The Data Mix Podcast
Brian Booden and George Beaton are very excited to introduce The Data Mix - a new show focusing on some of the leading individuals in the Data and Analytics space! Our aim is to bring you our guests in a relaxed and conversational format, where you can ask questions and we can all learn more about some of the topical items in today's Business Intelligence and Data driven world.
The Data Mix Podcast
TDM S3 Ep7 – Taylor Desseyn: Building Trust in Tech Communities
🧭 Career switch? Content overwhelm? Community-first hiring?
In this episode of The Data Mix, Taylor Dessen, VP of Global Community at Torc, shares how community-led recruitment is transforming tech hiring by focusing on trust, relationships, and long-term engagement rather than transactional interactions.
• Community-based recruitment sees 70% response rates compared to traditional recruitment's 25% response rate
• Taylor transitioned from traditional recruiting to creating a DevRel approach for the talent industry
• Torque connects candidates and employers through a platform that evaluates more than just resumes
• The platform integrates GitHub profiles, video interviews, and assessments to provide a comprehensive candidate view
• Building relationships over time yields better results - some of Taylor's best leads came from connections made 4-5 years ago
• Community involvement provides social proof and builds trust before the hiring process even begins
• The "Laid off Lounge Thursdays" initiative helps recently displaced tech workers connect and find support
• The human element in tech hiring is critical but often overlooked in automated recruitment processes
And don’t miss our returning segment, The Data Fix → where we break down what’s actually happening behind the scenes in tech right now.
📅 Streaming live on LinkedIn
Tuesday, 15th April 2025 - 3 PM GMT | 10 AM EST
#CommunityHiring #DataCareers #DevRel #TheDataMix #TaylorDesseyn
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Your regular fix are the best guests from the world of data and analytics. This is the Data Mix with Brian Boodin and George Beecham. Good afternoon, mate. How are you?
George Beaton:I'm good, thanks Wow, we've made it to another one.
Brian Booden:I know, I know, know it's moving thick and fast, eh, like we're working our way through our like our technical issues and getting our timings right and all kinds of stuff. It seems to be one episode nowadays, but like it's all good, it's all good and it's becoming.
George Beaton:You know, there's a bit of muscle memory in there now as well.
Brian Booden:Yeah, yeah, it's, it's. It's starting to starting to feel a bit more polished, despite the ragged edges. You know it's getting there. It's getting there. Well, it's um, it's week two of school holidays here. What's your chat and that's my chat. It's week two of school holidays, so there's lots of entertaining to do, especially later on this week.
George Beaton:So well, I'm looking forward to a long weekend. Um friday, saturday, sunday that'll be the first holiday since Christmas. Boo-hoo, I can hear a lot of people crying for me or playing their tiny violins, but this first quarter has been quite gruelling, so I'm looking forward to four days off.
Brian Booden:I can feel you. Honestly. It's a hard slog right now. Right, there's a lot of exciting things happening, but a lot of things happening nonetheless. But it's all good. We're a few minutes late just getting kicked off. Today we had a few technical hitches in the background, so I think we'll just get cracked on with the episode, shall we? Let's do it, let's do it.
Brian Booden:We're kind of in this weekly cadence at the moment, folks, just because we've been catching up a little bit. We've got tons of stuff that we've done and we're just keen to get into it now. So I think we're on the weeklies for a little while yet and, with that in mind, if you like what you see, you know what to do. I think I'm now picking a preference here. Maybe I'll alter this one for the next time, just to put Apple on there. Apple is the one when you download the podcast and we see the stats in the background 67% of our downloads come on Apple. So that is the one. The five-star reviews make a difference there. Thank you very much. Just keep it swift and move on. Really, mate, I guess that puts us in no interrogative of the data fix.
George Beaton:You ready for it? I am. We've got an interesting one this week as well.
Brian Booden:All right. Well, let's get you in the right state of mind. Here we have the data fix, where we catch up on the tech news that's happened over the last well, in this case, weeks, the last talk with George. What is the news?
George Beaton:Well, there was quite a few to choose from. Again, I tried to stay away from the mainstream ones, for example tariffs, but it's difficult, it's really difficult. So, this has got a bit of a tariff flavor, but it ties in quite nicely to our guest this week and also our theme of data. So what we've seen this week is a major shift brewing in the transatlantic tech landscape and at the heart of it is data revenue and the role of digital communities.
George Beaton:And digital communities is something we're going to talk a lot about on this session. So what's been happening? The European Commission has proposed something unprecedented a potential tariff on advertising revenues earned by US tech giants like Meta and Google, part of a wider trade negotiation pause. But the move signals a growing willingness in Europe to assert its power, not just through regulation, but through economics. And why does this matter? Well, because platforms like Meta and Google earn tens of billions from European users, and that's largely thanks to the data that they generate. And now the same data is being tapped for the next frontier, ai. So in 2025, meta began training its large language models on public content from European users from posts, comments, chatbot interactions and the idea is to reflect Europe's language and cultures more accurately.
George Beaton:But this has obviously raised immediate concerns around privacy and consent under GDPR. And that brings us to today's theme, which is trust. On one hand, we can see a vast algorithm driven networks where data and content scale fast, but often without clear community oversight or accountability, and, on the other, we're seeing a growing push towards more intentional, human scale digital communities, spaces where trust, identity and shared purpose matter as much as reach, and that's exactly what today's guest is going to explore. In a moment, brian will introduce someone who's helping reshape how we build communities on the web and how those communities are transforming the way we hire, collaborate and share meaningful, trusted information online. It's a timely conversation, brian, in a world where value of data isn't just in platforms that collect it, but in the communities that create it.
Brian Booden:I think this is interesting. You know what this falls under the category of I'll release something when something else major is happening in the hope that it goes under. The category of I'll release something when something else major is happening in the hope that it goes under the radar. And I think that's exactly what's happening here is that tariffs are out there in the world and taking off the full blown edge of these types of issues but it's not so long ago, about two or three years ago, and I specifically remember an episode of Dragon's Den in the UK where there was a product that was basically about monetizing your own data right and it got everyone, got maximum, put the maximum behind it from the Dragon's perspective.
