The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
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The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 177: Recruiting for ROI and Growth
Greg Troxell, Director of TA at Function Health, joins James Mackey to share how a single comment reshaped his hiring philosophy from resume relay to business impact. He shares how they break down the concept of skills-based scaffolding and how it drives better hires leading to reduced mis-hires.
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Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, James Mackey. We have Greg Troxwell on the show. He's the director of town acquisition at Function Health. So, anyways, Greg, thanks. Welcome to the show. Really happy that you're here.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, thanks, James. I'm so excited. This is gonna be fun.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's uh great to have you. Really enjoyed our prep call a couple of weeks ago, going through some of the topics and your background. Speaking of which, it would be great if we can learn more about your background and what you've done professionally.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, I'll dive in. I uh so like most people in talent acquisition, I'd say recruiting finds you. That's maybe more of an older saying. I've actually seen people who've now just wanted their whole career to get into recruiting or their whole like through college and stuff, which is crazy. Um, but yeah, it found me. I was in I was a sports management major in college. I worked in sports after, and then the money was like lacking there. And I got a hit up from a recruiter to recruit people, and I was like, what is this? Uh and then I like interviewed and jumped right in. And my my background really started in agency. Actually, my first, my first ever recruiting job was in locum tenens, which is like temporary doctor recruiting. So I recruited like psychiatrists in Florida and just a bunch of different specialties. And whenever a hospital or medical system had like a shortage of clinicians or doctors, I would recruit the doctors to fill those spots. Um, very interesting, like first recruiting gig. And then I moved into your more traditional big agencies, like your AeroTechs and Ronstads. That was the midst of it for a while. Then I got what I call as like the biggest, the biggest break. And I worked for Boris at Bank. Bank was like um an RPO consultancy in Silicon Valley, and they've built some of the biggest well-known companies that we know and love today, like Pinterest and you know, early at Airbnb, and I mean, just numerous companies that like we all know. And what they would do is they would embed their recruiting teams into the startup and like whatever you needed. It could be like design interview processes or hire it at will. Uh, whatever you needed, the recruiting team from Bank would come in and do it. And I got some really unique opportunities there, working for Get Around, which is like the Airbnb for cars, for Zooks, which is like the autonomous taxi for DoorDash. And the unique part of that world in talent was I got to see so many different environments, companies at different stages, different industries, different founders, first-time founders, multiple-time founders, um, and report to many different VPs of engineering and founders and recruiting leaders and whatever it may be. And you get to really like see what you like and see what you don't like and see where you thrive and see where you stumble, and you get to learn through those experiences. And that's where I really build up my love for the build, working with early stage startups there, building something from zero, the the seed, the the almost we have nothing, we can't even spell interviewing ideology of like, how do you build something from zero became like my passion. And that's what brought me to this stage of my career, which is startups. I'm on my third health tech startup, which is not by plan or by design. I love that this mode that I've been in of taking something we have zero built, and let's build a system, an operating system to scale a business. And that's where I've been now. Um, through three companies, Wheel, MIDI, and Function Health, came in at the very early stages of the recruiting function and started, started scaling, which is still what I love and still so much fun. Uh, there's a lot of maybe sleepless nights or like uh crazy moments, but it it's exciting to get into that space and just you don't know what the next day's challenge is gonna bring, but you have to you have to build it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. And I I'm very familiar with Bink as well. So Boris actually, uh, while he was at when Bink got acquired by Robin Hood and he was head of talent over there, he actually became an advisor for my RPO embedded agency secure vision. So I was able to work with Boris for a couple of years, which was a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_00:He's the yeah, he's the best. He he was like the the innovator. He's the one that started it off now the most recent news with growth by design headed to Cursor. I don't know if it was the first one, but I feel like it was the first one. Like Bink being acquired by Robin Hood was the first like RPO to be acquired by a startup. So yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Did you go over to Robinhood at all?
