Getting the ‘RIGHT’ Job

Your Work Friends Podcast: Getting the Right Job with James Hudson

Jobs aren’t magic…

And, they’re not always the right fit for you. Jobs are built, banded, and budgeted—before you ever apply. In this episode, we sit down with Talent Acquisition expert James Hudson (Regeneron, Nike, Levi’s, Net-a-Porter) to break down how jobs are created, how pay gets set, and how to land the role that actually fits you. Plus, we answer your biggest job search questions—and call out some wild hiring trends you should probably skip (yes, even that one with the parents).

Listen to the full episode here

---

Francesca : 0:00

The fact that you can whisper to Alexa and she whispers back is a little creepy. I'm not gonna lie, it's a little creepy.

Mel : 0:08

Sorry to have taught you that, yeah so me and my son.

Francesca : 0:12

So now it's like yes, Francesca.

Mel : 0:18

I am banned from Portland.

Francesca : 0:36

Hello and welcome to your work. Friends were to HR leaders with no filter, but we're exposing the work stuff you need to know I'm Francesca and I'm Mel and Mel, how are you today?

Mel : 0:48

I'm doing great. It is beautiful morning in Portland. It's been Fantastic to spend a few days with you here, seeing the city, planning our year, so I'm excited for 2024. How?

Francesca : 1:00

are you? Yeah, mel made the truck out from Connecticut to to semi snowy, cloudy Portland Oregon.

Mel : 1:09

I've experienced all four seasons in three days. It's great.

Francesca : 1:12

That is Portland in winter. There you are, yeah. Well, now this week we had a really fantastic interview with James Hudson, who is a talent acquisition leader. He's held executive roles at places like Nike, leave eyes for over 21 netta portet and he's a contributor to Forbes, and I think he's just an all-around rad person. We talked to him this week about Getting a job, and not only getting a job, but getting the right job. Now, what did you think about our talk with him.

Mel : 1:44

I think it's so valuable the information that people will get out of this episode, just the tips, good practices, red flags to look out for and wonderful to meet James. He's fantastic yeah.

Francesca : 1:56

So here's the deal, folks today we're going to give you the interview with James Hudson, a talent acquisition vice president and leader. You'll be able to leave that episode understanding how jobs even become a job and how do you really get the right job For you. And we also asked an answer some of the burning questions you all have, like should you negotiate your offer and is it really all who you know? He answers all of that. We'll come back after the interview with our roast and toast. So here's our interview about getting the right job with James Hudson. We are super stoked to have James Hudson with us today. James, how are you this today? How are you today? What's going on?

James : 2:42

I'm pretty good. Yeah, first of all, thank you for having me on your show. It is an honor to be here. I just got back from a long trip over the holidays to Europe and I'm back in what is supposed to be sunny California and it's rain outside my window. So whilst I'm currently working on my job Outside my window, so whilst I'm grateful to be home, the the weather, it's a little bit of pathetic fallacy, it's yeah like outside and maybe I feel a little bit bleak inside.

Francesca : 3:09

But oh, you get past that today. You got to bring the energy, james. You can't, you can't bring the bleak energy. No, it's so funny. I think I'm just north of you up here in Portland. Mel and I are sitting up in Portland today. We're getting snow, you're getting rain, we're getting snow, we're getting snow.

Mel : 3:24

It's, it's coming. I did read, though, that in 40 days, the sunshine is going to stay out until 7 pm Again, so that's moving us from the sad era yeah.

Francesca : 3:34

I think we all needed to hear that today. I think I think James needs some sunshine in his soul. So there you go. You got 40 days to go, james. 40 days. Yeah Well, friends, we're stoked to introduce James to you today. James is a talent acquisition leader and has been an executive at places like Nike, levi's, netta Porte. He's also a pre-massive contributor on Forbes and an all-around rad person. And, james, you and I Overlapped when we were at Nike.

James : 4:04

We share that very unique trauma bond it.

Francesca : 4:07

We indeed do, and if you know, you know, you know, you know. So Today what we wanted to do is give everyone a survey of how this stuff works. How do jobs even come to fruition? How do they go from a concept to like a job board? How does someone find the right job for them Not just a job, but the right job for them, especially from your perspective? And then there's a lot of burning questions that are out there, so we'll do a quick round robin at the end to see what do you think about some of these burning questions. Everybody wants answers to. How does that sound? I'm gonna do my best to answer all these questions.

James : 4:42

Yeah, there will be a test. We will be grading you and judging you at the end.

Francesca : 4:45

So there you go. I'm just so, James. How did you even come into this space as a talent acquisition leader?

James : 4:55

You know, I've been leading talent acquisition teams for a long time now, for the best part of two decades. My last team at Nike, where you and I worked together, I had a team of our hundred recruiters that the team. Before that at Levi's, I had 60 recruiters working for me. So over the course of 20 years I've worked alongside hundreds, if not thousands, of recruiters and obviously met many more peers in the industry at events. And what have you? Of all those thousands and thousands of recruiters that I met, nobody ever intended to become a recruiter, and my story is no different. I fell into the profession Like everybody else appears to have done. If there's anyone out there that in high school, wanted to be a recruiter, please come and find me. I want to talk to you. So my actually, I actually think my story is pretty interesting in that In college, first time around my undergraduate degree, I worked on the shop floor at Gap and ice Dating myself.

James : 6:03

Here in the late 90s in Europe, gap a was expanding pretty quickly and B had fairly innovative approaches to how they manage their workforce, in that they recognize that a large percentage of the folks working for them would be part-time, transient workers, college kids what have you.

James : 6:25

In the UK, unlike here in the United States, it's pretty common to go quote-unquote out of state to college. Obviously we don't call them states but people. You know, people live in one part of the country and Go to college in a completely different part of the country. Back then the cost model was completely different. Our cost model in the UK now is Getting closer to the cost model here. Well, obviously, more frequently people tend to stay in state because it can be cheaper, cheaper, yeah, anyway, you, I like many people in the UK, my undergraduate degree was far from my home and Gap had this program where during term time you could work in your college store and during vacation time you could transfer your employment to your home store, and so they had this really flexible workforce that you could be employed year round.

Francesca : 7:18

Yeah, Get that discount too. Get that discount at home. Got to be looking right in those genes 1969.

James : 7:25

Yeah, that was cool in the 90s. Yeah.

Francesca : 7:27

I know, I know, I'm so what happened to Gap? Because I'm like, I'm still like is Gap still a?

James : 7:32

thing it's going to be. The new CEO just came over from Mattel and was responsible for the Barbie resurgence, so I'm excited.

Francesca : 7:42

I'm pulling for Gap. I'm pulling for Gap Gap banana. I'm athletic. Well, maybe I'm pulling for him all.

James : 7:47

Yeah, san Francisco hometown. Then in my last year of college I ended up moving to the team that hired the staff for all the new stores. So that was my first taste of interviewing and of hiring at scale, and I really enjoyed it, even though I was like 19 years old.

Francesca : 8:04

Making those decisions. I love it. What did you major?

James : 8:06

in.

Francesca : 8:06

Did you even major in HR, or are we Were you like mechanical engineering, my undergraduate?

James : 8:10

degree was art history. Nice, I didn't go back to business school eventually and get a proper degree in something sensible, but yeah, my undergraduate degree at art school was art history Not very useful at all. So, yeah, that was my first taste of hiring. Then, like very many British people, I took a year out after college and went traveling, and I actually stayed away for a year and a half. I spent six months in Southeast Asia and a year in Australia, and then when I got back to London a year and a half later, I had no money at all because I'd basically been on vacation for a year and a half and I have no idea what I wanted to do. And somebody said why don't you go work in recruiting? Because you've done that before and you'll make a ton of money. And I was like, oh OK, that sounds good. And so I interviewed with lots of different search firms in London, without really even knowing what executive search was, and landed a job with a search firm that operated in the sort of retail, head office, corporate retail jobs space, and so that was my first taste of professional recruiting. I did that for three years and what I learned was I loved the people side of search, but I didn't enjoy the cold calling and business development and sales that comes with agency recruiting, and so I knew that I wanted to make the transition to an in-house role so that I could keep the people side but lose the sales and business development element.

James : 9:37

I had just bought a house in London and one of my clients was at the time. This tiny little website had fewer than 200 employees, less than $40 million in revenue, but I just totally believed in what they were doing. Natalie, the founder, was just so visionary. Naomi, the head of HR, who I'd been working with as a vendor, I just adored her, and every week they would send out a list of all the open vacancies that they had and ask us and their other search partners which we could fill. And one week the list came through and they wanted their first in-house recruiter on a six month contract, and I knew that was it, and so I took a 50% pay cut and left a full-time job, even though I had a mortgage to pay, because I just really believed in what Netaporte were doing.

James : 10:30

And still, 20 years later, it's the best career decision I ever made, because when I joined it was this tiny, tiny company and I was just super fortunate to be right place, right time and to be able to grow with the organization for the best part of the near decade that I was there. We had triple digit year-over-year growth, so complete hypergrowth. We opened offices in New York, in Hong Kong, in Shanghai. We opened distribution centers around the world.

James : 11:02

I got to build out the internal recruiting function. In my first year there I hired 150 people on my own. By the time I left, nearly a decade later, we were hiring thousands of people every year and I established recruiting teams around the world. They sent me to business school and it was just the most amazing experience because I was having practical, real-world examples of everything that I was learning in school, because the business was growing so fast. We went through three rounds of M&A so I got to see both sides of the corporate transaction and I think everything that happened during that first decade then enabled me to make the transition to much larger scale quote-unquote corporate America where I've been ever since Right now.

James : 11:48

I'm resting, but yeah, well-deserved rest.

Francesca : 11:52

Well-deserved rest too. It's interesting, too, when you know you're running towards something right, even though it means a 50% pay cut, even though it means a smaller footprint, but then it turns into something exponential right, and it turns into something that sounds like it just married your gap experience, your agency experience, just from a global perspective too. Even that art history, I'm sure, came into play somewhere. Somehow. Design is design. And then you've gone on to things like Levi's, nike, et cetera too, and just kept on growing your career. It sounds like.

James : 12:28

Yeah, exactly, If Nettaporte hadn't grown so quickly, I don't think I'd have been able to make the transition from dot com to corporate America, just because of the scale and complexity.

James : 12:41

But by the time I left Nettaporte I had teams that I directly managed in Shanghai, Hong Kong, a very large team in London, I had a technical recruiting team in London and then a non-technical SGNA team in London and then another large team in New York.

James : 12:57

So because I'd already been able to have the global experience, the cross-border experience, multi-lingual recruiting experience, that then enabled me for my first big job, which was Levi's in Europe. So I moved to Levi's, moved me to Brussels, and so for two years I was crisscrossing Europe rolling out the workday technology and re-establishing the recruiting function in the region, and then from that job I was promoted to the head of recruiting role in California. So that brought me to San Francisco eight years ago now. And then my most recent job was head of talent acquisition for Nike's director consumer businesses worldwide. So, as you know, Nike's roughly $50 billion in revenue or it was maybe not this year and the director consumer piece was roughly half of that. And so my team worldwide hired 40,000 people a year for all of the satellite offices and stores around the world.

Francesca : 14:01

Yeah, this is the thing and one of the reasons why we wanted to talk to you today, because I think most people that don't sit in HR or sit in talent acquisition, I don't think most people understand how big and complex recruiting organizations, internally at companies, are. So if you're in a fortune, if you're trying to get a job at a Fortune 500, 1,000, 5,000 firm, you're going to be dealing with a very large team of people that are incredibly skilled at trying to find the best person for the role Sometimes, yeah.