Brian Booden:But this is like a real issue. I think, like the super conglomerates have gotten away for so long before even the LLM conglomerates have gotten away for so long before even the LLM side of things started so long of just processing whatever data they wanted, however they wanted, and hiding it under small print and tick boxes that were pre-ticked, even though they don't comply with GDPR, and that's a bit of a sweeping statement. But this is really to sound like ChatGPT, a game changer in terms of how this data is dealt with in the public domain. It's about damn time I'm sorry, but it is. It's about damn time that Facebook and Apple and Meta and Google and all of these companies started paying for what this data is worth.
George Beaton:Yeah exactly.
Brian Booden:It's not ethically okay just to hoover up all data in the world about everything and it's super sly to start training LLMs with a silent tick box and us having to unconsent. That is ethically wrong, programmatically wrong. Imagine if you just walked up to a person and said I'm going to use your speech to train someone else's speech, but I'm not going to tell you about it. I'm doing the courtesy of telling you now, but I'm not going to tell you about it really. So that's a bit of a rant, but I think this is high time it really is.
George Beaton:Yeah, and do you know what the irony is? But I think this is high time it really is. Yeah, and do you know what the irony is? The irony is that this was really kicked off by the US president's tariffs, because Europe was looking at, okay, how do we respond to this? And one of the things that these tariffs hadn't touched was services. So services the services that we sell to the US or the services the US sell to us were not touched. But now what we're looking at is advertising revenue from these. So if Europe was to tax advertising revenue, then maybe, in a funny way, we'll start getting the true value of that data will maybe start coming back and hitting our pockets again.
Brian Booden:Maybe, maybe, and I think the point that you mentioned about public domain was really interesting as well and it ties in very tightly with what we're going to talk about today. So I think we'll use that as a kind of seamless rollover into the next phase, maybe. But thank you very much, guys. That was George with today's Data Fix. So thank you very much, george. That was cool, george. That was cool mate, and that puts us back in the land of the episode after the data fix as well.
Brian Booden:So today's guest, as you mentioned, is a very, very interesting guy. Taylor Dessen is the VP of Global Community at Torque, and Torque is pioneering a new way of employment as the only way I can think community-based employment or community-sourced employment for tech and data, and I think this is quite a departure from the old job board way of doing things and just being able to hold each other's hand a bit more through the process and make it feel more of a gamification. And I think Taylor's a really interesting guy as well. I almost got a chance to go and meet him at Copenhagen earlier on this year, but it didn't quite work out. So maybe in the future. But your thoughts before we bring him on.
George Beaton:I think we're in for an interesting ride here. There's a lot of energy in this episode. Taylor's a fantastic guy and I think, when it comes to communities, one of the things that we know as humans, and especially as Scots, is that you tend to get on with the people that you know. Everybody's got their own personality, etc. But you know that personality if they're your neighbor, if they're in your community, um, and so you know how to treat them and deal with them. You know what to ask them, you know when, what to trust them for and what maybe not to trust them for, and I think, when the uh, the internet is as big as it is, there's there's an awful lot of anonymous people there. There's a lot of snake oil sellers, et cetera. So I think what Taylor is pioneering could be a game changer for the way that people start dealing with each other again on the internet. So I'm really interested. We're in a new world here.
Brian Booden:Yeah, we are, we are, and let's just cut to the chase and get them on, shall we? Because I know we started a few minutes later as well. So let's speak to Taylor Dessen, vp of Global Community at Torque. Hey everyone, as we just talked about, we're here, george is here, brian is here and down here we've got Taylor. Hey, taylor, how are you?
Taylor Desseyn:Let's go. It's good to see you boys. Glad to be here.
Brian Booden:Yeah, George, it's exciting to have Taylor here, right.
George Beaton:Absolutely yeah. We're joining up all three corners of the Western world right now.
Brian Booden:So are we all allowed to say where we are right now? I think that's okay. Well, I'm here, I'm home near Edinburgh. So, taylor, you're next.
Taylor Desseyn:Yeah, I'm in the glorious Nashville Tennessee.
George Beaton:Oh, wonderful.
Brian Booden:George, can you read that?
George Beaton:Yeah, I'm in the pretty darn cold Oslo, norway, in the Northern Hemisphere right now, minus 5. What's that in Fahrenheit?
Taylor Desseyn:Negative 5 Celsius 2.
Brian Booden:He's checking Google. He's checking Google.
George Beaton:I'm going to say it's around 20.
Brian Booden:I think it's roughly 20 degrees We've got like a nice triangular trifecta of geographies, though, so it works out quite well. Not sure if it's a nice triangle, but it's a triangle of some kind. I saw some kind. Anywho, taylor, it's a joy to have you on the show with us. This has been a long time in the making, so thank you so much for coming along. How are you today?
Taylor Desseyn:I'm great Again. I'm always blessed to be on uh really a technical podcast, as as a non-technical person, and and uh being willing to obviously share my thoughts.
Brian Booden:So, again, blessed to be here, thank you well, you're, you're welcome and uh, we ain't going to get too technical here, but we were talking before the show how our last guest, curtis from Slack, again was on your show. Yeah, so there's a bit of syncopation there, which is nice as well. But I think what's nice is that you guys do have a common link and you work in the DevRel communities, but I think your roles are quite different. So, as a community manager because, don't get me wrong, that's your like official title, right, your community manager Tell us a little bit about what community management means in the realm, of how you deal with it.
Taylor Desseyn:Yeah, I mean listen, a little backstory for those of you who are listening, you know and again, like, subscribe to the data mix. So, basically, you know it's interesting. I was talking to you, brian, backstage before George hopped on and it's hilarious because I essentially career transition from a traditional recruiter to, I mean, really a non-technical dev rel, right, which is what I call community. And you know, I told you, brian backstage and I'm gonna say it here Cause I'm very open Like I have dealt with the most amount of imposter syndrome my entire career over the last four years, right, because I went from a traditional recruiter, right, I would cold call Brian, I would cold call George and be like, hey, please, work with me, I'm different, please, hey, you know, I have a job for you. And then you know Brian, george, like oh no, not again, not another recruiter.