SPEAKER_00:Um that's where that's where that decision kind of came. It's like Robinhood was the big company, like they had a massive recruiting team already. We were adding to it. And I, through the experiences I had at Bank, that's what I wasn't a huge fan of. Um, I I just felt like I think I was really interested in the impact, like the individual impact that you could have at a smaller company more than the bigger ones. And when I was at some of the larger projects that Bank had, I was just like, recruit as many software engineers as you can. It wasn't like um work in your own silo and you go. And there's a lot of people that love that. There's nothing wrong with it. It just didn't like align. I just didn't feel like that value for me. So when the Robin Hood news came down, it was that was the decision of like, do I jump to go early stage and do what I know I enjoy, or do I just try this out and see if I liked it? I probably would have liked it, but I loved, I just knew what I I already knew what I liked.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it sounds like you really like building from the ground up.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So I joined, I was the second, I think, second recruiter, but first technical recruiter at Wheel, and then I moved up from there. And it was nice.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, cool. Well, you're actually one of our first guests that is coming on with a new format of the show. Steven Trudor named the breakthrough hiring show. Yeah, exactly. It's really exciting. Uh, so it's I'm I'm really excited. We're elevating the show, and I think going to through telling a more story-oriented format is going to be even more impactful. And so just for our guests tuning in, the new format highlighting two, maybe more. We'll see how the conversation goes. We'll see. Maybe there's more stories that'll come out. But uh two stories uh from our guests' uh career, which is really exciting. And the first story being a little bit more formative in nature, what I'm calling almost like a professional coming of age, right? Where's a story that essentially highlights how that's impacted how we think about talent acquisition. All right. So, Greg, I would I would love to get started there, just going through a moment in your career that really impacted you and the leader that you are today.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. I I oh I think about a lot. And it's it was while I was at Bank, I was working for a client and the VP of engineering said something to me that like it's so simple when you hear it, but it actually changed the entire way I think about recruiting. And it's all you're doing is sending me resumes. And like when you think about it, yeah, like that's yeah, you're right. That's what you want. That's why I'm here, right? And that's more of like um, I don't want to generalize things, but you can get stuck into that agency recruiting mindset of like, I'm gonna throw resumes at this job until one sticks. It's the numbers game. That's some games that is play. And there's a lot of people that have been very successful, a lot of companies that have been very successful at that strategy. But what it changed for me, and I think it's more of this impact thing that I talked about a little bit earlier, of like, what do I really enjoy? I took that as saying, what am I actually, what value am I actually bringing? Um, and I think of like when when he says that, like, you're just sending me resumes, and I never asked him about it, and I probably should reach out to him and be like, hey, you don't need you don't know you did this, but you completely changed things for me. But he said, You're trying to fill a seat, is the way I took it. You're just trying to fill a seat. Like, we have to manage these people, they have to do well here. Like every hire determines the success of a company. And it's like the the Mark Benioff principle you can have an average product, but if you hire the best people, you'll win. That's that mindset, is it's like you're just sending me resumes. Like I want people that are going to elevate this company. And it really pushed me to dive in. I sat with our technical teams, I learned what their problems were day to day. I understood what an iterative coding language was. I really dove into each piece of the business to determine who was the right fit. And again, generalizing, but uh a software engineer at a Fang company might not be the best fit for our Series A because of like speed to productivity and like how often we chip code on a weekly and monthly basis. That's not an environment that they're used to. And then there's like the cultural differences between like enterprise Java and our Python shop, right? So, like that it allowed me just to dive into those details of the recruit, like finding the right candidate for what we need to do. And then can they learn and iterate and grow amongst the next six months to four years of the job? And that that also expanded it even further for me. You guys probably are thinking, like, wow, you took one sentence way too seriously, Greg. But um, I think like, how do