your jobs, we'll post them and take care of them. Massive amounts of waste, but better than doing it on your own, so why not?

Yeah. Now we wanna know what's happening. Now every time we want... Every time you point a vendor at a problem, you're expecting some crazy results, and most of them [00:31:00] make their money by getting it blended in the wash. It's like LinkedIn when they call you and tell you "You should pay us more 'cause we hired 180 people."

You hired 180 people from LinkedIn last quarter based on our notes. And you're like that's wild, 'cause I only hired 126 people all quarter, so I don't know where you got the one-" Yeah. This happens so much, it's actually now like a... It should be a meme at this point. Yeah. And Dean's always "20% more."

LinkedIn's always, "Look at all the hires we gave you. Give me a three-year contract." Yeah. And the numbers

Jonathan Duarte: never- And then they're, and then they're like, "Oh, do you realize that none of those people who put our company name on their profile, Are real ... work for us?" Yeah. Yeah. "So should you reverse and pay me their salaries because you can't figure out that they don't work for me, and you're trying to charge me, so maybe I should charge you for rebranding them."

Jim Durbin: We... No, we can... It's our fault. It is our fault. The way that this industry grew out because e- everybody who came from TA was a recruiter. [00:32:00] What they're really good at is talking to people, interviewing- Yeah ... and pushing hires through an organization. That is an absolute skill that many people are very good at.

What they're not always good at is tech, finance, legal, because it'd be weird... It's weird to have that kind of experience.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: So what happens is they've been pushed into these roles. Half of them came from HR, which is far more compliance and legal and benefits and other things. And now that everybody's looking at these cost centers, it's like, wow, we really have to step up our game because our budgets are big enough and our cost...

we got people making 250, 300, $500,000 a year- There's c- there's really talented people looking at that going, that actually is a lot easier than what I'm doing," and they're starting to move. So I've seen finance roles begin to move into HR roles.

Which is very different 'cause they look at the reporting different.

Yeah. So if we don't grow up, if we don't solve these problems and understand and work with our vendors and get a good job, other people are gonna come in and take over. It won't be AI- And- It won't be automation, but...

Why Every New Head of TA Hires Ops (33:00)

Jonathan Duarte: Let me ask you about the ops side. W- most of the [00:33:00] people on the podcast are in the HRTA space.

I wouldn't say most are gonna be as technical. But the operations piece, as Kai alluded to just recently on the la- last comments, was it's the business of talent acquisition, which is the technical how do you move data. And we've had HR business process people help. We've had HRIS people help.

But they've never been dedicated on the talent acquisition team. Gotcha. And that it's been the leader who's been saying, "Hey, I need to get this thing done. I got Jim over here who's technical, and I can get some time from somebody over here without doing a lot of political, power to get that person to cross- you know, work with us."

That is what you should be putting money into, I would say, or you're reevaluating spend That...

Jim Durbin: You keep- You- Everybody needs one now. Yeah. And we're seeing these hires. So if you look at any new head of TA- [00:34:00]

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah ...

Jim Durbin: w- one of their first hires- Ops is one of them

well, one of their first hires is the opera- Because the operations person isn't necessarily a leader. No. They're the one who likes to look at the ATS. Yeah. Like all my clients, I have to have full access into your systems, which takes forever 'cause they'll s- 'cause otherwise I, I don't believe what I see, and if you get mad at me 'cause I ruffle some political feathers, you can fire me.

That's the benefit of having a consultant in.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: Some people hire me just to do that, right? That's the whole point- Yeah ... of it. But that, that is it. An operations person, they're the ones catching the bottlenecks that you could never see. They're the ones saying- Yeah ... there are no people here in Reno anymore for us to do that.

When Amazon ran out of people in Phoenix until they raised their warehouse prices four bucks, now they're co- Oh, now there's magically people. Like you do run out of people. But that- Yeah ... operations is a big part of it. Who's my team? It's similar to what happened in B2B when someone s- finally realized that when we're doing sales, we should be attaching marketing to sales.

They never used to talk to each [00:35:00] other. Marketing's like, "Look at all of our leads." Sales is like, "Your leads suck." Eventually they got those connections-

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah ...

Jim Durbin: because there is... and that means more sophistication, multimedia- Yeah ... attribution, all this other stuff that they're still working on, and we're doing the same things.

Talent operations connects your recruitment marketing spend, your employment branding spend, just what's going on in the market to the actual recruiter. So now you can see- What actually ha- oh, you know what? Brian Wurtzel does it. Brian's great. He's at GoHire now. He used to be at Appcast. Before that he was at TruGreen.