Taylor Desseyn:And for me I just I started to see DevRel quote unquote kind of pop up on my LinkedIn, right, with people like Curtis and you know all these amazing DevRel individuals. I was like man, I really feel like, I feel like this makes a lot of sense. Right, you have individuals at a company that are out in the community breaking bread, going to conferences, spreading the good word of, of of their product. And I was like, I was like the talent industry doesn't have anything like this right now. We don't have a product. Our product is the people. So I would almost argue that the talent industry needs the dev role role more than the dev role needs that role, if that makes sense, right? Because literally, for us, we are people first, like the entire talent industry is people first, and the fact that there is nothing like this in the industry to me is crazy. And so, you know, I I started to emulate all these uh, amazing dev role individuals and and, and you know, uh, I had a lot of pushback over my last four years.
Taylor Desseyn:You know, I heard a lot of Taylor. I don't know what to do with you, taylor. What do you want to do? We want to put you in sales, but then it's like, well, you can't really hold me to a metric because I'm not outbound calling all the time. And then it's like, well, we're going to put you on marketing because I'm not outbound calling all the time. And then it's like, well, we're going to put you on marketing, but I'm out here meeting with CIOs, ctos and helping hire their teams and I'm in the community, so it's been an interesting four years for me. And again, I know I'm working for Torque, so obviously I've got to give them a plug.
Taylor Desseyn:But what I truly mean is I truly have my dream job. I truly have my dream job now and the ability to create DevRel for talent, which is what we're doing at Torque and really loving on people. And I'm not trying to create a tutorial video on how to code the latest SaaS, blah, blah, blah. What we're doing is like hey, here are 10 ways to write a resume. Hey, here are six ways to interview with a hiring manager. Hey, here's the best way to negotiate an offer. And those things, in my opinion, single handedly transform people's careers, sometimes more than just another tutorial video. Right, and so I know there's a lot of weight on our team. There's a lot of people looking at our team for kind of leveling up their career, and I don't take it lightly. And to be able to do this at scale the way we're doing at Torque is a huge blessing.
Brian Booden:I think that's really cool and I want to seg you into something similar but different there, and I think career progression of individuals in the tech industry is sometimes an incredibly overlooked thing. So I don't mean overlooked, what I mean is it's routine. It seems routine to be able to move from role to role and to have the capability to do that. But the thing that you mentioned about you get to go to all these cool conferences. But have you ever been to a cool recruitment conference? No, I've never been. You know what?
Taylor Desseyn:I've never even been invited to a. They don't even exist, they do. And they even been invited to a. Uh a, I've been invited, they do, and they're real terrible in my opinion, right. Like like they're really nerdy, like they're even more weirder than tech conferences, like, and listen, I'm a nerd at heart, but like, let's be honest, we're all nerds, right, and some of us can be a little weird, that's okay. Recruitment conferences are really weird, um, and and what what's even crazy is I giggle. It doesn't't bother me. I promise it doesn't bother me. But literally there's a big recruiting conference that happens in Nashville every year and like no one's ever been like on the staff, been like, hey, you've been a recruiter. I mean, I'm very out there on LinkedIn, like I'm very public. I've got no invites and that's okay. I'm okay with that Because you all are my people. I resonate more with the developers at this point in my career than I do recruiters, which is why I think I'm kind of in the best spot right now.
Brian Booden:You are in a good spot and I'll offer one more before I let George get one in. And I just think that the way that you put it, and that DevRel doesn't need the tech as much as the tech needs the DevRel from the people side, and that's completely right, because you go to any conference and you can pick up technical skills at any conference right.
Brian Booden:Yes, can you find? How do you find the right people? If you're going to a conference and you've got 3 000 people there and you need to like lock down a persona of five to ten individuals that meet a type, how do you go about finding that? And I think that's the challenge that you're trying to address, which is like incredibly awesome, because 95 percent of people go to tech conferences for tech, but there is a small proportion percent of people go to tech conferences for tech, but there is a small proportion of people that go to tech conferences to meet the people and to engage with those people as part of their network.
Taylor Desseyn:so, yeah, how does that sound right? You know it sounds right. You know I saw an interesting trend, which is why I know which I, why I knew early I was on the right track, and which is which is more of a confirmation lately for me and what we're doing with the Torque team, because what are the? In my opinion? So years ago so I was very blessed I was elected VP of the NET user group in Nashville back in like 2015, 16. I was elected by my friends in the tech community as VP of the NET user group. It was averaging 100, 150. This is when meetups were still in vogue, right? We were averaging 100, 150 people a month, and one of the most highly attended meetups consistently was the January meetup. And guess what the topic was?
Taylor Desseyn:Recruitment the job search, yeah, the job search yeah, job search it wasn't blazer, it wasn't the latest version of c-sharp, it wasn't how to develop a mobile app using xamarin which is not even xamarin. I think it's like maui or something like that now, but like it wasn't that, it was the job search, and so for me it's one of these things so. So I saw that right. I really feel like one of the things I do well is kind of seeing trends early before it happens, and so I was like man, people are so hungry for this job search talk and this job search panel, so why can't I continue to replicate this from a conference perspective to speak. You know, my conference talk in Amsterdam in a few weeks is exposing the interview process right, basically educating people and giving them the playbook to succeed in the job search.
Taylor Desseyn:And it's like for me and there's been even more of an appetite lately I've been very blessed, but really the last three conferences I've spoke at was packed out rooms, like when I spoke at All Things Open in Raleigh. We had to turn people away. We had to turn about 40 people away out of 80 people in my room. Like Todd Lewis who runs All Things Open was like we probably need to put you in a bigger room next year. But, like you know, again there's just this appetite and again for me being able to give back. I think it's just so incredibly important to the tech industry.