how can I bring revenue into the company? That's what it evolved to. And it was in a time where COVID was happening, a ton of recruiting teams were getting laid off. And I kept thinking about like, how do I, I know there's a value here. We're we're doing it wrong. And I keep kept thinking about that quote, that one sentence. So I started thinking about like, okay, if we hire a high performer and a high performer brings in 20% more revenue than an average performer, can we track how much revenue recruiting brought in this quarter? Because we hired X high performers on these teams and these teams brought in X revenue. I started like doing these very V1 calculations to determine how much impact are we actually bringing, and then starting to build recruiting to enhance those goals and those structures. So our goals in recruiting became value added to the company or high performers. So we started looking at performance reviews. How many of our hires got the highest rating performance review? Who are the game changers? And did we hire them versus attrition numbers and what value are we actually creating? Do we understand the environments? Uh, are we putting the right people into those environments and also on the right teams to succeed and grow? So it took this whole different approach for me. And I mean, it was down to everything, like the recruiter screen, like how I approached the recruiter screen too, like how I sold equity. I thought about that question everywhere I went. Um, and then I made sure my feedback notes were like so detail oriented, way beyond the resume to do it. It was like that aha moment that I needed. It's a very monotonous job. And it's like a what have you done for me lately job, especially in the individual contributor recruiter seat. You get into this flow of, okay, I'm good at this. I know this many equals this many, like recruiter screens equals hires. And you can play those number games and understand how you work to create success, but that completely flipped it on its head in a different way. I was like, that's not really the right way it needs to go. Like, yes, I need to know these things for my own metrics, but there's a better way I could serve a business with our function, and that's where it took me.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, that's incredibly insightful. I think about talent acquisition similarly uh in terms of from a ROI perspective. Yeah. And what's interesting is that recently we've started playing with putting a ROI calculator into our proposals for embedded recruiting and showing the actual impact of secure vision and breaking down essentially head count associated with ARR growth. Right. And it's like rough estimates of, of course, like there's no perfect science here, and it's it's hard to have completely accurate attribution. However, we can look at okay, teams that have a more established TA motion earlier on and how that correlates to future success, right? Um, which is is really impactful. It's every hire right at that early stage should have a ideally seven, if not eight figure ROI, yeah, right. On the value that they're producing for the company.
SPEAKER_00:It's so true. Exactly. So that and that's how critical it is. And we're even talking about like customer support, having those numbers, even if you just break it down to revenue per employee, which obviously is going to have a margin of error. In those early stages, you have a 200 person startup max, and you're making 100 mil, that's a significant employee number. Right. And if you're tracking that over time and you see that revenue per employee increase, there's two things that are happening. Like the business is creating the correct efficiencies, the product market fit is there. So I guess that's three things. And the third is like you're hiring the folks. And that's the part that doesn't get mentioned much. It's almost like recruiting is an automatic in a lot of companies. It's like, oh, but this is just what happens when you grow. But we've all seen, and being in the space, you know when it's done poorly, and we've seen it get done poorly and planned poorly. And if you can show that story of growth on the ROI component, it completely changes the way the business views the talent function. And that's the mission at the end of the day. And it would be cool to get down to we're hiring this senior software engineer, and we've determined like senior software engineers make X amount of revenue per year. We open the role, we're expected to hire it in 45 days. Here's how much money we lose every day after 45 because this role's been open too long. And that's a maybe a negative metric for recruiting, but how much value, like when the leadership sees how much money they could lose if we delay that hire two weeks or a month, no one thinks about the lost dollars and the amount of money not earned because there isn't a performer in the seat. So getting those calculations is my next V2 what I want to get to, but that's super impactful to get to be able to talk dollars from the recruiting function, which until recently wasn't really a focus, which I'm happy a lot more folks are in on it now.