Yeah. And he went and took Ana plan and work plan- of Workday. And he just basically looked and said "We have to find some pest control technicians," right? That's spraying for the... And every March we get orders from here because we don't have enough people. So next year I'm gonna talk to that guy two months before things go bad.

We're gonna put the focus on it and we're gonna save that revenue gap. And he could see all that from his systems. He just built that himself. That's exactly what I'm talking about, though. You're being [00:36:00] proactive- Yeah ... and saying, "Hey, every year you have this problem, let's fix it." Or maybe we don't fix it, but quit throwing bad money after good.

This makes TA... Right now everybody's reactive. You're just pulled in every di- whoever screams the loudest is the one who gets attention and budget. And that's just... so you end up working on maybe 10% of your jobs and the rest are just good enough.

Jonathan Duarte: Yep.

Jim Durbin: TA operations now lets you to go, "Okay, the problem is John.

I spent 35% of my budget because he insists on a seven interview thing for part-time workers in that cafeteria," whatever it is that he's doing wrong. It gives you the information. And now you have to have leaders courage, courageous enough to go, "We're not doing this until you fix that.

Here's the data." In corporations, whoever has the PowerPoint wins.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. '

Jim Durbin: Cause if you don't... Oh, you don't have a PowerPoint? 'Cause I have one. I did the work. You're just complaining.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: That is what operations really does. It gives you the understanding.

Jonathan Duarte: Gives you the data.

Jim Durbin: Yeah. And you can pick up source.

You can figure- Yeah ... what the problem is. Yep ... and it's really exciting,

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah ...

Jim Durbin: [00:37:00] because

Jonathan Duarte: it's- 'Cause you can, yeah, 'cause you can find the actual... If you have data, you can find the problem to work for, work on. You- If you don't, you're like- You

Jim Durbin: finally see it, yeah.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. You're buying tech to solve a problem that doesn't exist, or you're trying to buy tech to solve a, to find a problem to solve, and it's just not the right way.

If you get data, if you can get the data, even if it's not perfect, it doesn't have to be perfect, it has to be a signal. Once you can get the signal, then you can figure out, don't spend a ton of money until you actually have good data to actually invest

Dentists in Janesville and What Ops Should Find (37:00)

Jim Durbin: in. Dentist in Janesville, Wisconsin. I had a prospect.

We looked at stuff. They wanted to know if I could use Indeed to find dentists in Janesville, and I was like, "Probably not, but let's eliminate that." So you try to figure out how many are actually there, 'cause it's not a giant place. It's not tiny, but it's not giant.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: Maybe that's not where they are.

'Cause you know I could pull a list of them by going to Google Maps and search dentist.

Jonathan Duarte: Yep.

Jim Durbin: That's where they are.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: It's

Jonathan Duarte: the- Another NPI search, by the way, too.

Jim Durbin: I could I could do a... Yeah, I could just do a search and here's all the [00:38:00] licenses. So maybe they're not, but if you don't know that, you're just hoping that it's a, you insert a button and magic comes out.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: Because even if you could, and then you're getting them and i- and it's... Okay, so now I know I have to do something else for these, but at least I'm not blowing a third of my budget in Janesville hoping that somebody shows up because I don't know what else to do.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: The, "I can't find them" is an accurate statement.

"They don't exist at that price" is an accurate statement. The problem is every recruiter throughout time has always said that. Yeah. It's the whole reason we get paid is... Because of course if you raised your money, oh yeah, if you paid $5 million you'd have no problem filling the warehouse The question is where is it?

Advertising vs. Sourcing, Housekeepers and the TiVo List (39:00)

Jonathan Duarte: And that comes back. So will you... Let's use this as a great example for a TA leader who's getting to understand what you're talking about and about this, do I hire an ops? Or even do I have Jim come in and sub to be an ops to get you to the spot where you can hire somebody when you can justify it?[00:39:00]

Is using this example of can I find people in Janesville, a dentist. If your recruiters are coming back to you and saying, "I can't do this," and you ask them for data and they don't know- they don't even know what you're talking about, that's the problem. That's, that is a pinpoint that you need an ops person.

Yeah. 'Cause that's not a recruiter role ultimately, 'cause a recruiter should be on the phone talking to qualified candidates who meet the criteria and talking to your hiring managers. That's the role. Yeah. It's not calendaring. It's not doing data research, unless they're sourcing 'cause you're not paying for a sourcer or you're not buying the tool.