George Beaton:Yeah. So, taylor, I'm curious now because I have a vision in my head of a developer and I've been a developer in the past. Yeah, and what I wasn't really hungry for as a developer was a promotion or the next sort of level up Sure, but I might have been unique there of level up Sure, but I might have been unique. There Are developers then just looking for, like, a better company to work in, one that gives you better benefits maybe free lunches or whatever or are they looking for promotion when they're coming? What's the general ideas there?
Taylor Desseyn:You know, this is why it's so hard to do what we do, because we have to speak to everybody and everybody is at a different stage in their career, right?
George Beaton:So George you weren't necessarily wanting promotion, but usually I just wanted a free lunch, free drinks, or you just wanted to be a part of a community to share and not be alone.
Taylor Desseyn:You just wanted to be a part of a community to share and not be alone, right? One of my, one of my keynotes at a conference that conference two years ago was you're not alone, right, and so one of the things, one of the unofficial slogans for Torque is welcome home, because we want this to be a home base for you and your career and however you want to use us, right. So, so a lot of developers want to race, right. A lot of developers just want to vibe and be at their spot that they're at and just you know, speak at conferences and learn things.
Taylor Desseyn:But the thing is is we have to develop content, meaningful content, for individuals that want a promotion, that want to raise or that want to stay where they're at, and we have to continue to meet people where they're at, which is part of the really part of the difficulty in creating content, right, if you're, if you're a DevRel person at a software company, you put out a new feature.
Taylor Desseyn:You know exactly. We are going to speak to that feature. We're going to put it out on YouTube. We're going to have people watch it For us. We're trying to speak to George, who may just want a community of data folks or AI folks to share his latest LLM project which is what we have at Tor or Brian, who may not know how to ask for a raise at his company. We got to give specific bullet points to Brian to how to approach his manager when it comes to a raise. Those two things are very different pieces of content and that's something that we have to do and we have to address, which is one of the biggest problems that we have at tort.
Brian Booden:Yeah, and like a follow up to that. Taylor, you talk about the different people, personas, in terms of employees, but George and I have gone slightly different paths recently as well, and he's working for a large consultancy, but I'm kind of out on my own as a small consultancy and you might even call that a contractor or single-person business at times and again that's a different market, right, and we've chatted to a few people recently Cutters was one of them. Ben Roggean again has sort of taken that path from being like a fine company to being his own company and a very successful one. But the point that I'm trying to get to is that that gamut of people you have to appeal to is very wide. So I'm guessing you probably have to be quite keyed in on the personas that you're working to get to and that must make like an unending content loop.
Taylor Desseyn:Oh, it's unending.
Brian Booden:I mean, I mean, it's unending, it's a lot of content hard, but in your case, content must be like oh my God, I've got 10,000 things I need to talk about today.
Taylor Desseyn:One of the biggest problems I have and if any of my teams listen to this in the future, they're going to giggle at me because I am just like ADD central. I have a Google doc that I just dump ideas and I was like we got to do this. I mean, literally in Slack. I'm getting blown up on Slack because I dumped some ideas but I even I even popped off like two ideas today, this morning. I'm literally looking, I'm looking at it, my team's hazing me Because, like I just throw out all these ideas that I wanna do and try to address and it's like what's important now?
Taylor Desseyn:Right, and I think, as we're starting this journey as a Torque team is starting to put out meaningful content. Let's just go to what the root of people want how to, how to write a LinkedIn, how do you leverage the Tor platform to find a job or build a community. Those are three things that we're just focused on right now and then over time we'll slowly build that out. But it's definitely a challenge and it's a lot of listening. I run my mouth for a living, but I also listen a ton and I watch a ton and you know my team is in our Discord. We scale our Discord from about 900 people to close to 4,000 people in a few months and like we're constantly listening to people and what they're complaining about or asking about and we're just kind of putting that into our content plan to make sure we're developing content for people that they actually want to read and leverage.
Brian Booden:And are you actually facilitating people getting jobs then, or are you just providing the content around that? How closely tied are you to that like final recruitment piece, and how much of it is like we are the community that helps you get to the last mile and then you have to make the jump yourself. Yeah, creation there, or how does it work?
Taylor Desseyn:so that's something we're trying to iterate on. Where I'm not in full transparency, we're not as close as we need to be. So we're a job. Torque is a jobs platform, so the way it works is you join our platform, you complete your profile and then we reach out to you when we have something that's a fit for you. Now what we're trying to do is trying to develop within our product.
Taylor Desseyn:I literally met with our head of product, Ken Collins, yesterday. He's a big AI guy. You guys should probably interview him too. So. So Ken Collins had a product we were actually talking about trying to get our jobs public to where people can actually submit their profile and they can have control over. I mean, we have, we have stuff going off every day in our discord, in our lives, like you can meet other people every single day within our community, but I would really want our community a little bit closer tied to jobs. So that's something we're iterating on right now, that we're not perfect on and we're aware of that, but right now we definitely have the ecosystem for you to get plugged in and show up to a live, show up to a networking event we're actually I'm launching next Thursday in our Discord in the Torque Discord laid off lounge Thursdays so I've had a bunch of my friends get laid off I don't know what's in the water right now.
Taylor Desseyn:In the last week I've had so many people get laid off this week so I was like you know what? I want to help them. So we're going to go live in Discord every Thursday and just ask questions and just be a resource for people um that they typically would have to pay three to four hundred dollars an hour for like a career resource, and we're just offering it for free in the discord yeah, that's interesting and um, I know why people are being uh laid off um doge the department of um, but the uh, the trump policies are starting to hit.
George Beaton:But hey, let's keep this on political.
Taylor Desseyn:I've got a whole other conversation to end on myself. We'll stay community focused right now, yeah.
George Beaton:So that does open up a question. I hope you don't mind me asking. But then what is the monetization model of talk then? Are the companies' opportunities seeing you then as a different model, as a different, you know, you're not the standard sort of approaching on LinkedIn type recruitment company that's then going to charge between 20 and 100% of a first year salary. What's your model on that side?