SPEAKER_01:Did this uh breakthrough uh impact how you actually evaluated talent in terms of during the screening and interview process? And if so, how how so?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, like I think evaluation just came from a typical kickoff conversation where we were like, what questions do you want me to ask in the recruiter screen? And is there anything I can help evaluate for you to you know you're getting a great person for the higher manager screen? That was like the layup question that we would ask. And then it it turned into like when I mentioned I would do these sit-downs and I'm gonna do a bad job. I don't remember who the author is, but it's a book for technical recruiters, like how to talk technical as a technical recruiter, but it's written by an engineer. I can't remember the name of it, but I read that book like front to back. And then I started talking to our engineers and scheduling one-on-ones with them. What do they do day to day and where's the gap on the team and what's the hard part? And I would really just dive in and I would ask the stupid question with our teams like, why would we not consider somebody that has a Java background, even though we're a Python shop? I wanted to know what's the gap. And I think that's that was the difference. It it seems like simple. It seems very intuitive. Like, why wouldn't you do this immediately? But what that did, my screens turned into like in front of like, hey, let me, what questions can I ask? To when I'm done this recruiter screen, you're gonna know exactly the culture that they came from, the engineering cultures or sales culture, whatever it may be. I'm just picking engineering for now. And like, you know, how big were their teams? What was the their budgets? Like, how fast did it take to get to production and what parts did they own? Instead of like, oh, you were on this project at Spotify. That's great. And like pass, move forward. And it just went from, I guess the best way to describe it. I'm getting a little verbose, but it's like, what did you do versus what's the first part? What did you do at these companies and how long were you here? To what was the impact? What was the team size? What broke? When did you know it broke? How did you fix it? How many people were involved in fixing it? What role did you play in fixing it? And really get into the details because I want to take that person from their seat and put them in our seat, knowing what our environment was interconnectedly. And I'd want to fill that spot. So somebody who's shipping code once a quarter, cleaning the bolts on the ivory tower isn't the environment for somebody like in the mud on the construction team, basically. And I wanted like I found immense success from changing that and really diving into those questions. So the recruiter screen became not necessarily a technical interview. There's only so deep I could go, but like a day in the life of you, what actual role you played, what mistakes did you make? How did you fix them? And I used to always come with the phrase, like, that's impossible to be perfect. So where did you mess up? How did you learn you messed up? And what was the team that needed to fix that mess up? And it it became like that understanding of how intuitive they were, how self-aware they were. And those are the environments that we needed. We needed somebody who could work in ambiguous, who knew that mistakes were normal, but could identify the mistakes before they became too serious and then fix them and was curious enough to fix them and ask the right questions. So that's how the evaluations turned into versus checkbox recruiter screen to like fully deep dive. And then when I teed up the feedback to the hiring manager, they could just do multiple layers of different interviewing from that point on. So we've really sped up how deep we could go in the interview process.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think it's uh what I'm hearing too is that it can be easy, particularly when you're building a program from the ground up, and particularly when you start to enter scale to put such a large emphasis on systems, yeah, that sometimes we you're away from spending a lot of time with the teams that we're hiring for. Yeah. Right? And actually. Yeah. And you you start to recognize, okay, on the team, the top performers, maybe the folks that are struggling, the differences, the nuance in terms of skill set, behavior, yeah, background at times, like where the experience that they had and the environments that they've worked in. And there's all this nuance that can then inform how you manage the screening, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And even to your point there with like top performers and not top performers. I think I tell our recruiting team this a lot. Like when you do a kickoff, find out who's the best three employees on their team, and then do a market map with that talent. Those just take the three LinkedIn profiles, find out the similarities because there'll be similarities. They came from these types of companies, or their first jobs were in these types of companies. We'll find some similarities, like some training grounds, or maybe they did come from the same employer. There's definitely things that we'll find that we can start creating a talent ecosystem map of finding out what type of environments our top performers came from in each department. That's the type of goal. Just turning the key a little bit more to say, I don't need to make a hire. I need to bring somebody in the business that will 10X us in this department, not 10X the company. But I mean, that would be cool too. Yeah, that's great too.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Let's always shoot for that. Yeah. I'd love to transition more so to something that you're currently working on, a breakthrough that you're looking to achieve over the next 12 months, or maybe one that you've achieved over the past 12 months. Yeah. So let's dive into that conversation and what you're solving currently or recently.