But guess what? If you had a ops person, they would say, "Look, we have five LinkedIn licenses. Why don't we get Hire EZ to actually do sourcing for us for those roles?" That's how you operationalize that wasted time that the people are doing low-value work on.

Jim Durbin: Exactly. Exactly. You figure out [00:40:00] what your mix is.

Advertising should be knocking 85% of your roles out done right. But you can't mess with it. That's... you don't mess with it. You don't- advertising's not the sniper rifle. Sourcing's set for that. We know these are always problems, so our budget's got to be carved out for this and judged differently, and recruiters have to be trained differently for that.

That's exactly what the problem is because... And the problem is in the past there was always more. I first got good at Indeed by learning their resume section. So we were at Mar- I was at Marriott. I was at PeopleScout working for Marriott, and we were just looking for housekeepers.

And the problem was is that they called them guest environment experts. So bad recruiters would look for guest environment experts. The only people that ever called them that already worked at Marriott. So we can't find people. So others would go look for housekeepers, but housekeepers has two words, housekeeper, house spacekeeper.

So if you just search housekeeper as a title search, it'll pull those up, but some people use it as two words. About half of the population does it different. Yeah. So I would say there's actually twice as many people as you were thinking- ... because you did- [00:41:00] no one trained you in how to look. And oh, the way, what about clean, janitorial, housekeeping aid?

Man, there's a whole list of that. There's far more people, not just on the job boards, but in our databases that we don't know how to search for. That, that is part of the issue as we're going through it. But you have to know that and eventually go, "Okay, there really aren't people that can do this now.

Now we know for sure." Or, hey, l- look at all, look at... I used to do this manually, which is painful, but I was doing a thing for TiVo years ago- And I was gonna walk them through LinkedIn. They're like no, we got LinkedIn." They had three really good recruiters. They were actually excellent at their job, but they hadn't gone as far as I did.

It wasn't search and Boolean LinkedIn recruiter. I hired an 18-year-old in the neighborhood. What I told him is, "Go look up everybody who's ever worked at TiVo, and give me the companies that they worked at before, and the title and the companies they went to afterwards." Went afterwards. Yep. So he built the network list out, and we were able to...

Then it's like a lookalike thing, right?

Jonathan Duarte: Yep.

Jim Durbin: I gave them 84 names. The kid did 84 names, [00:42:00] and like maybe a third of them were in the database. So this 18-year-old with less than a day of training was able to find 60 very difficult set top Linux people, or set top Unix people, which is not the same as regular one.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: We found them. I'm like, "That, that's how recruiters..." So sometimes they are out there. Yeah. We just don't know how to get them, because we don't give people time. But how do you know if someone's wasting time? That's the problem. Sitting on Facebook, LinkedIns. It looks like working- Yeah ... but it's very hard for a manager to know if they're working.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: So th- that's the beauty of this. We... People are like, "Why are we dealing with the same problems?" I would think we truly are.

When You Need a Talent Operations Person (42:30)

Jonathan Duarte: Where do you think... let me ask you this about... So going back to the ops side, where... what size of a company that... You would know this way better than I do, is where a leader...

So if you're a director of TA, maybe you've got... If you're a director of TA, maybe you got seven recruiters, maybe. I don't [00:43:00] know. Yeah, it's all over the place. Yeah. Five, seven, whatever. And then when do you get to the point that you've got enough of a team that you probably have ops issues that you don't realize?

Jim Durbin: I think it's more about the budget you're spending, because that's when it begins- Yeah ... to show. Smaller companies tend to have a process that's driven by their owner or they're driven by people who've been there- Yeah ... for a long time- Yeah ... or something like that. One, they should all have the processes in.

That's one of the beauties of AI just to understand what it is they're doing. But I think it... But once you start spending enough money, and it's probably 10, $20,000 a month it dep- it it's probably- In mar- in marketing

Jonathan Duarte: spend? Yeah.

Jim Durbin: Yeah. But even that, it depends far more on what that is doing.

If you're getting dollar applications, that's... You don't really need that. Yeah. If they turn into $5. So it's when the things that weren't working that used to work don't anymore. Yeah. We still got people who believe in Craigslist and refreshing jobs, and I gotta ban, I gotta ban all those words when we use it.

I think it's more when things aren't working and you keep... If you're bouncing from vendor [00:44:00] to vendor, you're not doing yourself any good. Yeah. It's it's like bad dates, why is it I keep getting these women that try to stab me? You're the y- you're the only one who can answer that.

Jonathan Duarte: I won't ask about how many stitches you got.