Taylor Desseyn:Yeah, model's very standard. I mean, if anybody's listening to this, you know we're very, from a pay perspective, from a pricing perspective, very similar to just like a staffing model right, you only pay us if you place a developer right. One of Torque's specialties is our near-shore capability. One of my goals within the Torque community is to build community in Latin America. We have thousands and thousands and thousands of really good engineers on our platform from South America and Mexico and so a lot of companies use us for that and so we can do contracting, contract to hire, full-time placement, consulting, stuff.
Taylor Desseyn:We kind of do it all from that model. It is free for the developer to join. All they got to do is create a profile on Torquedev and they have access to all the resources. One of the coolest stats that I've learned recently since starting is traditionally when a recruiter messages a developer from a staffing company, like cold DMs, their response rate's only 25%. So if I message 10 people people, I'm only hearing back from two and a half percent of those people, right, or no two and a half people when you message somebody on the tort platform. So if you use us and this is why this is why my job in community is so important is. The response rate is 70%.
George Beaton:Interesting.
Taylor Desseyn:So if we send a message, if our matching team we have a matching team at Torx sends a DM to somebody on the talent platform, the response rate is seven out of 10. So speed is tremendous. We have a case study of helping a client that we basically took away. I mean, the hours is ridiculous. It's like hundreds of hours of interviewing we like alleviated from this one client. This one client went from like, hey, we only want to see a developer, we're still going to bring them through four high, we're going to still bring them through four traditional interviews. To now. We've staffed up so many individuals with them. They message our sales guy on Slack and go hey, we need this developer tomorrow. You guys know the product fit or pro profile fit. Just go ahead and get them started tomorrow.
George Beaton:Wow, taylor, you mentioned um near shore capabilities. Just then be clear about the service. Are you actually providing a sort of business process BPO type service um in any form or fashion, or is it individual?
Taylor Desseyn:contractors, consultants, I mean. For the most we're probably individual contractors, but like you know, like we had, I hopped on a call with a VP of engineering he's one of my buddies a few days ago, like they need to develop a mobile SDK for their iOS and Android to tie into some sort of application. Right, and they don't. They don't have the, they don't have any of the resources they're going to manage the project, but then they need us to like, slide in three resources and just roll Right.
Taylor Desseyn:So, however you want to call that, but I would say traditionally, what what we do is do is we do everything except manage the actual project. We still want you to manage the project, but we will make it easy, because my buddy, who's the VP of engineering, he said I don't have the bandwidth to hire, like I don't have the bandwidth right now to sit in interviews and interview 30 mobile devs and pick three. He goes. I just need the three best profiles and just get them started. To sit in interviews and interview 30 mobile devs and pick three, right, he goes. I just need the three best profiles and just get them started.
Taylor Desseyn:And that's what we do.
Brian Booden:I think you've hit something there and I want to explain what I mean. So in the UK, like the concept of the job board has been around a long time, I can see some big names like Indeed and JobServe and stuff like that.
Brian Booden:But what I've noticed over the last year or two and probably it's a post-COVID thing, it ties in quite closely with that is that people's trust in what they see on job boards is dwindling by the day. Like fake jobs, rates that don't exist, permanence that are contracts, contracts that don't exist. And you mentioned the direct relationship with a recruiter. Now, this is not a slight on all recruiters at all. I don't mean it this way, but there's a very good reason why they only get a 25% response rate, and it's because whenever you try to get something on Indeed or JobServe, you're met with two problems. First of all, you never get a response and it's faceless, so you don't know who's even responding.
Brian Booden:Second of all, we're living in an age where technology cuts are just rampant right now For every job that is out there publicly advertised let's take Power BI as an example right, yeah, contract Power BI jobs in the UK as soon as something goes up on LinkedIn, there's like 150 people on it, 100% yeah.
Brian Booden:So that's a logistical nightmare for everyone involved because there's 150 profiles to vet, there's no way to get quickly to an end candidate and, like you say, you've got a multi-tier interview process to get there for a job that maybe isn't well paid enough. So there's so many issues there that make me think that community sourcing of jobs is actually the way to go. And I've got a friend of mine, in another group actually, who runs something a little bit similar to what you guys do, not on the same scale, but an aggregated job board with a personalized service that helps you get in through a side door rather than having to go through there. So, like, can you comment on I know that's a lot of things, but can you comment on that kind of model and how things are becoming different? Because, like you say, you've jumped from the recruitment side. So if anyone knows, it's you. Yeah, yeah, no, I think it's a, it's dude hiring just in general is a mess right now.
Taylor Desseyn:It's you, yeah, yeah, no, I think it's a it it's dude. Hiring just in general is a mess right now. It's even more of a mess because of just all the. I mean like a, a dear friend of mine, kelly vaughn. She's a director of engineering um out of atlanta. She and she and I text all the time and she like sends me like I have 500 people apply to like a mid-level role. It's like you're going to sift through all that right, and I think what the cool thing is, I think a community-first approach in keeping your people engaged.
Taylor Desseyn:One of the hardest issues that typical recruiting companies have is just for somebody to get back to them. Right, you could have them in your database but you haven't engaged them at all. So it's like it's like I have a power bi role and I recruited a ton on power bi in the states and it's like I'm gonna call one my power bi guys and I talked to six years ago, but I don't have the ability to like stay in touch with that person. So I'm gonna call Brian from six years ago and Brian's be like who are you? But then what's so important from a community perspective is, if you're doing it through emails and text message marketing and meaningful video content and blogs and one pagers, we can call them and like all this stuff. Then, if I call Brian from six years ago, brian's like oh yeah, I've been in your community for six years, I've been actually using all your resources, I'd love to do this job for you.
Taylor Desseyn:Right? That is a fundamental shift of how you source people, and the problem is is that the recruiting industry is the slowest to innovate, and that's why I'm I'm excited for torque. Um ronstad, you guys probably may be familiar with ronstad. Ronstad actually bought torque, and ronstad bought torque for a reasons, one of them being the community first approach, because Ronstad knows they have to change their approach, and so, again, I truly think that the recruiting companies that can change to a community first model, which is very intricate that could be a whole nother podcast on how to do it I think those are the ones that are going to be successful the next 10 to 15 years.