Francesca : 14:34

Listen, there are some real dipshits out there. That's actually true in every single team and everybody knows that. But there are systematic tools, processes, procedures in order to find the right person for the role and, a lot of times, some great people and sometimes some dipshits. So one of the things that we wanted to jam with you about, james, was to kind of educate people on how does something go from a concept like we need somebody in this role to a job posting. I'm wondering if you can open the hood for us and just share. How does a job become a job? Almost like how does a bill become a bill. How does a job become a job?

James : 15:11

It's a great place to start, thank you, thank you. It's one of those areas where there's a ton of myth and misunderstanding. Quit. Let me caveat this by saying everything I'm going to say is from the perspective of large scale organizations, fortune 500 size companies and obviously in smaller organizations you know 100 people organizations everything is a bit looser.

James : 15:42

But the second that you get to any kind of scale, there is a huge amount of rigor and guardrails in how the business is run, and especially once that, because that business becomes publicly traded, there are rules and laws around what you can and cannot do, and that bleeds into every part of the enterprise and obviously HR is no different than any other part of the enterprise. There are rules, regulations and, in many cases, laws around what we can and cannot do. So caveat number one In any large organization there is a strategy which is, you know, often a three to five year plan, and there is an annual operating plan or budget, which is the shorter term, you know, six to 12 month horizon plan, and everything is captured in that plan. For most organizations, irrespective of industry, for most organizations the number one overhead is people. Yes, labor.

James : 16:48

The wage bill is the biggest expenditure and therefore subject to the largest amount of scrutiny. Organizations have a very clear idea at every point. So over the next 90 days, over the next 180 days, over the next year and over the next five years, what their wage bill is going to be. This is all a very long way of saying. Jobs are planned way in advance and as recruiting teams, we play a role in how those roles are brought to market. But we do not create those roles, we do not decide those roles. They're decided by at the highest level of the organization, then with the leadership teams within each function, with their finance teams way in advance, so that the biggest expense of the organization can be controlled and measured.

James : 17:49

In any normal established organization, 80% of jobs that are hired are going to be backfill or replacement for people that have left and roughly 20% are going to be net new headcount growth.

James : 18:03

That has been decided as part of the budget and strategy strategy process to decide we're going to grow this discipline or in this market or in this geography and therefore we need to add x amount of headcount so that 20% of headcount is pretty fixed because we've decided we need x amount of people in Germany or India or in data science, for example.

James : 18:28

The 80% is a little bit more ambiguous because obviously we don't know in advance who is actually going to leave, who's going to get another job, who's going to get promoted, what have you? But we know that in any given year, 20% of your workforce will leave one way or another, so you know that you're going to have to backfill 20% of people. So if your organization is 10,000 people, you know that in any given year you're going to have 2,000 vacancies to fill. You don't know exactly where they're going to be, but you can broadly assume, based on the size of the individual functions within your organization, we'll have 200 to fill in finance, we'll have 150 to fill in marketing, and so that's kind of at the highest level. What's going on with like how headcount is created and how roles come and go and exist within an organization?

Francesca : 19:21

Yeah, I think that's important, though, to know, because I just even know that most organizations are looking at like a 20% of the open jobs they have every year net new right we decide we're going to start making paper clips right Now we need paper clip makers, and we've historically been paper makers, for example. I think that's really important to know, especially because when people one of the questions we get a lot is especially around layoffs, for example, like how can people have open jobs and lay people off at the same time, and a lot of sometimes that's because a skill gap right, Because people we still need to hire the paper clip makers and we had to lay off the paper makers, if you will. So I think it's just helpful to have that context of how these things come into bear annually.

James : 20:05

Yeah, totally so. Then let's get into how the business is operating day by day.

Francesca : 20:11

Yeah.

James : 20:12

I'm running a team in finance and I know that for this quarter ahead I've got two net new headcount that have been assigned to my team that I can hire in this quarter. I can't hire them any sooner because the cost of that headcount is phased into the overall operating plan and if I'm the leader of that team and I want to hire those roles early, I can't just open them. I would have to get approval from either the leader of the function or maybe even up, depending on the size of the organization, maybe even up to C level. That's how tightly controlled costs are in most organizations. So even though the headcount exists, the headcount exists from a point in time, from a point in the budget, and if you can't even bring it forward because that would be adding more costs that wasn't planned for. So I think that's an important caveat that new headcount is phased and is hired when it's supposed to be hired Then if somebody resigns from the team and again, depending on the organization, it isn't even an automatic one-for-one approval that we could replace the finance manager that resigned.

James : 21:24

You often still have to go through an approvals process to get that role opened and the leader of your function may decide to reassign that headcount elsewhere and you might not get to backfill that role. But only after all that has happened does the role get passed to the recruiting team. The recruiting team just executes on a plan that has already been set. We're not responsible for creating headcount, for gatekeeping headcount, for deciding on which roles get filled. That is all done at the leadership and at the HR business partnering level.

Francesca : 21:58

Yeah, I think it's really important for people to know too, because a lot of times, when people interview for jobs, there's a difference between the hiring manager, the person that is going to be your boss, right and there's a and your recruiter. And this is why it's because the person that is going to be leading you is not the person that's going to necessarily be finding you and taking you through the acquisition process. Those are two separate people 100%.

Francesca : 22:21

Yeah, interesting. Yeah, the other thing I'm curious about is do you find that in most organizations like, for example, when I've been leading teams before I had $2 million for payroll, that was my payroll budget and I could decide how those roles and that pay was distributed among roles? Do you find, too, that when you have a job rec open that you're given a dollar amount? Like so, for example, you've got a job role open and this role cannot exceed $100,000 a year, $200,000 a year Are you typically also given a dollar amount too when the job rec opens? Just out of curiosity.

James : 22:59

So there's a few different things at play here. As the leader of the organization, it can happen in a few different ways. You can be given a total number $2 million and therefore you can hire 20 people $100,000, or you can hire two people at $1 million each. Yeah, in some organizations you're given both size and shape. You're given $2 million is your headcount budget, but you can only hire one leader, three managers and 10 associates, and so then that $2 million is already portioned out for you.

James : 23:37

Irrespective of how that happens to you as the leader of the organization, when you decide how your headcount budget is going to be spent for net new hires, those roles then need to be graded and leveled, because and again this is in larger organizations there are set bands and steps in the compensation framework and all roles are anchored to those bands and steps, and in a large organization there can there's typically 16 different steps in the pay hierarchy, so the bands run horizontally and then across the bands running vertically are job families, and so a level one role in finance will have a salary range and a level one role in marketing will have a salary range, and whilst they will be similar, they will not necessarily be identical because the ranges are anchored back to the organizational compensation philosophy, which is either tethered to the cost of living or the cost of labor in the market where the organization is either operating or hiring talent.

James : 24:54

So there's a huge amount of complexity in the background as to how roles are graded and priced and so as a recruiter, when you're given a live role, you know exactly where it sits in the organizational hierarchy it's a level five. It's a level five role in finance. So you know the salary band for that role. Roles are typically pegged at the midpoint of the range, so $125,000. So as a hiring manager, you will be told okay, you've got a level five role and it needs to come in at $125,000. But then your HR business partner might say well, actually the rest of your team is pretty legacy.

James : 25:47

And therefore their salary level are all around the sort of $115, $120,000. So you can't even go to midpoint. You can only go to 90% comp ratio for this hire to maintain internal equity. And so as a recruiter, when you get the live role, you get a lot of pieces of information about where this job has to land, whereas recruiters do not decide. We have to execute against what the budget is based on. All of those factors I've described.

Francesca : 26:20

Going back to what you started, this conversation with. This is so complex. It can get incredibly complex in terms of the amount of people in the room making the decisions from top to bottom. All the variables that we need to consider, even from bands that are well established to things like pay equity on a team to make sure that things are equitable and that you're also competitive right in the marketplace from a talent perspective. It's just really good to know, because if you've never been in HR or in talent acquisition or a hiring manager, most people don't know this and would be like well, I just want to make a million dollars a year, can you do that? It's like no, you're a level five in finance and this is the midpoint, and that's why Also good to know that there's just things like bands and pay equity as well, just to understand the lay of the land. I know, mel, you wanted to talk about finding a job, and not only finding a job, but finding the right job for you.

Mel : 27:16

Yeah, I really love earlier how we talked about your story, james, that you ran towards something that had a fire in you, and we want everyone to feel that way right, so want to make sure folks are finding the right job, not just landing a job, and would love your tips and tricks on that.

James : 27:32

A great question and it's, I think, very timely, in that we're living in an information age where we have far more transparency in all areas of our lives than we did even a decade ago, but there is still a degree of opacity around what it's like inside organizations. But yeah, we're also living in a time when we have five different generations in the workforce in some organizations, and the expectations of Gen Z are wildly different from even millennials, and I just think it's really interesting how these expectations and demands of the newer workforces are changing the work landscape and hopefully for the better, because what we have has not worked for so many different parts of society. Right, it's very clear that how we've run things up to now has not been great.

Francesca : 28:42

Yeah, it kind of sucked. I think this is the thing that a lot of people don't think about.

Francesca : 28:47

I was telling Mel this the other day when I first started working. So I'm 44, right when I first started working, my first job was at Accenture and I got a desktop and I remember I loved my time at Accenture. It's not an Accenture, but I remember being in the office and working until 10 o'clock at night and there was not a question of whether or not I was going to work. This is what was expected. You earn your stripes, you labor so you can get to that partner level. That was what was expected and I love the idea. We've been talking a lot on the pot around. Do we have to live like this? Do we need a dream of labor? And I feel like your Gen Z is coming in and being like guys. This blows what are we doing?

Mel : 29:26

Yeah, my favorite tic-tac recently was a young woman who just started her first full-time job and I really had empathy for her because she was like is this, it Is this life? I work, and then I have no time for my friends or any of my hobbies. I work, I come home, I go to the gym, I cook dinner, I go to sleep and it's like Groundhog's Day and she was having somewhat of a panic attack about it. Right, and she made a good point. Francesca, you and I have the same kind of history there. I also had a desktop in my first job in big law, working until 10, and then you get home and you're like just recycled. But we were always told this is what's expected. I really love that.

Mel : 30:06

Gen Z is bringing a different perspective and millennials started it a little bit. I like to see that Gen Z is really kind of demanding more transparency in the workplace, including recent laws around salary transparency, even in job descriptions. I think now it's more important than ever. How can people find the right fit? So one of the things that's an interesting topic to me is the legitimacy about what the culture is like, what you're going to experience in the workplace. How can people find that information out? So if a candidate's going out and they're researching different companies for the job that they're looking for, how do they know that that company is legit about what they're putting out there and it's not just kind of word, lip service, on their website?

James : 30:54

And what's great about? I mean, there are a lot of negatives to living in the information economy, but what's great about the information economy is that it was so much more networked than we ever were before. So my number one tip is obviously start by trying to connect with people on LinkedIn that work at the company or companies where you're hoping to work, and obviously try and connect with a cross section of folks, so people within your discipline. So if you're a marketing, obviously focus on the marketing team. But also, what's great about LinkedIn is LinkedIn will help you find the people that are most active on the platform. So go where it's warm, right? So if you want to work at Nike and actually the people at Nike that are most active on LinkedIn are in supply chain well, start there, right, because they still work at the organization. So target folks at the places that you want to work and start to make connections with them on LinkedIn, and then the more time that you spend with them virtually will hopefully lead to at least a coffee chat where you can ask them what it's really like. Tip number one yeah. Tip number two Glassdoor is a great resource.