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know, function health is is been awesome. I'm just still recently here, like three and a half, four months in, and the big shift. That we're making is kind of like in in in very related to what we're doing, but we're taking our hiring from pedigree base. So, like trying to avoid generally, oh, your resume says you went to these companies. So we should hire you because we know those companies hire great people and have a high bar. It's kind of going into that previous conversation, is taking pedigree might not be what's serving us, but hiring for slope, I'm seeing it more and more. And actually, I just saw a podcast get released the other day ago with a VC talent partner about slope hiring. But think of it as like scaffolding. We're going to build an interview structure for your team. We're going to look at all the competencies for this role. And then when if we take these competencies, so let's say there's eight of them or 10 of them for this role, what does your team not have today, or where's the gap? And that becomes the most important competency that we're going to assess in our interview process. Maybe there's three that we lack or don't have enough of. So we start to search this role, and we may have five people that are in this position today, but this one's going to be a bit different because this is the gap that this team doesn't have. Maybe it's marketing is a competency, or think of a product marketing manager. The competency that we don't typically have on the team is let's say it's data analytics, just really diving into data. They're great with how to lift up a product, how to push it out there, how to communicate it to the masses, but taking the data and action in it may be a weakness on this team. So we're going to have hire a PMM who's that's their strength now, which is going to be very different from the PMMs that we've hired previously. But that team is going to be way better because of it. So we're lifting that team up. So we're building our interview process around this skill-based slope scaffolding where we have these sets of competencies for each role, but what becomes the priority changes over how we scale and allows the organization to make micro adjustments around if we hit our 2026 headcount plan, we can still hire for the gaps that we're finding throughout the year based on this slope. So if we have X amount of hires in this department, we know we can hire different people with different backgrounds. We get very caught up into this evergreen hiring format, especially if you take like sales or software engineering or even customer support, for example. But there's actual skills that are being utilized on the team and there's gaps being created because of it that we're not finding. And it allows these teams to become more high-performing by slightly adjusting the profile of the talent pools we're bringing in. And then we build an interview process for that. So obviously, it wouldn't need to be this exact same interview process if we're interviewing a lot of different skills or the high priority skills of change. We can switch it up too and get people who are strong in those areas to assess. But it's allowing us to like lift the team up with each hire and make them a higher performing team with each hire. And then hopefully calculating the revenue from that and seeing revenue per employee increase and those things. So that's what we're building now is taking pedigree out of it and becoming very skills-based operating system, like ideas. And we have essentially my saying is we have an operating system, we do it this way, we assess this way, but within it is the scaffolding that we build based on those competencies. So that's what we're in the midst of. And comms are going out to the company this week or next week.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, nice. So this is a recent evolution. Yeah. And just to understand, so where is function health in terms of scale or growth? Where the size of the team, potentially funding round, if that's relevant. Just where are you today?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we actually just raised a$298 million series B.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, wow. Oh, congratulations. That's a big series B.
SPEAKER_00:Yep. About a month ago, we announced that. So that's amazing. And we're in this mass growth stage now as we're going to hit 2026, just getting bigger and bigger. And there's like this other layers of artificial intelligence versus scale and creating efficiencies across the business within that. We're doing a lot of that in 2026 game planning now. But we're in this point where why we're building it this way is like we need to make sure every hire counts because it's so critical now. We have this funding, we have the product market fit. We have the over immense amount of customers that are paying these yearly membership fees to join us. So, how do we take this and make sure every single person is servicing the members in the best way? And that's one of the internal values of the company is like member first. And so we want to like encapsulate that in hiring too. We need to hire the best person so our members can get the best results from the product. And that's a little bit of a shout-out to Jim Miller at Ashby. Some of the things we're doing on the top of funnel, if we're not, if the recruiter screen hire funnel is 10 to one, we want to triple that on the top of funnel. So we want to do 30 screens for each role and we get three finalists. And if we hire all three, great. If we hire one, we're going to pick the best three out of the 800 people that applied. But we're going to look at every applicant, we're going to source, we're going to get referrals, and we're going to pick the top 30 from that entire pool and interview them. And we're going to try to decrease the margin of error of hiring, making a miss hire, essentially, by just really assessing every resume, interview them, interviewing the best, and then selecting the best from it. So combining all of that together allows us to make those adjustments, but still stay true to hiring the best of the best that's available to us in the talent pool.
SPEAKER_01:With this slope hiring, it involves tying back even to your first the first conversation we were having around doing more than sending resumes and hiring folks that are actually building the business. You need to have a it sounds like a very close relationship with the teams that you're hiring for, with the function leader, the team of engineering kind of sales, right? Truly understanding the top performers, what they may have in common. But not only that, actually potentially the gaps on the team which can elevate everyone, right? Um if you solve for that. So that's how much time do you spend with the teams that you're hiring for? And what is there maybe there isn't necessarily the need for a consistent cadence, but how do you manage that? Because you're scaling, I'm assuming, like rapidly with that type of funding, it sounds like you're probably going to be building from a percentage basis increasing headcount significantly. So how do you how do you stay close with the priorities of those teams?
