Rehumanizing Recruiting with Mike Peditto, Director of Talent @ Teal

How can recruiters make hiring feel seamless and human—especially when resources are stretched thin?

Mike Peditto, Director of Talent at Teal, discusses rehumanizing recruiting by putting candidates first—even in a resource-strapped hiring landscape. 

In this conversation with Shannon, Mike explains why providing interview questions upfront is a game-changer for candidate experience, creating trust, transparency, and a smoother hiring process. He also shares practical ways to balance efficiency with empathy, showing how even small adjustments can elevate your hiring strategy and foster team morale.

Key Takeaways: 

1. Empower candidates through transparency: Sharing interview questions upfront sets candidates up for success, reduces anxiety, and fosters a more genuine, productive conversation. It’s a simple step that builds trust and encourages top talent to engage fully.
2. Rehumanize recruiting to elevate candidate experience: Candidates are people, not just resumes. Taking time to personalize interactions and maintain a human touch—even in a high-volume environment—improves candidate satisfaction and strengthens your employer brand.
3. Make recruiting a team sport: Aligning with hiring managers and securing leadership buy-in for transparent practices, like sharing interview questions, creates a smoother, more efficient hiring process. When everyone is on board, the entire team benefits.

Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction

(05:46) Common challenges in talent acquisition 

(10:20) The importance of humanizing recruiting

(14:02) Why transparency in the hiring process matters

(18:30) Balancing efficiency and human touch in recruiting

(22:15) The pros and cons of sending interview questions in advance

(27:48) Implementing paid work trials for better candidate fit

(31:55) How to handle pushback from hiring managers

(36:20) Building strong candidate relationships for long-term success

(40:15) Why the hiring process is misunderstood

(44:50) Advice on achieving hiring excellence

Transcript

[00:00:00] Mike Peditto: To me, hiring excellence, when I hear it, I think of a process where everybody involved outside of the recruiter thinks it was way easier than it was. All right? Hiring excellence means like managers like, oh, that was great. Like I just saw a couple of candidates and we had great conversations and we gave great feedback.

[00:00:17] Mike Peditto: We hired one and candidates are like, oh, that whole thing ran so smoothly. They don't know everything you were doing on the back end. And they're just like, oh, you must've just had a, you know, Easy pick of candidates to kind of go through. That to me is excellence, where nobody has time to even be like, hey, what's going on here?

[00:00:32] Mike Peditto: What's going on? Everyone's just like, wow, how'd you make it run so smoothly? That to me is excellence, right? Candidates and managers both just like that was easy when every recruiter knows it wasn't. Welcome to Offer Accepted, the podcast that elevates your recruiting game. I'm your host, Shannon Ogborn.

[00:00:48] Shannon Ogborn: Join us for conversations with talent leaders, executives, and more to uncover the secrets to building and leading successful talent acquisition teams. Gain valuable insights and actionable advice from analyzing cutting [00:01:00] edge metrics to confidently claiming your seat at the table. Let's get started.

[00:01:08] Shannon Ogborn: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Offer Accepted. I'm Shannon Augbourn, your host, and this episode is brought to you by Ashby, the all in one recruiting platform empowering ambitious teams from seed to IPO and beyond. I am super stoked because I'm here today with Mike Pedito. He has over a decade of hiring experience, including working at multiple early stage startup companies.

[00:01:27] Shannon Ogborn: After experiencing several layoffs and job losses, he turned to social media to bridge the gap between frustrated job seekers and recruiters, having been, of course, both himself. He He uses his platform to deliver real, actionable help for job seekers and companies on improving hiring. In his role at Teal, Mike continues the work he began on social media while shaping the people strategy and direction for a company driven by the same mission he has, which is helping people improve and thrive in their careers.

[00:01:53] Shannon Ogborn: Mike, thank you so much for joining us today. 

[00:01:56] Mike Peditto: Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Thank you. I know I just gave a little [00:02:00] bit of a brief intro, but can you elaborate briefly on what your role is at Teal? I'm Teal's Director of Talent, which is a role that sort of encompasses a lot, as tends to happen at the seed stage in Series A companies.