James : 32:09

If you take it to the next level, glassdoor is like Yelp, right Right. It's polarized, in that you've got a lot of positive and a lot of negative, because those are the people that are mostly motivated to say something. So you have to be a little bit discerning when you're reading reviews on Glassdoor. Still will tell you that the average user reads six comments before they form an opinion. I would say, okay, read 30. Do you know what I mean? Like this is somewhere you're going to be spending 40 hours a week for the next two, three, five years. Like read as much as you can to get more of a sense of are these just angry people or is this a theme that may or may not be concerning to me? And then where it gets really interesting is last year Glassdoor launched really powerful new functionality, which hasn't had much airtime and I really wish more people knew about it, in that they allow you to slice the data by demographic and so on Glassdoor. Right now, you can see the average company rating for the employees that work there and it's out of five and they might have a 3.5 or a 4.0.

James : 33:30

And then what you can do is slice it by demographic and say well, what do women think? What do LGBTQ people think, what do people of color think and what's really? And I encourage everyone to go and try this. What's obviously really disappointing is that for virtually every company out there the underrepresented folks, their scores are always lower In every organization, even your dream organizations. Women, people of color, lgbtq folk consistently have a worse time than the general population. That sucks, but that's the society that we live in. What I encourage folks to do is look at the Delta. If you accept, rightly or wrongly, that it's always going to be lower for those of us that are not straight white men, look at the Delta and where the number is, particularly where the gap is particularly big. That might indicate not might it does indicate that that organizational culture is not somewhere that you would thrive, irrespective of how you identify. Do you want to work in a place where women, lgbtq folk and people of color consistently have a worse experience?

Francesca : 34:45

No, the answer is no, absolutely not. Don't go there. Yeah, exactly.

Mel : 34:52

Oh, I love that feature because I think it's incredibly important to gain that perspective, especially as a woman. If you're LGBTQ, if you're a person of color, being able to see what that experience is like it gives you that inside look into the culture.

James : 35:09

There's no smoke without fire, right? If there are consistently people saying really terrible things about the place that you want to work, there may be some truth in that. And then my last tip is if you get as far as an interview at your quote unquote dream organization, again, irrespective of how you personally identify, ask if the organization has ERGs employee resource groups and then ask as part of your interview process if you can meet with someone from that group either a group that you identify with or a group that you're an ally to and if they don't have ERGs, red flag number one. And if they have ERGs but won't let you speak to anybody, red flag number two. It tells you that something shady is going on and you don't want to work there.

Mel : 35:58

What other red flags should people look out for in the job description interview process? What are some things that stand out to you that folks can pay attention to?

James : 36:08

There's a ton of click-batey articles about these red flags in job descriptions, and I'm super wary of that because, again, coming from having worked in a side corporate America for a long time, I know that job descriptions can often be literally 10 years old and have been no relation whatsoever on what it's actually A what the job is or, b what it's like to work there, and so, yeah, you never know who wrote the job description or how old it is. So I don't know that there's anything super valuable that you can get from that. It's more what you can pick up on by people that are currently working there either what they're saying on review sites, what you're able to glean from them by networking on LinkedIn, or what you're able to discover during the interview process. I think that's your best barometer.

Mel : 37:05

That leads me to my next question. Around the interview process, you're in the interview, especially since a job description, as you said, it can be old. Sometimes they don't get updated for years, as you mentioned. So what are some questions candidates should ask in every interview to make sure that they understand what their duties will be? What does their day-to-day look like? What does the team look like? What are some things that they should ask, no matter what, just to get a very clear picture of the truth, of what their experience will be like in that position.

James : 37:38

Yeah, and before I even get into specific questions, I think it's about remembering and framing it in your mind that the interview is a two-way street.

James : 37:52

You're interviewing them just as much as they are interviewing you and what is scary. But what you have to get really good at is that when you come out of an interview and you think, oh hell, no, then you have to hold on to that. You have to be like no, trust it. Yeah, I have decided no, because, especially in a market like this, where it's so easy to fall into a scarcity mindset, we come out of an interview thinking that, ooh, I've got a bad feeling and then we talk ourselves into it because we need to get a job. Trust your instincts. If you get a bad feeling, there is a reason for that.

Mel : 38:30

Trust your gut. I've had that feeling before. Have you ever walked away from an interview process after an interview and just said no and sent them a note about it?

James : 38:41

I have done the opposite of that. I've done what I've told people not to do, in that, if you look at my career history, you'll see that I'm a tenure guy. I tend to stay around in places for a long time and wherever it's been a short tenure, it's because and there's only two of them it's because I found out too late that my personal values did not align to the values of the organization. And I had a very brief stint at Forever 21, which, since I left it, went bankrupt and is now owned by a VC firm. So I feel comfortable saying this. But when I went to interview at the HQ in Los Angeles, there were Bibles in the meeting room and I was like this is weird, like religion does not belong in the workplace.

Mel : 39:41

Absolutely not. That's strange, that's very strange.

James : 39:45

Yeah, and it's because the family that owned at the time were very strong believers in their faith, which is great. But that does not belong at work and obviously I ignored that giant red flag and was one of the more toxic environments I'd worked in because they were trying to mix their personal views with corporate America and those two things I will tell you.

Francesca : 40:10

That has been absolutely true for me too, like I've had two jobs that I knew in the interview process no bueno and they ended up being no bueno, and it's almost like dating. You know you date somebody and like week two you know week two like the thing that's going to end it. It's like food poisoning as well. Right, you can eat a whole day's worth of stuff, but you knew it was the fish. You know that's the same shit. It's the same shit. Love the advice. Don't do it.

Mel : 40:39

Just say no, just say no.

James : 40:41

Trust your instincts.

Mel : 40:42

I recently read that there's a proposal to pay people for their time in the interview process to avoid this type of thing. What do you think about that?

James : 40:58

I really strongly believe that if you are going to be setting folks any kind of take homework or any kind of lengthy assessment, you should pay them for their time.

James : 41:14

You certainly shouldn't be requiring people to give you their IP for free, right? However, having worked on the other side of the desk in corporate America, trying to bring any of that to life would be such a nightmare, both in America and in Europe, where we have different sets of rules and regulations. Like you're essentially trying to either payroll someone that's not already on the payroll or create, make a new vendor for someone that's not a vendor, and for anyone that's worked in corporate America, you know that doing either of those things is an administrative nightmare. So trying to get to a place where that happens at scale, I just don't see it happening anytime soon, because you know how are you going to pay hundreds or you know, in my case, hundreds of thousands of people that are going through an interview process, and not just the money, how are you going to fund it, which is question one. But even assuming there is a budget for it, how are you actually going to physically pay these people, right? Just, it's not going to happen.

Mel : 42:25

Yeah, that's complicated it can be. It's its own whole department just managing that alone.

James : 42:29

How are you going to ensure that they pay their tax so that they've identified you from their tax, are they?

Mel : 42:33

1099?.

Francesca : 42:36

Yeah, I feel like everybody's getting target gift cards Be happy.

James : 42:40

Even that's questionable right.

Francesca : 42:42

Yeah, there are rules.

James : 42:43

Yeah, yeah, like.

Francesca : 42:45

Oh yeah, you can't go over.

Mel : 42:46

Yeah, there's a lot of complication. It's interesting. I've heard that tossed around a few times now. It's an interesting concept.

James : 42:55

Nice idea. I just don't see it being executed at scale.

Mel : 42:58

Yeah, yeah. In terms of the inner how many interviews? How many is too many? What's what's a red flag a candidate should look out for In terms of you know, now you're on your 15th interview for this role. Is there a magic number or a place where you're like, if you're getting to this many interviews, you should probably hit pause? That should give you that's a red flag that you should look out for.

James : 43:26

I love this question because there is a clear, unequivocal answer which I wish more people knew. Over the course of three or four years, Google did a huge longitudinal study where they looked at tens of thousands of hires and hundreds of thousands of data points, and they were able to conclusively prove that the magic number for interviews is four, Because after four the quality of the decision making process does not improve enough to justify the initial, the further investment of time. The sweet spot for high quality decision making is for interviews, and so any forward thinking and well run TA function knows that because they've all read Laszlo Box book work rules. If you haven't read work rules, I encourage you to go out and read it. It's phenomenal, not just for hiring but just for how Google think about or thought about people back when Laszlo was running HR. So four is the magic number. Most places in corporate America, probably for senior level roles, probably still around six. Anything beyond that is just a joke.

Mel : 44:55

It's a waste. Yeah, it's a time waste. Well, we'll link to that recommendation in the show notes because that's a great recommendation for folks. So we'll do that. For job seekers, I read your post today on LinkedIn about the post pandemic job market, so I'd love to give space to talk about what job seekers should know about this post pandemic job market and finding success and finding the role that's right for them. What advice would you give?

James : 45:21

Sure, I think what's really interesting that's happening right now is a perfect storm that is exacerbating conditions that have been prevailing for a while. What I mean by that is, in the talent marketplace there has always been a signal to noise issue in that a decade ago, a job posting or job ad might receive 100 applications and in every part of the enterprise in every geography that I've worked in, the numbers are always the same. In aggregate, of those 100 applications, roughly 25 of them will meet the minimum criteria for the job and 75 are just not qualified at all. And part of the recruiters job is to separate the signal from the noise right to find amongst those 100 applications the 25 that qualified, to speak to those 25 people and decide of those 25 who were the six or seven that most closely match the brief from the hiring manager and take those into the process At the highest level. That's, you know, a big chunk of the recruiters job for dealing with inbound applications.

James : 46:42

And then we'll move on to today, where we are living in the after effects of the massive structural changes to work and labor that the pandemic created, the macroeconomic tsunami that we've all been through and the significant strides forward in consumer facing tech, which, to be clear, all good things. As a job seeker today, as an applicant, today, you have so many powerful tools that enable you to turbo charge your application process, which is fantastic. What that means, though, is that a because of the macroeconomic situation, be because more people have had a taste for remote or hybrid work and want to pursue that, see, because we've got so much more visibility in the age of information. And D because of the powerful tools that are now in the hands of everyday job seekers, application volume has gone up 10 or 100 X. So a job oh yeah, you could get 100 applications could now get 1000 or 5000. And those ratios are still the same. Of those 1000 applicants, still only 250 people are going to be qualified in 750 and not, but a recruiter cannot speak to all 250.

James : 48:02

No way, and so it's the signal to noise issue has just gotten so much worse. And, yes, you can send out more applications and send out more curated applications and send out better applications, but your chances of the application being seen by the right person have diminished exponentially.

Mel : 48:21

And so, what can they do?

James : 48:23

to navigate.

Mel : 48:24

What? What can candidates do to kind of cut through the noise, especially if they feel you know pretty strongly that they they fit the profile. How can they cut through that noise? I see on LinkedIn all the time you see how many folks have applied for the job, which can be super intimidating. So how can you kind of put yourself ahead of the pack if you're qualified?

James : 48:47

So there's a few things. That number that you see yeah, it's not the number of applicants. The number that you see is the number of people that have hit apply, oh OK, which is different from the number of applicants that are inside the ATS.

James : 49:03

That's misleading yeah well, it's not misleading. Okay, that's the data that LinkedIn have which is valid. That's a number of people that did click apply, but I can tell you from sitting on the other side of the desk that the attrition from apply to applicant is massive. Okay, in that, in a volume environment, so you know companies that are hiring 10,000 people a year or more the average pull through is 16% and in one place I worked that may be a place that someone else on this the pull through was 1%. Oh, wow. So for every 100 people that click apply, only one applicant made it into the ATS, into the applicant tracking system, because the application journey was so cumbersome that 99 out of 100 people gave up. In most places, it's 16 out of every 100 that will come through.