Jim Durbin: No, I don't have any, I don't have any. It's, I only date girls that use fla- plastic forks. That's an old joke from a- It is ... very old sitcom. You go to a restaurant- ... with forks when you break up with her, so if she stabs you it doesn't- You didn't think I was taking the podcast in that direction.

That's the answer is really is- Yeah ... you have to understand when are you having problems and can't get things fixed.

Jonathan Duarte: Yep.

Jim Durbin: The... and op- operations, because there'll be fractional ones who come in. There's lo- there's lots of people who've done this. Just someone curious. Someone who knows your system and comes from the inside is curious is probably better for this than just grabbing someone from the outside. Because the person from the outside's gonna ruffle feathers, because nobody likes to hear they're doing it wrong. Yeah. And but, as I said, it takes a little time to learn all of those.

Yeah. What are you willing to pay for, I [00:45:00] charge $3 million an hour

Jonathan Duarte: Damn, you're cheap.

Jim Durbin: Oh, did I say dollars? I meant dosh.

Jonathan Duarte: No, I thought it was rupees.

Jim Durbin: No, I meant... what's that Shiba coin? Yeah, 3 million Shiba coin. I can't remember. I-

Jonathan Duarte: yeah. All right. So this- Put your stuff out there

this, this has been great. I always love just geeking off and finding out, like, all the recent... Oh, I wanted to ask you about your post today on LinkedIn. I think it was yours, that where you talked about... Oh, damn it, was it yours? What did you write on LinkedIn today?

Interview Day at a Dallas Call Center (45:00)

Jim Durbin: Yesterday I wrote about walking people in for the staffing company.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah, that one. And give me a... Te- tell me about the post and then I had a comment that I didn't write yet. But tell me about the post, for the audience. And- Okay.

Jim Durbin: But

Jonathan Duarte: I got three minutes ... 'cause

Jim Durbin: I thought it was interesting I got it queued. Okay. I gotta jump to.

Jonathan Duarte: Okay.

Jim Durbin: I was doing it because especially we deal with big numbers or you're with big corporations, you do lose touch with what happens.

And the issue is when I was a headhunter, I could look you in the eye, I could talk to you, I could see the impact on you, I could see the impact on the company, and that's what fuels a lot of this industry. [00:46:00]

Jonathan Duarte: Yep.

Jim Durbin: When you start doing it at bulk, you get a tiny sliver of credit for hundreds of thousands of hires, but it's not quite the same.

So I've been fortunate to be working with a staffing company here in Dallas, and they needed a bunch of part-time call center reps for- Yep ... some pretty important stuff. It's for heart and vascular health. Yep. So they're looking for certain kinds of people and, but it's a part-time, it was an overflow issue.

So I just immediately, because I used to be staffing, I was like, interview day.

Jonathan Duarte: Yep.

Jim Durbin: So I went down, and it's so scary because you're standing in front of the client. You're, you got, booked interviews for the rest of the day. You don't know who's gonna show. 50% don't show. But when you're talking to them, you get the opportunity to see what they're like.

You realize you're making a difference in this person's life. Exactly. I really liked the manager. She was, like, this super ca- awesome call center. She'd done all this different stuff, and is just trying to do a better job- For their clients and stuff. And y- you, you don't get that when you're working on computers.

Yeah. And so it was just ... it was a weird thing. So I'm sitting there, at one point I'm like, "Man, I could be doing so much bigger [00:47:00] stuff right now." But the reality was that it was, like, good for my soul. It reminds me and it humbles you and reminds you that there are always real people, and that the whole point of this job is putting somebody to work.

That's

Jonathan Duarte: it. That's why I wanted you to end on that. Because all the crap we talk about every day, it's that recruiters and TA teams just forget. That we're ... We have one of the largest footprints of changing people's lives, but most people just don't get to feel that every day. And it's a gift. So thank you for sharing about it.

Jim Durbin: And then they say things- Yeah ... "i fell into it." I'm like, "No, this is noble what we do."

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

Jim Durbin: Great. And you have to. And if you're not getting that, I don't know. It's-

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. Awesome. A heart- All right, thanks, Jim ...

Jim Durbin: a heart for staffing. It's good talking

Jonathan Duarte: to you, Jonathan. All right. All right. Thanks again, buddy.

Talk to you soon.

Thanks for spending your time here with GoHire Talks and listening to our guests. My intention has always been to create incredible content to help you in your career in recruiting, marketing, business, and leadership. We appreciate all of the [00:48:00] insights and feedback you provide. If you've got guests you'd like us to have on the show, please let us know.

Again, thank you for all your support