SPEAKER_00:This has been the hard part because in order for this to be successful, we need to stay close because like even you need to you need our leaders to have the strategic muscle as well. If we get caught in the headcount cycle where it's like, here's our headcount plan, but then a month later it's actually I need to hire these on my team. It's hard for us to stay ahead because if we're going to do this approach, we need to be proactive about how we recruit versus the opposite. And reactivity is, I think it's very normal in a startup, but you try to stay out of it as much as you can. But I think you have to have thick skin in the early stage startup world because that's just I don't know an early stage startup that has the strategy figured out. You kind of have to go with the flow. And the number one principle is like we cannot slow the company down. We have to hire at the pace that the business needs. Now we would have to overcommunicate as we're getting these profiles kicked off. Like that is my slowdown. But what I'm saying to the business is if you give me this extra week to kick this role off to really understand your team, to really understand this role, to understand the gap, to build the interview process, to look at every resume, to source the candidates, to get referrals. Just give me one extra week. What we're gonna bring to you to the table is we're gonna bring the top talent from the market we can put together. And all of them are great. So you're gonna get candidates that are great. And as an interviewer, now you can just be decisive and make the call between two fantastic people. And now we're just like picking between hairs. So the wasted time is going to decrease significantly. And maybe the total time might be 45 days, but the recruiting time is 28 because we're getting the best profiles to you right away, and we're just storing through an interview process. So I'm asking for the we actually did this in a recruiting off site, and it was a really cool exercise in creating our operating system. We talked about each step of everything we do, or like the main step of everything do. So sorry with headcount process, then roll kickoff, then like scope and compensation, then sourcing, then applicant questions. And, you know, we went all the way down. And I think there was like 11 or 12 things that we do or steps, and six of them are before the role gets posted. So my emphasis was like, we should spend 50% of our time launching a role in like in this theory, because if we do this right, then it flows quickly through the rest of the funnel. But I think we tend to forget how much it is to kick something off. But if we do it the right way, the quality of the candidate pool, the time you can move candidates through because they're the right fit, they're activated, they're excited, the matches there from what the candidate's motivators are and what the business is. Like you've done the right, you've done what you do well by market mapping the top performers from the recruiting expertise side of it. It's like we've done those those pieces of work. So it's going to make our process go cleaner once it actually kicks off. But I'm just asking for a little bit longer of a week to get it really started. So that's where the methodology is based around. It's a learning. It takes time to get that going.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And I also I like how you segment the time from essentially time to fill versus almost time of recruiting. Yeah because you there's that gap which should be there. That's how you can develop more certainty around your ability to hit your hiring plan because you've done the work that you have to do to be really effective once you start running. It's you need to make sure you're running the right direction.
SPEAKER_00:We have a hiring manager here, and we primarily use agencies. And we have a hiring manager here who's never passed a candidate through the hiring manager screen in a short amount of time, but quite a good bit of candidates that hasn't passed. We did this process and we took the time in the beginning and the first four candidates we sent right through. Um I love that. And it's just we took the time, we learned the business, we know the gaps. We've talked to the candidates that can fill the gaps, and they just stormed right through the process. So um, we're seeing the actual dividends from it. And it does, it it can be a slog in recruiting because you have to go, you feel you have to go, go, go all the time. But almost like counterintuitively saying slow down, learn it, spend the time with the hiring manager, have one-on-one with the team members, really make sure that you understand what you're recruiting for here because it will serve you at the end, I promise. Uh but yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Well, this has been a really informative uh session that we're having here. And I'm I'm really excited about publishing this and getting in front of our guests. I have a few rapid fire questions for you, shorter responses uh here where we're just covering some some different uh questions that are top of mind for a lot of folks are you know, also a little bit more fun and lighthearted questions here. But um, so the first one to kick us off. This is the big one. Uh will AI replace recruiters?