Mel : 50:07

So you do not be intimidated by that number. If it's a high number, that's good to know.

James : 50:11

Do not be intimidated, because most people won't complete the application.

James : 50:14

Okay, and of all the people that do complete the application, only 25% of them are going to be qualified, but, that being said, it can still be hundreds or thousands of people that do all of that Right. So there is still a signal to noise issue. It's just not as bad as it appears on the surface to the everyday user, but I see both sides and it is worse than it was before, and recruiters have this deluge of applications to deal with. So just submitting your application is no longer enough, because if you just submit an application, it might never get seen. So you also need to try to figure out who is the recruiter at the company and get in touch with them, and who is the hiring manager and getting in touch with them, and ideally get a referral from somebody that already works there, because candidates that are referred by existing employees often go into a fast track processing lane and your application is more likely to be seen Not guaranteed to be seen, just more likely to be seen. So you have to go the extra mile.

Mel : 51:25

Yeah, at a minimum if you have a referral. Typically my experience in the past is when I worked in TA2, if it was a referral coming in, at a minimum we had at least a one-on-one screening interview with someone from talent acquisition to meet with that candidate, just as a bare minimum.

James : 51:41

In larger organizations? Sure, in smaller organizations maybe not.

Francesca : 51:46

And you can use LinkedIn to do all of this. You can be using LinkedIn to figure out who the recruiter is, figure out who the hiring manager is, send them an email. Linkedin is a great product, but LinkedIn is your place. Where you'd want to do this, yeah, 100%.

Mel : 52:00

What if the recruiter is not listed on the job rec on LinkedIn? What's a good way to identify who the recruiter may be or to get in touch? What can people do?

James : 52:11

Yeah, and by searching LinkedIn right for recruiters at Nike, for recruiters at Apple and, bear in mind, at large companies, there will be hundreds of recruiters.

James : 52:24

And so then you need to figure out, okay, and recruiters are normally obviously very active on LinkedIn.

James : 52:32

So once you find people that you think are going to be in the right area, then you need to figure out okay, this person's a recruiter at Apple, but do they recruit product managers or do they recruit marketing folks?

James : 52:44

You need to figure out what their area is, and you can usually see that by what they say on their profile, all the types of things that they post, and the closest you're going to be able to get as a normal user is figuring out the recruiter at the company in the broad job family that you're targeting, and then reach out to that recruiter and say, hey, I've applied for this role, and give them the unique reference number or whatever you get from the applicant tracking system, explain in three very short bullet points why you've applied, why you're a fit, and ask them to connect you with the right recruiter.

James : 53:16

If they're not, obviously, just make their lives easier. Now you might still not get a response, but you will stand more chance of getting a response. If you work in supply chain and you reach out to a supply chain recruiter, they're more likely to respond because they'll be able to see that you're qualified for the job that you've applied for. And if you're consistently doing this and consistently not hearing, then maybe it's time to ask yourself are you being honest with yourself and the types of roles that you're applying for?

Mel : 53:46

Yeah, that's great advice. Just don't keep repeating the same thing if you're starting to see a trend for yourself.

Francesca : 53:56

There's a lot of just burning questions around getting a job and telling the acquisition, and so I thought let's do a rapid round with you. You can answer yes, no or a one word answer. Are you ready to play?

James : 54:09

Yes, I'm going to really struggle with one more answer, but I'm going to try.

Francesca : 54:12

Okay, I believe in you. I believe in you. So, rapid round with James about getting a job. James, is it all who you know?

James : 54:22

No.

Francesca : 54:24

Should you put the green banner on in LinkedIn if you want to get a job?

James : 54:28

100%, and let me talk about that later.

Francesca : 54:30

Okay, should you do a cover letter? Do cover letters matter anymore? No, should you customize your resume for each role?

James : 54:38

No.

Francesca : 54:38

Thank you notes Do we write them or not?

James : 54:40

Yes.

Francesca : 54:42

Should you negotiate your offer?

James : 54:43

Yes.

Francesca : 54:46

Should the interview process last no longer than 60 days.

James : 54:51

Depends.

Francesca : 54:52

Should you quit your old job before starting your new job?

James : 54:56

Ideally not All right.

Francesca : 54:59

I want to go back to. Should you put the green banner on if you're looking at LinkedIn, the open to work banner? This is such a hot topic. Thoughts.

James : 55:09

There has been so much clickbait around this and it infuriates me.

James : 55:13

I actually wrote a piece and included quotes from the LinkedIn product managers that built the feature. Let me say unequivocally there are, in fact, two features. There is the open to work functionality, which most people don't know about, and then there is the open to work green banner, and they do slightly different things and, as a job seeker, you may want to do one or both of them. So, first of all, there's the open to work toggle, which, in your settings, you can indicate two recruiters that you are open to work, and you can also detail where you're open to work so both in your hometown or if you're open to relocation and the types of work full-time, contract and job titles that will be of interest to you. If you click that toggle, it is only visible to recruiters, and what all of the data from LinkedIn shows is that folks that do that typically see an uptick of 40% of in-mails from recruiters. That's huge, that's significant. There is no reason, if you're looking for work, why you shouldn't do that.

Francesca : 56:31

Even if you're curious, like, even if you're curious, you're like I don't know if I want to see at this gig, just put it on.

Mel : 56:35

Yeah, Put it on all the time, potentially just to have conversations.

James : 56:39

Yeah, why not Right? And LinkedIn say but do not guarantee that it's not visible to recruiters at your own company.

Mel : 56:50

That's good to know it's only visible to recruit.

James : 56:52

They can't guarantee 100% accuracy. And so what? Even if a recruiter does see that you're open to work like it's not, unless you work somewhere that's really evil, it's not going to come back on you.

Mel : 57:02

Yeah, good work environment. I mean, as a leader, I think everyone should always have their ear to the ground, right? Never know when your dream job might happen. So good work cultures, I think, encourage folks to always keep their ear. You hate to lose good talent, but you also shouldn't deter anyone from having those conversations if you're in a good workplace 100%.

James : 57:24

So that's the open to work feature.

James : 57:25

You should absolutely use that.

James : 57:26

The Green Banner, which has obviously had tons of click baity articles and what's really annoying is that most of the people that have an opinion about it have never worked in HR or recruiting and have no business talking about this Again.

James : 57:39

What the data from LinkedIn shows is that system wide, folks using the Green Banner get 20% more in-mails from the entire LinkedIn user base, so not just from recruiters, but from folks across LinkedIn, and for most users that is going to be a good thing because, even though the in-mail is not coming from a recruiter, the more connections you can make and the more you can bring in broad in your digital footprint and it might be from the hiring manager, it might be from someone that works with the hiring manager that knows that that person is looking for the type of employee that you are. It is a good thing to get more inbound outreach across LinkedIn, especially if we go back to what I said before about the signal to noise issue. If you can be more discoverable to either recruiters or people that can influence the hiring decision, that is a very good thing. So you should unequivocally, in my view, use one or both if you are looking for work.

Mel : 58:42

That's good advice. We'll link to your post on that because I, like you, I hate the clickbait around it or the shaming that, like the weird shaming that was going on around it. It's like don't listen to the noise Do your thing.

James : 58:54

The former Google recruiter who now runs a small business in Salt Lake. I wish we could just say for what it is he runs a small business in Salt Lake. Good for him. He's not the king of recruiting. Right Opinions are not valid Right, right.

Francesca : 59:10

Well, they can be really harmful too, because I think the thing is, I feel like we're going to see more and more upticks on layoffs. Quite honestly, it's just going to be more. There's a running thought right now, quite honestly, around you're one quarter away, potentially, from getting laid off. That's literally how business is operating right now. People will be looking for work more and more. I feel like we're going to be flipping more and more into gig-type work or trading jobs more and more. We have to get used to this conversation that people are going to be open to work and then working, open to work and then working. There's no room for shame in this discussion. It's a marketplace. At this point, 100%.

James : 59:51

Yeah, I'd go back to what I said earlier that, yes, we are increasingly in a world where careers are not for life of course they're not and increasingly moving to an environment where people have side hustles and portfolio careers, and that is all a great thing. But ideally, when you move to your next job, you're hopefully going to be there for two or three years right, maybe four, maybe five, if you're going to be spending the next three years 40 hours a week somewhere. Invest some time in doing your research, doing all your due diligence. Think about how much time you spend researching your vacation or maybe that's just me, but what is the hotel like? All of that stuff? You spend hours and hours, yet people spend no time at all on researching the place that they're going to spend all of this time. Do your due diligence. Reach out to folks at the company, ask to speak to people in the ERGs, read the review sites, make an informed decision and don't be afraid to walk away.

Francesca : 1:00:59

I love that. Sage advice, sage advice. James, thank you so much for joining us today. It has been a pleasure. We'd love to have you back to talk about more subjects around acquisition and talent acquisition, but thanks so much for your time.

James : 1:01:11

Thanks, you're welcome. Thanks for having me, yeah.

Francesca : 1:01:16

So now it's time for our segment called Roast and Toast, where we roast some companies or individuals that need some light roasting and some that need some great toasting because they're doing it and doing it so well. And we're going to start with the toast. Who are we toasting this week?

Mel : 1:01:33

I have two toasts One for candidates, candidates that ask the tough questions and do their homework during the interview process. So toast to you Organizations who streamline the process I'm talking no more than four interviews and those who have a high touch of candidate care and transparency. Toast to those folks.

Francesca : 1:01:58

Love it. Yeah, I think that idea quite honestly of doing your homework. It is so easy to get swayed by your dream company or companies that you think are going to be an amazing employer. But sometimes just because the company is really sexy doesn't mean it's the right company, the right role or the right team for you. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. So doing your homework Huge.

Mel : 1:02:22

Huge yeah. Sometimes it's glitter on a pile of poop, so check it out Indeed it is.

Francesca : 1:02:27

Indeed, it is. That's awesome. Well, and today I am roasting, actually, an article that I saw in Business Insider, which brought up some memories. Here it is. This is it came out this week Some Gen Z job seekers are bringing mom and dad to interviews. Yeah, this is just a hard pass, people and, by the way, gen Z, not the only generation that has been doing that right.

Mel : 1:02:53

It is not just you, I know. Back in the early 2000s, when I was working in TA, I had a dad call me up asking for swag from the law firm I was at because his son was interviewing and he thought, well, I just want to represent like you do for colleges. I'm like not the same thing.

Francesca : 1:03:13

And I just was like candidates trust yourself.

Mel : 1:03:16

You got this you got this.

Francesca : 1:03:18

Yeah, that's my thing. This is not just a Gen Z thing. This is actually going on. It melts here very good for about 10 years a long time. We are seeing an uptick in it. Friends, don't bring mom and dad into the interview process. They're not going to be there with you for work. Don't bring them into the interview process. It's not a good look. It's only a good look when it's bring your mom and dad to work day. Yeah, yeah. That's the only time. That's the only time.

Francesca : 1:03:43

So, yeah, a light roast of bringing the parental units into the interview process.

James : 1:03:47

Just don't do it.

Francesca : 1:03:49

You want to bring them on a date. You want to bring them on an interview, and if you need me to explain that to your parents, have them call me. There you go, follow us, music Mel. How about that interview with James about getting the right job?