Brian Booden:I got one more point to add on this before George jumps in, and it's actually related to you, george, as well. I won't go into the details, but George and I are going through this very thing right now with something that we're doing right. We're working out people that we're talking to. Are they the right people? Are they the right fit? How do we validate that? How do we get credentials?
Brian Booden:Again, going out and outsourcing all of that stuff is super difficult. Or just trying to do it cold by just reaching out and saying just tell me, because you never know what's going on. I think that's where this model really is incredibly useful, because you've got, like I said, basically, if you put it down to a sales perspective, it's a bunch of warm leads for recruitment that you guys are holding right. So any tech can come up to you and say, hey, we need an X or we need two Ys and you can be like well, here's our pool of 150 vetted people that have been in our community for five years and have contribution levels of over 600. And here they are and it's easy for you to get that and that's the bit right. It's cutting out those first two steps. Oh, it's kind of hours. Who is this person? Are they telling the truth? Is it right? Can they do what they say they're going to do?
Taylor Desseyn:So yeah, yeah, and one of the things we're doing, you know, and this is what's really cool we have the ability for you to tie in your GitHub to your profile. Nice, so you can. So that's one of the things we submit over to the clients, like hey, well, if you get a resume, let's be like what we're doing at Torque we're trying to change what the resume is Like.
Taylor Desseyn:If I hand you a resume, you're like I mean this is cool and all, but like, what have you done? What are you actually coding in Right? And so one of the one of the ways is you, you have the ability to hook in your GitHub. Another thing that we do is is we don't send you a resume. We send you a profile based on what you need from the developer and what that developer has done. We also do video interviews that we send to you so you can. We have clients that don't even interview. We have clients that just watch our videos and then pull the trigger on that, and we have a whole slew of assessments that we do. So, literally, ideally, you can just say, hey, torek, we need this. We go, we got you, give us 48 hours. We get three or four developers for you. That has everything. You can look at their video interview. You can look at their GitHub, you can look at their assessments. It sounds good.
George Beaton:Yeah. So I'm interested then on the, the people that then don't make the grade. So there must be. You've got a lot of data points I mean a lot of data points and people, so you can, you can just about make a decision depending on things like their engagement, their videos, their um, their github um, just how, how good they are for a particular role. But what about you must get and I'm going back to brian's comment about there are charlatans out there, there are people that will say they can do something. They'll maybe take the first couple of weeks of pay before somebody finds out that they're no good at the job. How are you screening for these? Or is it self-screening in the community? What's your?
Taylor Desseyn:Yeah, I think. Well, first off and this is, I think, the biggest challenge, right? So? I told you all the percentage about the LinkedIn response rates Traditional placement percentages for a traditional talent solutions company is 10%, right? So if we have 100 people on our platform which we don't, we have way more than that. If we have 100 people on our platform, only 10 people are going to get placed in jobs, yeah, Right. So what are we doing with the other 90%? That's something we're talking about right now.
Taylor Desseyn:To answer your question, I think because of the assessments, because you have to have a certain amount of profile completeness to even be considered. You have to have your profile 70% complete. So I'm sure there's a ton of spam on our platform, but we don't even consider you unless you have 70% profile completeness, right? Which is like there's like 10 things to complete a profile. Essentially, they're all way the same. You just got to get seven of them done, right? And then, on top of that, then what we're talking about internally within the platform is like how do you badge properly? You know we want people to be engaged, right? So if you attend 10 of our panels or virtual networking sessions, you need to have that on your profile, right? So if so, if one of our team reaches out to like oh wow, brian has gone to like 10 meetups. He's done an assessment.
Taylor Desseyn:I have more than that, right right, I'm here exactly, so it's like all right, brian has done everything we want to do, then we need to consider him, or or at least highly consider him for this role, versus maybe somebody coming off the street. We have no data from Right. So, to answer your question, george, we're still evaluating that. We don't have a silver bullet yet on that, but there is a lot of steps you have to go through to even be considered. Mainly, complete your profile. Just because you log on doesn't mean you're already be considered. You have to actually complete your profile and take the time to do that.
George Beaton:because you log on doesn't mean you're already be considered you have to actually complete your profile and take the time to do that, yeah, good, and then I think that's really valuable for, um, for the people that are then going to ultimately hire uh, your, the people in your community, because you've done a lot of the hard work for them exactly yep, yep I.
Brian Booden:I think that part is incredibly important from the the candidate side, but from the employer side, I did have a question and it's not a trust question, right, because you talked about the recruitment game being very slow to change. In my experience, people who are doing the employing take a bit of time to change as well, and obviously this is still a relatively new model. Right, it's great what you're doing and it takes away a lot of time to change as well, and obviously this is still a relatively new model. Right, it's great what you're doing and it takes away a lot of levels of exposure. But convincing companies to take that leap, yeah, what just like, just talk us through that a little bit, because I'm guessing it's not just a case of, hey, we are talk, I'm taylor, let's go. Yeah, what's like the pipeline for you guys to to get involved in this with someone that a company that's new to this?
Taylor Desseyn:well, I mean, at the end of the day, it comes down to trust, right, which is why it's incredibly important, I think, going back to community, for for especially people, I think, unfortunately, the traditional talent model is sit behind your phone, smile and dial, call a CIO, call a CTO, call a VP of engineering hey, use us, we, you know, we're, we're good, we promise. Right. It's like well, okay. So Sally and Brian and Sue and Cynthia have all called me too and said the exact same thing Right, so it's, it's, it's social proofing is what I call it. It right, which is why it's so important from a community perspective, marketing perspective, to actually put out meaningful content right. The traditional buyer this isn't even, this is just buying in general, people's buying patterns. It takes seven touch points for somebody to make a decision seven, right?
Taylor Desseyn:so, like when I was early on recruiting, I'm like, well, all we have right now is a dm and a phone call. Yeah, how are we gonna? We're gonna call somebody seven times if, if I call you seven times, you are going to report me for harassment. Right, if, if I send more than three emails, you're going to report me for harassment. And so it's one of these things where it's like how are you getting yourself in front of those clients? And that's where I was like content's the only way. Content's the only way. Community building is the only way, right?