SPEAKER_00:Whoa. I'll say this. I I think we will hear sometime within a year from now, we'll hear of a recruiting team that is fully 100% AI. There will be, I think there will be a founder that tries it. And I think we'll we'll see that it won't work to the fullest extent. It will it will create a lot of time for the teams to manage, but it will probably come back. But I think it will happen. I think we'll see it. And I think my synopsis right now is like I see resume screening, scheduling, some sourcing, admin work, knockout questions, early filtering. You can already, if you know how to prompt AI, you can do that really well. But as far as judgment under ambiguous conditions and early stage startup or assessing motivation of a candidate, I think those are the clear runaways where recruiting is very safe. I'd say my short answer is like maybe the tough answer is it won't replace recruiting, but it will replace recruiters who don't evolve with it and can move faster from it. So that's probably my take on it. But I'm interested to see the founder who actually just tries it and we can all joke about it later.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Yeah, that'll be really interesting to see. Yeah. So, next question what is more productive, an office or remote?
SPEAKER_00:I love remote work, but I find when we can get together, uh, there's just so much more that we can get done when we're just like sitting there and brainstorming. But I think talent is so dispersed now. And if you hyperlocate your talent, you're not going to get the best talent. And you have to be okay with that as a business. So it's like kind of a counterintuitive. I think remote is the best with opportunities to be in person. If that makes sense. Is that cheating?
SPEAKER_01:It's not. And it's actually, it sounds like that's the culture at function health where you are a remote team but have a fair amount of offsite and ability to come together as a team and collaborate, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yep. Exactly. I think there's like a ton of value there in doing that. And like, I mean, we had a recruiting team off-site in Houston, and the things we were able to get done in three days, it was just like the focus time, just uh block it all off and get it done. So that's I I think that's my hopefully not cheating answer.
SPEAKER_01:I love it. Um, so what book has had the biggest impact on your life and or career?
SPEAKER_00:The book, it would so I'll I'll go to like Radical Candor, I think is a great one by Kim Scott. I actually I have it sitting over here. I always have it on my desk. And it's like one, it's it's really good from especially leading in recruiting. You don't get a lot of feedback. It's like, what have you done for me lately? But in leading, when you first get your first manager job, it's like, am I doing a good job? I don't know. I have no idea what I'm doing. And I think Kim Scott just really brilliantly was like, you need to care about your people. And the first step is you have to get, you have to ask for negative feedback and sit there comfortably until somebody on your team gives you negative feedback about yourself and to learn about yourself and to evolve. And I thought those principles were very good in creating the psychological safety on your team to, hey, I really care about you. And I'm giving you this feedback because it's going to make you better, not because I need to give you bad feedback. She really paints that picture really well. But also, there's a really cool uh piece in the book where she tells you how to manage your time if you're a leader. Like, how many hours a week should you spend for your team? How many hours a week should you spend doing strategy or focus work on your own? And how many hours a week should you leave for the business? And that just really helps to structure my weeks and think about how I should take on each week is like giving the right amount of time to certain things. So that's a big tip that she it's not very much highlighted in the book, but when I read that section, I remember writing it down. I still use it today. So that's a good one. And the other one I'll just mention is like, oh, it's called Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins. He's an interesting character, but just the mindset of I'm in control of all of this. If I mess up, I can fix it. But I need to know I mess up first. And like just internalizing it all and saying I can get out of these situations. I can, I can win, I can be better, I can be worse, but it's my choice. And it's what actions I put into it. Those are the two that really were like, oh yeah, this is totally right. Um yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That's great. Yeah, those are both uh books I've heard of that I have not had a chance to read, which now I am going to. So thanks for those recommendations. We'll need a follow-up, James. Yeah, oh, definitely. I'll let you know how it goes. Well, Greg, look, this has been awesome. I've really enjoyed getting to know you. I know our audience will as well. Your insights have been very helpful. And I think just your background, working for at this point, several different environments for a lot of startups and growth stage companies. It's going to resonate with folks. They're going to learn from it. So I wanted to say thank you so much for contributing to our audience and our community.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks, James. Appreciate it. It was so much fun.
SPEAKER_01:It was a great time. And for everybody tuning in, thank you so much for joining us. And we'll see you next time. Take care.