Mel : 1:04:04

Yeah, I mean, look, James is a huge expert in this space. He knows his stuff. I think if listeners walk away and implement just one thing that he shared, they're going to find different success in finding not just a job but their right job for them. So just loved it. So thankful he was able to join us and to share these tips with folks. How about you? Yeah, absolutely.

Francesca : 1:04:28

It kind of reaffirms my belief in why we even started the pod is because we really wanted to open the hood on how this stuff works and how you can actually use this knowledge to your benefit. So stoked to have him with us. Friends. Really thanks so much for joining us today. We're stoked to be back next week with New Week, new Headlines. Mel and I have been together this whole week planning out the year of the pod, and so we're stoked to be bringing not only New Week, new Headlines every week, but really rich topics like the one we brought today. Really cool guests like the one we brought today. Thanks so much for joining us. Like and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. If it moves, you come over and say hi on Instagram, the tiktaks or LinkedIn, hit us up on yourworkfriends.com and if you found this episode helpful, please share with your work friends All right, take care, friend.

Mel : 1:05:20

Bye, friend, Bye friend. Also thanks for staying with us today.

Career Pivot: Escaping Corporate

Your Work Friends Podcast: Escaping Corporate with Brett Trainor

Burned out, boxed in, and dreaming of a way out? You’re not alone. In this episode, we’re breaking down exactly how to exit corporate life without blowing up your life. Whether you're plotting a pivot or planning a full escape, this one's your blueprint.

Learn the art of the entrepreneurial leap with Brett Trainor, The Corporate Escapee, and embrace the power of fractional/freelance work that fits into the life you want to have. In this episode, we tackle: 

• What's a Corporate Escapee?

• Who Should Escape? Who Shouldn't?

• The Market for Fractional / Freelance, etc

• The Money in Fractional / Freelance

• Planning Your Pivot out of Corporate

• The First Three Steps You Need to Take 

• And the Biggest Piece of Advice to Make the Leap 

Listen or watch the full episode here

---

Brett: 0:00

seeing the number of solar businesses with seven figures, folks think they need to build the next Google or Microsoft. Like if I leave corporate I've got to start a company. Like not anymore.

Mel: 0:25

Well, hey, friends, this is your work. Friends, we're two HR leaders who have no filter, and we're here to expose all of the stuff that you need to know about work. I'm Mel, I'm Francesca, and with us today is Brett Schreiner, who is the founder of the corporate Escapy. You can find him on LinkedIn. He has an awesome podcast. He also just launched a Slack community. That's pretty rad. I just joined that community myself, and he's from a fun town called Wheaton who has a annual fair called the cream of wheat, in which just made my day last week when I heard this news. So, brett, welcome to the pod.

Brett: 1:08

No, it's great to be here. I'm thrilled that you asked me to come on and looking forward to the discussion. And yes, the cream of Wheaton. Never thought of it as a big event here, but it is kind of clever.

Francesca : 1:18

And they don't serve cream of wheat at cream of Wheaton, which I feel like is a miss, it's a sponsor miss, for sure, right, and they're using the name for it.

Brett: 1:26

Yeah, so funny.

Francesca : 1:27

The cocoa wheat still out there. If you grew up in the Chicago Land area, there used to be the show called the. Bozo show and it was sponsored by Cocoa Weets. You remember Bozo?

Brett: 1:35

I remember Cocoa Weets. Yeah, we went down memory lane that too long ago with some of those cereals that are no longer available, but they should bring them back. I know some people are bringing back those retro brands yeah. They went out of business or bankrupt, but the name still means a lot, so I think we're starting to see more of that.

Mel: 1:53

I just bought Captain Crunch Crunch Berries a couple of weeks ago for the first time in 15 years. Scrape the hell out of the top of my mouth, but it was delicious. It was delicious and worth it.

Brett: 2:04

I'm more of a peanut butter crunch, but I do like the crunch berries. Yeah, remember the old like Count Chocula in Franklin.

Mel: 2:11

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Brett: 2:12

Boo-Berry. Was Boo-Berry a seasonal or was that a? It was at a ongoing.

Mel: 2:18

I think it's seasonal right Boo-Berry with the ghosts.

Brett: 2:21

Yeah, so good.

Francesca : 2:23

So good it's so funny.

Mel: 2:25

Oh, look at on top of that. How do you, how do we get this? Yeah Well, brett, the corporate escapee. I love your mission, which is to help 10,000 corporate Gen Xers escape the nine to five. Tell us more about it. What's the corporate escapee?

Brett: 2:42

Yeah, it was funny because I got to that point about four, four and a half years ago after a 30-year career, mostly corporate, a couple of stints out to the entrepreneurial world and back into corporate, ended it with a year and a half running management consulting Cause that's what you should do at the end of a corporate career is go into traditional management consulting but just realized that I was just done right. It wasn't like where is this going? What am I going to be doing? Right, we don't have pensions. I shouldn't say we, the collective, we just didn't. The right corporate didn't offer pensions. So am I just going to be fighting this treadmill for the next 10 to 15 years or is there something better? And, like I said four and a half years ago, didn't have a plan High inside. I highly encourage folks if you're leaving, have a plan. Don't have to, but it makes the transition easier. And then the last year really there's got to be more of me out there, right?

Brett: 3:34

Cause for the first two years 95% of what I was doing was the fractional work, did some consulting in the B2B space, I was by myself, really didn't tell anybody that I was doing it, and then slowly gain momentum, caught up with some different folks and I'm like, yeah, the corporate escape, be that's, it's more than just work, it's the lifestyle.

Brett: 3:55

And then I just started playing with it. I decided just to have some fun, to get on Tik Tok and test cause. I'm like short attention span at 60 seconds, 90 second, and all of a sudden that took off, no idea why. But what it reaffirmed was that there is a lot of people. I think I've got like 20,000 followers on Tik Tok and to a person that I talked to it's like, yeah, I didn't know I was stuck, I didn't know there was other folks, but man, it really resonates with me. So I decided to make that more my personal mission to say if anybody's out there that wants to get out, there is opportunity, there's a path forward, there's tools, et cetera. So, even though it's been around for probably about a year I was in the last two to three months it's really found its footing.

Mel: 4:41

I will admit I found you on Tik Tok. I am a recent corporate escapee and I immediately was like, yes, let's connect on LinkedIn, join your Slack community, because I think what's really appealing for me to what you're doing is the community that you're building around. It is someone who's new to trying it out, and I think that community is so important just to help you succeed right Lessons learned, sharing. So I really love what you're building over there. Who is this for? Who is this not for?

Brett: 5:12

Yeah, good question. I say I tell everybody that if you've got 20 to 30 years of experience and if somebody's paying you to do a job, you can do it right. The can and should are two different things. I think who it's not for is if you're really risk adverse we're not talking super risky ventures, you're not putting your family's savings into a new business or something like that but what corporate does give you assuming you don't get laid off is a steady paycheck and they pay some form of your benefits, and so there's a floor in corporate that you always know you're going to have that paycheck. But with freelance, fractional what I call the corporate escapee the ceiling is much higher, the utility is much higher, but there could be lows. Right, you could have a zero month where you're not bringing any revenue in, and you have to be comfortable with that and knowing that it's not going to stay that way, but it's not for everybody.

Brett: 6:06

The other thing that I found is important is you have to be accountable to yourself.

Brett: 6:11

I really took that for granted as I transitioned from corporate into the solo space was I own the priorities, I own my schedule and for the longest time I found myself just cramming more work into the day, but I really wasn't getting stuff done until I flipped and scheduled and put some structure into my day. But yeah, if you're not accountable to yourself and you like somebody else's direction, then this may not be for you Everybody else. I think you want more flexibility, freedom, control, opportunity than absolutely you can. I had probably 120 conversations with TikTokers, genxers that have came in and more for my learning to say what else can I do or what can we do to support what I was finding is the nichiest of niches in corporate. There's still businesses that are looking for that help. I call them the SME. Small and mid-sized businesses, startups, nonprofits are looking for that type of help. If you've got experience and somebody's paying you to do a job, there's an opportunity to help free yourself from that task.

Mel: 7:16

What do you think is for folks who are successful? When they do this, do they have a specific mindset, skill set that stands out to you?

Brett: 7:24

I think, open mind, because one thing in corporate it just teaches you to go follow the rules, don't rock the boat. Incremental improvements are good and you just have to have more of an open mind. We use the cliche of Gen X, but it's released back into the wild. We grew up without the rules and the restrictions and then 20 to 30 years in the box of corporate. You have to go back and be okay with experimenting and asking. We talk about can and should and it's will A lot of people. I can do that, I can go, so I do have that experience. I can run this project, I can work for it, but will you do it? It's the people that actually take action are the ones that are successful. I know I mostly work with Gen X, but I've had some 20-somethings that are super curious about how do I do this. I said well, look, if you get your job, you do this. What is the problem that you're solving for this company? There's probably a bunch of smaller companies that have this problem. You can just restructure it. 20 minutes later he's like okay, I got this. Thanks, see you.

Brett: 8:25

He was going to go take action when I think, if we've been around longer, we like to over engineer it, we like to overthink it and we're trying to look for the perfect plan. I'm guilty. One of my colleagues in Mansion Consultant used to tell me Brett done is better than perfect. That was a harder thing for me to transition from. Just go do it, it's okay. If this little experiment doesn't work, you try something else. And it's going to be okay Because at the end of the day, if it doesn't work, you can go back and find your corporate job. If it's not for you but I encourage anybody that's thinking about it just give it a 100 percent and see. If it doesn't work, don't have acid and then, if it doesn't work, go out. Wasn't for me. If you're going to do that, then maybe it's not for you anyway.

Mel: 9:08

If this is your new business, you treat it like a business. Otherwise, it's a hobby. It's just a hobby.

Francesca : 9:15

There's something suffering about going back to thinking about your feralness as a kid or thinking about the world of opportunity that you get as a child. I remember being in college and thinking, wow, anything's possible, anything could happen, and I think you get that when you're creating your own space. I'm wondering if you're seeing that in the landscape now. What is the market for folks that want to do freelance fractional? Do you see it's picking up, it's growing, it's depleted. What do you think?

Brett: 9:45

Yeah, I absolutely think it's picking up, because that's one of the concerns I hear from folks is it's saturated. I'm like we're the farthest thing from saturated when you think about the number of small businesses that are out there and the help that they need. I think we're in the early stages of this. And what kind of opened my eyes is I was on a podcast called the Human Cloud and John and Matthew do a lot of work in freelancing at the enterprise. I have more focus on the small business and part of our conversation was me flipping out of him and asking well, why are you seeing this rise in freelance? And what he told me was we haven't seen. Even three years ago there wasn't somebody with your experience or expertise that was open to fractional work for small businesses, so small businesses have never had access. You two are a perfect example of that as well. If a small business was looking to hire you, they couldn't afford you, and so what do they do? They have to hire somebody junior just to take a chance on somebody new or promote somebody within. Not all bad choices, but if you really need help and your org's growing, this is a perfect solution. It's the rare, perfect, perfect or win-win, especially with fractional. There's other ways you can slice it, but fractional is easiest transition, I think. And so what fractional is? Basically? It's a day per week per client and most of the time it's focused on strategy work, not a lot of the tactical and the doing stuff, because it would be hard to do that one day a week. But what you will be able to do is save that business a third of the cost. If they're going to hire a full-time equivalent for that HR lead, they couldn't afford it, but with you, for a third of the cost, they can. Now they can start to build a team with a couple of other fractionals. That gives them expertise that they couldn't have otherwise had.