Taylor Desseyn:I literally had a tweet go out right before we went live. This is like prime example. Brian, this should answer your question, but I have a few more thoughts. I brought in three sales leads in the last week, which is a good sign. The market may be heating up right. One of the one of the sales leads came from a dinner I threw a year and a half ago, but that relationship started four and a half years ago. Another relationship that came in is a guy I met at a conference five or six years ago.
Brian Booden:Yeah.
Taylor Desseyn:Yeah, like that is a and that is really hard. Like like that is like from a from a from a. We need to ROI. Now that's hard but it but man, it comes back around and that's where people really miss out. So I think that's important. And then I think, from an actual get on the call with hiring managers, it's just like that one client, that one client wanted to bring our candidates through all four of their interviews, even though we told them they didn't have to, and then they realized we hit on every single or most candidates and then they're like all right, we trust you.
Brian Booden:And it's something, taylor, that we're kind of slowly losing the ability to nurture because of automation. Right, automation is giving us so many tools just to try and hit something and say, and then just ask the same thing three times Just give me, okay, here's step one, here's step two, here's step three, now sign. And really I see a lot of this that you can still have that and you can still use that to start the conversation, but it cannot be the conversation, right. And because of that, I think that's why people like you are quite important, because you have to be in the community and willing to put yourself out there and say let's have this difficult conversation, rather than just say I'm great at one, great at two, great at three. You should sign me and I'm not going to have a conversation with you if you don't, which is a way that a lot of companies are still operating with automation. So, are you seeing that shift happening?
Taylor Desseyn:Shift for the better?
Brian Booden:No, I saw the hesitation and the pause there I kind of feel like we're in a battle here against automation, because the other thing that you mentioned is like the five, six-year lead time. George and I have been doing this for about that period of time. Right Now I'm not saying that from a lead perspective, right, but you've got to give for a long, long, long time, consistently, for someone to reach out and say I really like you, I want to do something with you, right, to think that we can just run three of these in two weeks and then reach out is not practical. So I'm agreeing with you completely.
George Beaton:It's a life lesson to all of us actually Keep these things going. We were talking a couple of podcasts ago about the consulting company McKinsey and they have a mantra eight touches a week. So as a consultant, you should be calling up message on LinkedIn, some some kind of communication with eight contacts a week and that that ultimately then brings the work in. But yeah, you're this point about a long lead time.
Taylor Desseyn:Uh, 100 percent, um, and that's and that's and that's the nuance of community, right, and that's where I've struggled over the course of my year. Because, because people, of course of four years, because people want to put me in sales, well, it's like, but I'm not cold outbounding, right, even though I bring in leads, right. And then from like, you know, then it's like, well, we will. Then you're marketing, because you're doing the events and you're doing the social media and you're doing all this stuff. It's like, well, yeah, but also to like, you can't just put me in marketing.
Taylor Desseyn:And that's why I think, and then, like I was, I'm sitting in product meetings, right, because as a, as a head of community, then you're hearing what the community is complaining about your products and you're in product meetings going, hey, the community saying this, and then I'm in sales meetings just helping drive. So that's why I like this role, especially in staffing, is, I think, so vital, but it's so nuanced and it is a complete, fundamental shift, which is why I'm glad Tork and Ronstad have this mindset, because it's it's not something that you can be like, yeah, we'll give it a shot, like, no, you don't give community a shot, right?
Brian Booden:So, again, I think what you're talking about, taylor, to like give a sales analogy here. You're basically, you're basically, and we all are, just by doing this, we're all human lead magnets, right? We're not bits of paper, we're not PDFs, we're not programs, but we are lead magnets for what we do in our areas. Right, because people are buying people.
Taylor Desseyn:People are not buying stuff People don't want to buy from businesses.
Brian Booden:Especially.
Taylor Desseyn:B2B staffing companies.
Brian Booden:Honestly, when I get a LinkedIn DM that starts off with I can sell you this, I just respond saying that I don't take cold pitches, thanks, for your good luck, best of luck in the future with that, but no, so it's cool, it's fair, but I think the human being is something that needs to be re-commoditized ahead of automation, and I think that's something that we are forgetting a little bit as all this is coming in, so like it's very timely for me, nate, to be honest. Yeah, I mean.
Taylor Desseyn:And then I have this building public vlog and, like, a lot of people are like what's the ROI for this? And you know I put out a clip yesterday about me eating the actual corn husk of a tamale. I went to Mexico and ate the corn husk of a tamale, which you're not supposed to, I was told, and like I think if you're in a business, if you're strictly revenue focused, you're like that post is dumb, that post is not going to provide ROI, but you know what that does? It shows you're human and funny and goofy, which is what people are going to buy from Me. Sitting out there I sat with a very high up from somebody at Ronstadt and we were just talking about trying to make staffing more human and to me it's mind boggling that the staffing industry does not make themselves more human.
Taylor Desseyn:Put out more things, like you know. There's another clip from my last blog about me, like waking up first thing in the morning, my business partner, jason Torres, telling me good morning and me in the Uber ride going please don't talk to me and I've had so many people DM me about this and it's like I hate to say it, marketing people and B2B. That clip's going to sell more than your stupid stats that you want to put out. Yeah.
George Beaton:I think the problem in a lot of the businesses we're in even me in consulting is people want that human connection. You're spending eight hours a day in work. You can't be a robot for eight hours a day. So just that human connection, building the community. I mean it's such a novel idea and I mean I'm sold in this. It works. It works, taylor. I have one question. I'm not quite sure if we've got enough time for it, so give me your best shot in 60 seconds. But what about the education on the other side, the people doing the hiring so that they can get the best out of your sort of hand-picked group of people? Because it's easy to hire somebody and you can have a great dev, but if you don't know how to get the best out of that dev, then so is there on the community side? Is there anything for the wannabe companies that want to hire your people, or is that?