Brett: 11:33

And the other last piece that I encourage people to think about the business owner is it minimizes risk. If you make a higher, it's an 18 month mistake if you get it wrong. And if you're hiring a type of role you've never hired before, that's hard. And if you can bring somebody in, that's fractional. Maybe it's a three month to start, but then it's month to month and a lot of what the fractionals will do is work with that business to transition out. If they're ready for a full-time, they can help you find that full-time person.

Brett: 12:02

So I think where the industry or where the overall market's got to catch up is fractional, still in relatively new term. But when you explain it to the business owner, they're like yeah, I get it and we're starting now to actually see hey, we are actually looking for fractional CFO for this role. So you won't find it in LinkedIn job postings yet. But it's not like this is just one-sided, where it benefits the escapees because they can charge a premium for what they do. It gives them more flexibility. But the businesses are actually going to benefit from this as well.

Francesca : 12:35

Yeah, you see a lot of movement in organizations trying to outsource works or work that is not core to their competence, because they don't want to be in that business, and this is one of the ways I think that they could do that either through fractional or contract full outsource. It does seem like we're at this wave of this coming right. Business is understanding the benefit of not holding on to full-time labor because that's so expensive. It's expensive for turnover too if they don't work out and also people wanting a different lifestyle. Work to means different things and still get paid and paid well. Do you feel like in five years this is going to just get bigger, or do you feel like it's going to go the other way? My gut is it's?

Francesca : 13:17

going to get nuts.

Brett: 13:18

It's going to get nuts. I think Every last dollar I had it's going in this direction. Just because a couple of reasons, and think about it from when you were in corporate, what percentage of your week was actually spent on the job that they brought you in to do? 30%.

Mel: 13:34

It's really.

Brett: 13:35

Maybe at a high end. So you're paying 60% of overhead from the business perspective and that's where fractional is there. They're super intentional about using you only for what you're good at, because they don't want you on unnecessary meetings. It just doesn't make sense. So I think just economically it's going to make sense and that's why I think that the small and mid-sized can really take advantage of this, because the bigger orgs they're still trying to figure out sales and marketing alignment. How do we go? Digital Things they probably should have figured out 15 years ago they're still struggling with. So how do they incorporate a more flexible workforce is going to be hard. I think certain organizations or operating units within bigger companies are starting to figure out how to do it, but for the most part it's not there.

Brett: 14:19

I've used a couple of analogies that help people see it. The one is think about it as if you're making a major movie Hopefully it's a blockbuster but you got hair, you got makeup, you got actors, you got film. You got all these different, mostly small entities that come together for 12 to 18 months, build this thing. They go away and this group may work with each other here and they may work over there. And then the other one that's similar to that, if you remember the movie Ocean's Eleven.

Brett: 14:46

George Clooney wanted to rob the casino. What did he do? He needed a make disguise artist, he needed a bomb guy, he needed X-Wines. All specialists that come together, get paid for what they do, drive towards an outcome and then go back to their separate ways. I just think the Industrial Revolution pushed us into offices. There was value in having people side by side because everybody was doing the same job. You can learn now All that side by side stuff is going to be automated, and what are you actually learning? When we did answer Francesca, your question, I think it's fundamentally going to change it and it just depends on how quick. I think we're in the early stages, so it's going to be fascinating to see where this goes.

Francesca : 15:28

That's a thing for employees. I've been hearing from a lot of people that they feel they're stuck in organizations, they're at a manager plus level and they're like I thought I was being brought in for my expertise, but I'm not being listened to sometimes, and or to your very good point the majority of their day is spent on shit that is absolutely not even relevant to their job, and there's something so beautiful about having an agreement that you're being brought in for your skill set, you're being paid for your skill set and all the other minutia goes away. So from a business, this makes sense. From an employee or from someone that this is their craft, this can be a really beautiful way to work too, because you're actually getting paid for your expertise.

Francesca : 16:09

Yeah, and you can do it where you want right?

Brett: 16:12

Yeah, that's what I'm watching. These return to office mandates. I'm like you got to be kidding me. You've been in the workforce for 30 years and this is the way I love your viewpoint on this. We just talked about it, yeah.

Mel: 16:23

Yeah, yeah, feelings. We agree with you wholeheartedly. You hire adults. These are experts You're hiring to come into your organization, but you don't trust them to get the job done, and that's a larger issue we think is happening.

Brett: 16:38

If you don't trust them, they're not going to work any harder in the office and you can argue they're more inefficient at the office. I grew up in it, so I saw the value at times when having colleagues and working. I just think that those days are gone.

Francesca : 16:51

They're gone, they're gone. It's interesting because there's these decision makers that are making really regressive decisions, like we're just going to keep going back, we're going to keep going back, and it's like that ship has sailed and I think the people that are willing to think about a new way will win.

Brett: 17:06

And as long as we're on this, culture is something I've been thinking about from a pure execution standpoint, from a company, and I think culture matters for the ownership group. This is what the vision, this is the thing we want to create. And once you get below a certain level, everybody's just doing it for the paycheck. And you can tell me there's companies that believe in the mission, which I'm 100% sure there are, but I'm saying 80% of the companies, 80% of the workers, and they just want to be paid fairly, treated with some flexibility, right, and then they'll do a good job. I don't want to say culture is overrated, because it's not, but don't think the 10,000 employees are all going to buy into your culture. You're never going to get that, especially with return to office man and all that other stuff. But if you plug in specialists for a lot of these key roles that just love to do this job they like you and the company you're going to get a lot further than trying to force people into a box again.

Francesca : 18:00

My whole thing on companies right now is they are not everybody, but most of them are misrepresenting themselves in terms of what they're offering from an employee experience perspective, because a lot of organizations are we're a great place to work, we're a great place to work for mothers, we're a great diversity, equity, inclusion, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We have all of these benefits, we care about mental health, we care about all this stuff, and the actual working experience day to day doesn't match the brand that they've been sold, and so there's this sense of betrayal, there's this sense of like. What the fuck you know? Excuse my French, yeah.

Brett: 18:37

I get it.

Francesca : 18:38

I'm going to get it out. To me, one of the best relationships you can get into in anything romantic friend, parent, job is when it's honest. Yeah, contracts are honest. Yeah, my dogs are honest. You know what you're gonna get. Oh, I love your point of view on this. I think a lot of employees feel like I thought I was signing up for something completely different. Then what I've been given.

Brett: 19:01

Yeah, the one-way street.

Mel: 19:04

Yeah, we're hearing that from a lot of folks who independently reach out to us to share, and I agree with you wholeheartedly, francesca, because culture is the responsibility of the organization, team and individual.

Mel: 19:15

But it takes all three of those elements for it to be effective throughout. But if at each of those levels you don't have everyone bought into your good point, brett, there there comes a point sometimes when an organization Potentially is just too large where they're not going to be able to manage all of the micro cultures that have now popped up. It's like having a core set of values and making sure that Everyone operates within that core set of values and how they work is so critically important. But if they're not really paying attention to that or have expectations around that or build performance management around those expectations and they're really measuring it, then the culture and the micro cultures get out of control. Into Francesca's point yeah, there's a sense of betrayal from people who were sold hey, this was a great working environment from others. But you know, I joined this team and my direct leader won't let me leave early to go watch my kids soccer game Then that's not a great organization for that mom, but maybe a mom on another team is getting the opportunity to do that.

Mel: 20:18

But, it all depends on your direct team. Yeah, what's?

Brett: 20:21

interesting when I was starting to have these conversations is the the relationship between, as a corporate escapee or an employee employees. Definitely, it's mostly command and control some companies to give you some flexibility. But I heard that command and control. I talked to a executive recruiter friend of mine who told me that there was a CEO, they were hiring a chief people officer and the board was basically dictating who he was gonna hire. I'm like, so he's being micro managed at the highest. And this wasn't a family-owned company. This was a pretty good-sized business and when I started to think through this, this is why I think fractional can start to even that playing field.

Brett: 21:01

So the way I think the old days of freelancer is really transactional Okay, we're hiring you to do this job, we'll pay you this. We both agree, done, done. Where fractional is more of a partnership right, I'm part of that organization just on a part-time basis. I've got to be on the same page as the owner of the sea level. That's bringing me into that organization. We've decided together what's gonna work. Right, you can't tell me what to do all the time because, one, that's not why you brought me in, but two, that's not the way our relationship is. So you got like commanding controls and employee Partner is a fractional, transactional, is freelance and there's some service Businesses in there that are definitely more transactional. But at least give the employee a leg up.

Brett: 21:42

The other thing I encourage folks to think about even if you're staying in corporate, think of it as you are a still the CEO of your own company, company of one, and your product is your expertise, and what this company is paying you to do that job is salary, benefits and the requirement of you being on site three days, five days, one day, just everything that's involved. And would you run your business that way? If this is the way the customer, maybe you would and you're willing to trade off because this is what you need, but for me, I forever I just take it All right, this is what you're paying me, this is what I get, right, this is the vacation and all those things, and just accepted it, versus thinking if I treated this as this was my company and this is my skill, I probably would have done things differently, maybe not have had as many options, but too often I think we're just way too reactive and not as intentional with it.

Francesca : 22:29

I think a lot of people think that that's the only way. I grew up thinking you're gonna go to college, you're gonna go to grad school, you're gonna get a job at Accenture and you're gonna keep on did it, did it did and this is. This is the way, this is the path, and it's not the same thing.

Brett: 22:41

It's the right thing. Right. My plan was I was the first one in my family they actually went to college, so business.

Mel: 22:48

I do.

Brett: 22:49

That was, and so my goal before I started was game warden in Wisconsin. That sounds awesome, yeah. Then, 30 years later, I'm like what the hell happened? You get into that. Somebody called it a treadmill and I think it's the perfect thing. Somebody said that salaries the drug that keeps you going. It's that next level. I just get promoted to that next position. Then I'll end up with enough money to do this. But it's never really enough, and what's happened this last year Is the fear factor against him. Yeah, lay it off. What are you gonna do? There's nothing out there, and they scare you into Staying into a job longer than maybe that you would want to, and times are changing, which is so exciting. There's enough signs that we're moving in the right direction.

Mel: 23:40

I think so. I think the sign of how many folks and younger folks who are looking at exploring this space too and not just going into corporate. There's a real desire, I think, for people to own their time and how they spend it and who they spend it with. And I think that's so beautiful about this type of work too, because you have a bit more autonomy around what you're working on, who you're working with, when, after COVID, I will say my personal experience was really reflecting on how do I want to spend my time and I tell Francesca this all the time I went to work where there's a three-legged stool of Respect, relationships and meaningful work. So in everything I do, that's what I want to do and that that's appealing to me about your messaging and going out on your own, and it seems possible.

Brett: 24:28

It's true, an author, steve Glovesky, australian guy wrote time rich and he's like look, you can always earn more money, but you can never earn time back.

Brett: 24:36

I'm like so true and you think about our corporate careers. We built our lives around those jobs, whatever it was right vacation, school Workouts. You had to get up at 6 am If you wanted to go to the gym. A little more flexibility now, but not Completely so. Our lives really revolved around whatever corporate job that we were doing and not the other way around, which, again, we're gonna look back in 50 years. You know what the heck, yeah right.

Francesca : 25:22

We talk about the money for a second, because I think this might be one of the things that People get nervous about when they think about this. Do you find in general, that the money is like net-net it's better, it's worse. I think it's better.

Brett: 25:34

You've got the risk, because when I left, it was all about the money. What had happened to me was, as a management consulting firm, I saw they were billing me out as, and I saw what I was taking home about that billable rate. I'm like this is crazy. What it did teach me is what my market rate was, and that's one thing I think we all do is undervalue what we have and what we do. Where it's definitely going and I can speak from the fractional and from the service side, because when I say fractional, it's again that on average it's a day per week, probably no more than 10 hours a week, no more than two hours per day, depending on how you spread out per client and the billable range that you can charge is between six and twelve thousand dollars per month and and what I see more consistently is between seven and ten.

Brett: 26:21

Now it's a bigger company that you're doing some work for. Maybe it's a couple more hours. It's on the higher end, so definitely outliers. In either way, this is for sales leaders, marketing leaders, customer success folks, hr Recruiting, anything that needs a leadership or strategy component within those companies. You can transition that to fractional, and this isn't just my experience. You can like voyage, or you, which works with exclusively fractionals and fractionally. United with Karina she's got six thousand fractionals in there and they just had a data Study that came out that showed wages or the hourly rate Amongst different levels of skills and what role on the organization, and it was consistent. If it's more of a less strategic role, you're gonna be down in the $150 per hour or $100 per hour.

Brett: 27:10

One rule of thumb that I think if people at home want to do the math is whatever your corporate salary is, chop off the three zeros and that's what your hourly rate. And if you do the math backwards which I'm not a fan of the public math so if you're making a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in corporate, think about it is about a hundred and fifty dollars per hour. You know times that by ten hours you know per week, per client, and it adds up to being able to replace your income with two to three Clients and only working two to three days per week, and that's ideal. That's after you get running. If you don't leave corporate, that instantly happens, but it's definitely more. I wouldn't call it an industry standard yet, but it's definitely becoming accepted. And the other data point I'll share is one of the companies that I was a chief Revenue officer for. They were less than three million in annual revenue and they were still paying in that range, so it's even a smaller company is willing because they need to invest.

Francesca : 28:07

Right, and so if you do worth it, yeah.

Brett: 28:10

So that's what I'm saying, and when people say it's a tree, I'm like do you how many companies that are between two, five ten million dollars that could use your skill set for 12 to 18 months as they figure it out? The other beauty of this is you can start to think about your expertise as a service. I know we're going to level two now, but I think there's that's where I encourage folks at your new CRM specialist, maybe they're not gonna bring you on as a fractional CRM Person, but what do these small businesses need that you do really well that you could do for three thousand dollars a month. They're five thousand dollars a month. One their entire CRM, do whatever it is.

Brett: 28:48

And the other example I'll use from the design sites there's a graphic designer named Brett, his company's design join. He's been super open about publishing his track record. The last year he did two million dollars as a solo company. He does all his own design works. He charges brands, I think between 5k and 7k per month. I think the rule is you can only do one design at a time. You can't send him six design requests at once. Maybe do the math backwards of how many customers he needs he can manage that. He said to get overwhelming at that level but like well, if you don't want to do two million one, bring somebody in which he didn't want to do. We'll just reduce the number of clients you have. So that's why I said, if the rules don't exist, if you can solve a problem and add value to a customer, there's a way that you can structure that that it's gonna make sense for you and for the business.

Francesca : 29:39

I mean in two million dollars a year, is that's kind of livable?

Mel: 29:47

Right in your recent newsletter. I loved the template that you shared around what's problem Are you solving for people? What skills are you bringing to solve that problem? We'll link to that because I think it's super valuable. I'd love to talk about if you're in corporate. Today we hear from a lot of folks in high-pressure industries so think law firms, the finance world's, banking, all of that who are Looking to pivot. For folks who are in these intense industries, they're also highly regulated so you might not be able to start a side gig because it could be seen as sort of competing priorities with what you're doing. What do you recommend for them to be able to make space to plan for this kind of pivot?

Brett: 30:31

Yeah, it's a good question. It's this highly regulated, maybe a bigger issue. There's still gonna be a way around it. It's still gonna come back to what the problem that you solve you solve it for and even if you solve it for free on the side, for a few folks, you can test the idea. Target maybe a different industry.

Brett: 30:49

Because that's one thing I've found is, unless you're specific in, like a healthcare technology or whatever it is that doesn't translate, then you may be a little trickier and you may just have to get yourself set up, build some runway and say, alright, I'm going all in, I see the, the future of this. But short of that, there's no reason why you can't start to have these conversations and do some mini engagements with folks. Right, everything that we're building to go solo. You can build on the side and then just start to have the Conversations one off with people and then you get a sense of is this really a need to solve problem? Is this a nice to solve problem? Hopefully it's really the need to solve that the business has. So I think there's date ways around and that's the number of the folks I'm actually working with and I'm testing a new Offering 60 days, your first customer and it originally had the grandiose plans of you know, end to end of all the things that you should Be thinking about.

Brett: 31:46

What I found was all these folks are really smart and don't necessarily need all the pieces, but when you get down into what is the specific offering look like who is the target customer cut through all the noise because we all like To chase the shiny objects and go too many. But let's pick one path. What's the problem? What is it you want to solve and work on and then build the offer into that? Most of the people I'm working with they're still Incorporate, so it can't be just broadcast to your network that you're open to fractional and contract work. It's not gonna work. So we're gonna have to be a little more targeted with some of the outreach.

Brett: 32:20

But it's absolutely possible I think that's what we talk ourselves into that when nobody's gonna want this or we have to have a full-on marketing plan. I'm like the end of the day, for us to be successful and I say most, if you have ten customers that you're not gonna be able to service ten. So you think about it really to read if you're thinking about replacing that income and still working less. Two to three customers is all you need. That's not very many. That's super targeted and through relationships Referability of John arms talks about all the time and then just solving that problem. You got to Break the ice with the first one, but then it's much more manageable even than it was five years ago when you tried to. You almost Did have to have a marketing plan.

Mel: 33:00

It's just starting the conversation with folks and offering Advice for free to build those relationships. I've also seen this done, where folks start to have the conversation with their employer and they've turned that former employer to a client Once they've transitioned into Freelance. Have you ever seen that happen with any of your I know people have done it.

Brett: 33:20

I wouldn't be comfortable going to my most really recent employer. But if you were like me and worked for three or four or five other companies, maybe there's some folks in the past that know you, the work that you do, and need some additional help to get that going. You can be super targeted with LinkedIn and I'll give you just an example. When the corporate escapee took off, I didn't want to forget about the work that I was doing with the small business, so these corporate escapee work. So everything you see on my social and LinkedIn now is mostly the escapee stuff. But I did some targeted outreach to some clients saying, hey, I've got this full network of Estapies now misses or? Mr Business owner, are you still stuck in your traditional Recruiting ways? Are you only looking at a full-time equivalent? Are you open to ideas around flexible staffing and fractional those types of things? And I was just sending that out to Not direct connections but second-degree connections.

Mel: 34:17

Yeah.

Brett: 34:17

I probably an 80% connection Acceptance rate. Most of them would say, now, that's not my business because I was targeting too small. Then I went up the next level 10 to 25 employees and Most people accept the connection or say no, I'm not in that. But a handful are now saying, yeah, I'm interested in learning more. We're just about to that point. Again, I'm not selling anything on those things, but I've got three or four leads that I'm working. If I was still employed, they'd have no idea that I'm even talking to these companies Can't, don't do anything illegal, but you know they can't keep you from right, trying to to grow you.

Brett: 34:53

Whatever you want to do on your own, you're free time and your own time and what you want to do the future so. So the point is there's ways you can start to Identify customers, even if you're linked in. It says I'm fully employed, just have to be a creative sometimes just building relationships as key.

Mel: 35:10

Yeah, like my name.

Brett: 35:13

That's what I've found with this community. Everybody is super helpful and maybe Great myself.

Brett: 35:19

But yeah, again, everybody realizes we're breaking the mold in corporate. Where it was every person for themselves, it was the political if either be eaten and all that. We're here. Everybody's more than willing to help. And again back to the community. That's really what I want out of this group is to say, hey, this I came across an opportunity. Doesn't make sense for me, but I know somebody that was an IT that this would be a good fit for and we just start referring each other into Opportunities. All of our networks are big or big enough for us to figure out what we need to have. I've never been more optimistic about a path then, if you would ask me this three years ago. I think you get work really hard and figure it out, but now we can eliminate some of those blockers there that the traditional learning curves.

Mel: 36:02

I love your slack community. I'll keep plugging it because being a new Corporate escape me myself joining that slack community. I think it's been an invaluable experience because everyone's just wanting to help each other, learn from one another, help each other grow, and I think that's the beauty in this is that Community piece and you're sort of indirectly creating your own quote-unquote corporate culture through that community Culture of just helpers, people who are interested in helping organizations and helping each other, and it's really nice. I'm so glad you're here. I love you too. I'll see you next time. Folks don't talk about this often, but it's hard to get your first client. But how was it having to fire your first client?

Brett: 37:00

It's usually mutual. Usually If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Usually you get a sense in the first three, six months of it's going to work. And I was working with a client doing some sales but really what they needed was marketing support, some branding. They had a really good tool, really strong, competitive product, but nobody knew them. Less than 3% of the industry knew who they were and I basically said, look, take the money that you're paying me and go invest in a marketing and, more specifically, a product marketer. That's really going to help, because their entire business was contingent upon. If this one product hit the growth targets, you can understand the product from the customer research all the way to how do you position it and move it into the marketplace. Spend your money there, because it's going to be much better than me trying to help you figure out how to cold call our way to that business. And so we agreed to move on just because it didn't provide the right fit. You get a sense of the cultural fits going to be there.

Brett: 37:58

But the way I like to structure my engagement is the first ones a. Don't call it a get to know you, but as we're having a conversation and we're saying, hey, this is what I think my organization needs and I'm saying I think this is what I can deliver. Until you actually get involved into the business and know what you have, it's hard to know, so I always liked the 30 or 60 day. Let's validate everything that we thought we knew and then build the roadmap from there. Even if you're fractional, that's really what you're doing is helping them build the strategy and go from there. So I always build an out after that paid assessment period I hate that term, but I don't know a better way of a paid validation. Right, those are going to be value. We'll build the roadmap and at that point we'll know if I'm the right fit for what your business needs and if not, then we can find somebody else to go in there.

Mel: 38:48

Love the concept of a paid assessment time when everyone gets to test it out and see if you're still in alignment after that 60 day is really nice actually.

Brett: 38:56

There's a few businesses, like one guy that was working on a corporate development and really the work that he needed to do it's a six month right to do the due diligence, so he can't do that one month a month, but almost all of them you absolutely could do a trial one month, two months three months just to make sure everybody's happy. And again it takes the risk out of the business zone. It's an easier sell at that point too.

Francesca : 39:20

It's actually beneficial, Like yeah.

Mel: 39:22

Where there's an out.

Francesca : 39:41

What are the things that you want to avoid when you're getting into this space that you don't need?

Brett: 39:46

Yeah, that's a really good point. I see less of the scammy, right, they're there, right, but I think, yeah, we over complicate what we're doing and you don't need a hundred tools. The thing that I found that would have been helpful would have been how do I reduce the learning curve? Because everything I did was the first time it was on my own. There was nobody to share what was going on, and that's kind of the way I've approached that with TikTok and the newsletter. I'll tell you everything I know you know for free. And then if there's still stuff that you want help with, then fine, and that's the way that I approached with other folks as well.

Brett: 40:23

That said, hey, I really need some help, like, I've got somebody helping me on the community Never done a community. I've got an escapee that does it for me to help eliminate some of those big potholes that I don't need to hit. And so I think that's the biggest thing is don't let somebody sell you on. There is no secret sauce. If you do this one thing, you'll get 10 customers. No, it just doesn't work like that. I think it's the fundamentals. The basics. It's everything you already know, but people will tell you you have to do more than what you know, and that's just just not the case.