Taylor Desseyn:a common thing there is, there is, and that's something I'm actively talking to with our sales team is how do you start building community and giving back to engineers or engineering leaders on, like, how to hire? Yeah, right, like, how are your interviews structured right? Do you have, do you have, a rubric? Are you guys all on the same page? Do you guys know what you're interviewing about? Most of the time that, no. So that's something I'm actively talking with our sales team to start putting out content of. Hey, if we could basically put out a playbook on how to hire engineers for free game changer.
George Beaton:I think it would be agreed.
Brian Booden:That's an amazing way to sort of close off, taylor. I know that we could easily double the length. Yeah, we try to be respectful to our awesome viewers that are out there. So thank you so much for joining us. I think we could definitely have a part two TBC. We'd love that, but it's been awesome to have you. Thank you very much, george. Closing words from you.
George Beaton:Thank you very much, taylor. I think closing words from you Just thank you very much, taylor. I think you've very much opened up another avenue to myself and hopefully our audience. So thank you very much for that and we'll be checking out your website. Thanks, guys.
Brian Booden:All right, thanks everyone. We'll catch you back in the main show, guys. Cheers in the main show guys cheers boom, we're done. Brian, I can't hear you now. You can hear me, I can hear you. Okay, but that was interesting, right? That was a different slant and I think, community recruitment give us your 30-second shot at that, george. Community recruitment how does that feel after going through that?
George Beaton:Yeah, it solves a lot of the issues that we are seeing out in the industry just now.
Brian Booden:People trust who they trust.
Taylor Desseyn:They like to buy from friends they like to buy from people they know.
George Beaton:So I think community solves that, and Taylor was throwing out some great numbers there. Without community, two and a half responses per 10, what was it? He called it? Out of 10 people that he would message, you get two and a half responses, and in the community that goes up to seven and a half. And that's just because you've got trust.
Brian Booden:I think the gamification of the recruitment process is a very important thing because I think I mentioned it in the episode. But there's a lot of people out there who are alienated by recruitment at the moment, having been through a lot of ghosting and again I'm very careful not to, you know, tar everyone with the same brush but there's a lot of it out there where you don't get responses to anything, jobs don't exist. You don't get responses to very carefully crafted things that you send out and it's depleting for the community that is looking for jobs. Especially with the tech crunch and all of those factors involved, every job becomes more important. So it just goes hand in hand, I would say, to be part of a more welcoming and trusting environment, to get that first push point from there. I really do think it's an important step forward here. I honestly don't think the days of Indeed and JobServe are going to last very much longer just because people are finding alternative ways and I think there is a real thing here with this community building. I really do.
George Beaton:Yeah, absolutely, and I think it goes across the board. And what I mean is like from the most junior positions up to the most senior, where I work at Alvarez and Marsal, we do not buy from recruitment consultants. Now it is all through word of mouth, referrals or people contacting us through the website, and I think the thing that's pushed most is you're more likely to get a good hire through somebody that you already know, and I think part of that is it's not necessarily just how good you are at the job Of course that's important, but it's also how well you get on with the people that you're working with, and that's where the community comes in, and I think that is such a big point that I think a lot of people just will miss it's. You got to get on with the people that you're working, and the way that you know you're going to get on is are they your people, are they in your community, and you fit in that community and angles of referral are just different.
Brian Booden:nowadays, right, a referral used to be um, bob talking to jim or jim talking to jane, saying you know, this is a good person, hire them. And now very much. We're an evidence-based society where it's not enough to just say bob's really good, you've got to be able to back that up. But the backup is not coming along with your project and showing it in the first or second interview. It's social proof. Now it's being able to show that you're part of something or you've made the effort to be part of something. So I think that is going full circle and that is where the community element of this recruitment cycle is going to be very, very important.
Brian Booden:And I think people like Taylor in his very and I just like the way he's kind of aloof about it, right, and I don't mean that in a derogatory term, I just mean that he takes it seriously in a very different way and that his job is to spread the word in a very different way. And that his job is to spread the word, and we're so used to seeing DevRel as a technical role that what he's showing is that DevRel is something different. And this goes back to the episode with Kurt as well. It's very similar to that as well. You have to lead socially by example as well as technically, and I think that's where the worm is turning here.
George Beaton:Yeah, yeah. Ultimately, quality will be rewarded. So if you do a good job and you turn in a good day's work, then I don't think you've got anything to worry about in the future. And that's a message to all these young people, people like my two kids that are going into the job market put in an honest day's work and contribute and you'll get picked up. Hopefully it doesn't get as bad as that Black Mirror episode that you made, where everybody has a sort of social rating. We don't want to go that far.
Brian Booden:A bit too Orwellian, but yeah, I think that you know. I go back to the episode that we did with Ben Rogajan as well, and he was talking about. You know, make the effort to prove your capability. So like, if you're out there and you've got a GitHub profile, you're already up on 90% of the people that are out there who don't have anything to show. So, if you've got something on Tableau Public or Click Community or Power BI whatever it is, or whatever realm that you work, then make that, do a thing for you and then leverage that when you get into these community scenarios, because then you're just starting on a higher step than a lot of people that are out there. So, yeah, very, very cool, and Taylor's just a stand-up guy man. We'd love to have him back in the future as well.
George Beaton:Yes, so much energy. I loved that episode. I really did.
Brian Booden:Yeah, it was very cool. Well, we're running up an hour here. I think we may have had a mishap on LinkedIn, but we've continued carrying on. We'll get it out there eventually anyway, but you'll catch us on YouTube and obviously on Apple and Spotify very soon as well. I think we're going to run next week as well, mate, right, so we're on one-week cadence at the moment. Awesome.
George Beaton:So we've got some Easter in between that, so we'll go out and roll some eggs or whatever you do at this time of the year.
Brian Booden:Absolutely so. I think that kind of rounds us off for now. Mate, thank you very much for joining today. It's always a pleasure to have you here and Taylor was awesome, and we will see you for next week, for the next episode of the Datamix Season 3. Thanks very much, everyone. See you soon. Bye-bye, thank you.