Francesca : 40:55

You're talking to somebody the other day and they're like I don't even know how to get started. I'm here, I know I hate my job, I'm in the muck, have the talking heads like this is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful life. On repeat, right. What are the first? Like two to three things you just need to do.

Brett: 41:11

Yeah, if you would have asked me two years ago, I wouldn't have necessarily thought of this. But it's what do you really want, right when?

Francesca : 41:20

Best question ever. Best question ever.

Brett: 41:22

It's hard to answer and it might changes, but I've gotten much more settled into it because, if you can answer, that is your number one goal just to replace your double your income Cause that's going to send you down a path of doing X, y or Z. But if it's, hey, if I can just supplement my income or get 50% of it and it. But I only want to work one day or two days. I want to be able to do it from the beaches of Florida in the winter and on a lake somewhere in the summer and really think through what is it you want from this next phase. And there's no wrong answer. But having that answer makes it easier to figure out. What are the next steps that you do to drive that business Cause. Again, if you want to build the design joy with the two million revenue, you're going to have to put a little more work into. I just want to replace my income and work a couple of days a week and I'd be able to do whatever else I want on the other five or four or five days. So in the more macro sense, I think some people probably roll in their eyes and say, trust me, I was that person. But now I always encourage you to go down that path. This is personal work on it. If you've got a spouse, partner or whatever, be on the same page, because if you're not on the same page it's going to make it really difficult not impossible, but really difficult to go through this. And then from there, I would find that problem right. I tell people to go through a skills and experience inventory and if you've done something for 20 to 30 years, you'll be shocked at how many different things you have to do. But from that then think about what is it you like to do, cause you're at it now a point you get a little bit. You may have to take some jobs or a couple of projects that aren't exactly what you want to do to get started. But start to think about what that is, who you want to work with, what type of business? Right, because some of the folks I talk with they could go into sales, so they could help small business with sales. But they're also really good at software, so they understand right, are you getting at the ROI off your current software? So there's multiple paths. You just get it down on paper and say, all right, here's in, francesca. Back to your point. There's three or four main problems that you can probably solve that you've got the expertise and your LinkedIn profile will show you can walk into these small business and say, yeah, I've done this type of thing and then you can start to figure out what does that offering look like?

Brett: 43:44

I think too often we go straight from well, I've got 30 years, I want to be fractional, but make it happen now. Just take the steps to go through it. Did you maybe make it happen Again? That was part of my learning curve. Was in consulting.

Brett: 43:58

Really like man, why did I do this? This isn't even what I like to do. I like the conversations, I like the problem solving, but I don't like project management. I don't like tracking down stakeholders, I don't like recapping meetings, those types of things. So I think it's figuring out what you want, identifying that problem at the most accurate or clearest point you can from a business owner standpoint, whoever you're solving it for in the business, and then the type of work that you want to do, and then you can start to craft options again, because those $3,000 to $5,000 a month engagements add up pretty quickly and if it's in your core expertise, it's probably not going to take you a lot of time to do it either. I don't like to oversimplify it, but it's not as hard as people make it out to be.

Francesca : 44:42

Yeah, those are such important questions and things to define and I'm surprised when I talk to people and they're in these situations and I ask them what do you want, like what is it you really really want? And they don't know or sometimes they don't want to admit what they really want because it's very far from where they are today. These are really important questions to ask yourself, for you to get to a space that you are meant to play in and that it'll be easy to play in as well.

Brett: 45:11

Yeah, I get feedback from folks that said that they took me two days right, they were longer to go through and actually think through what it was. But when you think about what's next for you, we've got a lot of options and flexibility. So that was the time. Like I said, I'm planning on living a while and healthy. So what am I going to do for the next 20, 25 years? Jesse Itzler he's NetJet's guy. He's Sarah Blakely's husband. He's built a really successful business, but one of the things that he had equipped not too long ago. He's like look, I think he's a year younger than me. So, statistically speaking, I've got 23 years left to live, which means I've got 23 summers and I want to do as much in those 23 summers as I absolutely can. I'm like yes, it's so true. And again, I think we get so conditioned that we can't think like that, like that's not for me, that's only for the rich can do this. No, that's the whole point of this exercise is, you can start to define what does that life look like? And then how do you incorporate your business into it? I'll give you one quick example.

Brett: 46:16

And she was my poster child forever. She and I worked in our last corporate job together. She was training and development, just hard charging corporate. She was moving up the corporate ladder. Then after that she's like you know what I'm done? And she wanted to start a business training and development and her whole mission was I want to take the month of August off so I can go climbing it didn't matter where in the world. So when she set up her training she worked with companies and basically said I'm not working in August. So they knew up front that she wasn't available for that. From that point on she grew her business. She hired some contractor to just do some work. She ultimately lived intentionally in her van, the van life, and then I think she's been in Australia now for six months running her company. But the whole point of that is she built this, she built her life and then figured out how to work, actually fits into it and I'm like that's so good.

Francesca : 47:08

Right, we're to do it. Yeah, it's build your life and then figure out how to put the work into it. I think that is the right equation. Right, that's the right stack of that story.

Brett: 47:19

It should be, like I said, better late than never for me figuring that out now. The other thing folks think they need to build the next Google or Microsoft, like if I leave corporate I've got to start a company. I'm like not anymore, I've solo businesses. Seeing the number of solo businesses with seven figures, I mean if you start to do the math and we can do that afterward you can see it's not that difficult. With the right couple of right freelancers or VA's to help with certain tasks you can build that. So I'm like how is it possible that these one person companies are doing one million or two million in revenue but yet there's three and five million dollar companies that have 22 employees?

Francesca : 47:55

There's so much opportunity. It's very exciting to think about.

Mel: 47:58

I love that, the concept of designing your life and then figuring out how work fits into it. That's how it should be. That's a great point. The one thing we can never get back is time. Well, hey, we have something we call a rapid round. Fun questions, yes or no? Are you up for a rapid round?

Brett: 48:37

Fire away.

Mel: 48:37

Okay, have you ever regretted leaving corporate?

Brett: 48:42

No.

Mel: 48:42

Have you ever had to turn down a dream project because it didn't align with your freelance goals?

Brett: 48:48

Not yet.

Mel: 48:50

Did leaving corporate improve your life 100%. Is it easier to say no to projects now that you're your own boss? No, it is TensorFlow. Think of what you needed when you came here.

Brett: 48:59

Yes, ish, Instinct still wants to take jobs, but my getting better at saying no if it does in a line, and usually I've figured that a little bit earlier in the process than I would have before, but yet still tempting right. If they're willing to pay a certain amount of money, it's do. I want to do this, so that's a car.

Mel: 49:24

Do you attend more or fewer meetings now than when you were in corporate?

Brett: 49:30

You were much fewer Good answer.

Francesca : 49:32

Good answer.

Mel: 49:34

Do you think contracting has made you a better negotiator overall?

Brett: 49:39

That's a good question. I would say yes. You go through more negotiations with potential customers, you get much more comfortable. The first couple are like oh my God, I can't you get. You're prepared for three days, right, and whatever they say, you're going to say yes to you because you don't want to jeopardize the deal. But then, as you start to go through a few, you realize it's more of a value based exchange than it is them walking away because you wanted a few extra dollars.

Brett: 50:09

It's good to hear you got nervous on your first negotiations too, oh for sure Common thing the bigger deals that you do get nervous because again, especially if it's a project I want, then it tends to get more nervous. The more you really want something, the more you tend to get nervous for.

Mel: 50:27

Have you ever worked from an unconventional location?

Brett: 50:31

That's a good question. I can't think of what an unconventional would mean anymore. I was actually working at home for a few years prior to the pandemic, so I kind of worked where I've been. So I wish I had a more exotic answer for you Like a treehouse in Costa Rica?

Mel: 50:49

or something.

Francesca : 50:50

Not a closet.

Brett: 50:53

No, I've been on a Zoom call with some guy that was cruising down the highway at 65 miles an hour from Detroit to Chicago on a. Zoom video. I'm like dude. It's okay, you can put it down and sound. I don't need to be seeing you scooting down the highway.

Mel: 51:08

Please don't get into an accident. Do you have your midday naps taken an uptick?

Brett: 51:15

No naps. I haven't figured out the naps, but definitely more. If I want to shut it down, nice, nice, can I give you just one tip?

Mel: 51:24

that I learned from this.

Brett: 51:26

Because when I started it, everything was I'm like ah, it's your contract, I can schedule my day however I want. But what I found was it was chaotic. And again back to that book time rich. It said, hey, if you calendarize and block time, it changed my life. It really did so. If people are struggling with that, I'm not saying you have to calendar or block. Find a system that works for you, because you'll be surprised at how much more time you actually do have.

Mel: 51:53

Time blocking. I also am a fan of the time block and I love that you're building in walks because that's good. Get some vitamin D. Last question, more of like a superstitious thing Do you have a favorite coffee mug or something that you're superstitious about for your work days?

Brett: 52:08

I wouldn't say superstitious, but that's funny. I don't know if you can see, oh puppy yeah, it was unfortunately, she was 18. We had lost her last year, but she was my office mate for like five years, and so my oldest daughter got me this cup as a gift, so I keep that as the good luck cup, so not superstitious, but more of a comfort feeling.

Mel: 52:32

I love that. I love that yeah.

Francesca : 52:53

Right before we adjourn. If you were talking to your kid or a best friend who is contemplating this, what would you tell them?

Brett: 53:01

Yeah, don't wait. Right, If there's a way to take control at the big macro, and it's don't run your life around your job. You may have to in the short term, but figure out a plan to get away from that as soon as possible. Get the skills you need to pay your dues, but always keep in mind that there is another way. You just want to be in control. Easier said than done sometimes, but it comes back to that time factor, and maybe now I'm just more sensitive to it as I'm older. But the earlier you can get that that it's okay to find alternative paths. My daughter's no by now.

Brett: 53:38

That corporate I'm not a big fan of anymore. It served me well, it had its purpose. But I think there's better ways to do that. And just again, take control of your own. Figure out a way to build your life and then incorporate work into it. And the last thing I'll add to that is figure out what you want. You may not know it at 25 to 29. You may not know, but I'd still have a plan. Even if it's this plan changes, think about where you go, Cause if you're not driving towards something, then it's you're just along for the ride.

Francesca : 54:09

And there's a lot of good work to do right and a huge space like wide open spaces.

Brett: 54:13

And people that appreciate that. These business owners and business small businesses appreciate it. They're open to it. There's enough that appreciate what you can do If appreciate your point of view, appreciate your thoughts on something, and I've heard from a number of folks that said that's one of the most refreshing things is somebody's actually listening to me. They're out there and they're hungry for your expertise.

Mel: 54:34

Time to tap into your main character energy.

Brett: 54:38

I like that yeah.

Mel: 54:39

I like the main character of your story, so build the story you want.

Francesca : 55:00

Brad, thanks so much for joining us today. We'll post in the show notes your Slack channel, your podcast, tiktok and your LinkedIn, just so everyone can go out and be part of your corporate escapee community. Thank you for joining us today.

Brett: 55:14

Yeah, that's my pleasure.

Francesca : 55:34

We'll be back next week with new week, new headlines. Thanks so much for joining us today. Like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. You can come over and say hi to us on the TikToks and LinkedIn community. Hit us up at yourworkfriends.com. We're always posting stuff on there and if you found this episode helpful, share with your work friends. Thanks, friend.