[00:02:15] Mike Peditto: And what I really work on there is a couple of things. One is helping build a hiring process, something a lot of early companies. don't really invest in until they build a big team. And then also working on ideas like retention and satisfaction and things like that, that really matter to a company like Teal, while also sort of being this front facing marketing side that may not be the official role, but just sort of because of who I was already coming in, kind of representing, here's what Teal wants to do for careers.

[00:02:45] Mike Peditto: Here's how we're trying to live by it internally and making sure we're doing that is kind of my biggest responsibility, I think. 

[00:02:52] Shannon Ogborn: Yeah, but that's so important because aligning what your external brand is with how you operate internally gives [00:03:00] consumers a lot of promise as to your product and that sort of thing.

[00:03:03] Shannon Ogborn: But with your background in recruiting and people, and I know that you have a lot of really strong and good opinions. What do you think are the most relevant challenges presenting themselves in T8 today?

[00:03:17] Mike Peditto: I think the biggest issue in the TA world right now is just a lack of people and resources for how big the workload has gotten.

[00:03:27] Mike Peditto: You know, one thing I always say, and I try and point this out to job seekers, everyone in TA understands this, but I always try and point out to job seekers is companies that three years ago had 100 recruiters now have 15, and companies that had 15 recruiters now have one. And at the same time, everyone is seeing 10 times the number of applications.

[00:03:45] Mike Peditto: That they used to see. And it's, it's a heavy workload combined with job seeker, kind of angst and anger, understandably being at an all time high at the same time that everyone's overworked on the TA side, and it's just led [00:04:00] to this sort of mess where everyone is just. Unhappy with what's going on. 

[00:04:04] Shannon Ogborn: 100 percent and the frustration is more visible than ever because there are a lot of platforms where people can release that tension kind of for better or for worse.

[00:04:15] Shannon Ogborn: I think it holds. JobSeekers and Companies Accountable. But at the same time, it's just like another stressor for recruiting teams to think about. And I know one of the other things we talked about that sort of came with this higher workload, less resources, was that there's been a gap really created in the humanizing parts of recruiting because The workload is so high and the resources are so low.

[00:04:42] Mike Peditto: Yeah, I just think that, like, it's so easy to lose track of the fact that everyone on all sides here are people just sort of trying their best. And there really has been this dehumanizing of it. And it's not just the way recruiters are [00:05:00] recruiting. It's not just the way managers think about roles, the way candidates are talking about people in the hiring end.

[00:05:04] Mike Peditto: It's just kind of this, like, faceless thing where Nobody seems concerned because they're just trying to get through day to day. So a lot of times when I talk about that, like, bringing human back into hiring or humanizing hiring, people think this is sort of like an anti AI stance. But it's not. It's really just like the human emotion side of it.

[00:05:26] Shannon Ogborn: And there's place for both, and you have to know where that place is. I'm curious, why is it so important to re humanize recruiting? Like when you think about bringing the human elements back to recruiting, why Is that important? Why should companies be investing in it where right now we're, we're struggling?

[00:05:46] Mike Peditto: There's all these reasons. And one is humans and people are your biggest asset of the company. And yes, right now the market is sort of in this way where you can almost get away with doing anything. And [00:06:00] still fill your roles and still get talented people. And, you know, maybe they're coming in happy, maybe they're not.

[00:06:06] Mike Peditto: But it's not the way you want to ultimately be running things. It's not the reputation you want to build. It's not how you want to have this process. And beyond that, it just says a ton about sort of you, And also the reliability of your team. When I first got into recruiting, it was such a different world.

[00:06:24] Mike Peditto: And I used to have to go to like Starbucks and meet with every single candidate I was possibly going to work with. And it's just like, now it sounds so just bizarre. But that helped me understand really like, here's who I'm working with. Like, this is the person. This is what they want. These are their goals in life.

[00:06:39] Mike Peditto: It made me want to do well by them. Right, it made me want to make sure that this transparency and these ideas are there, and it makes you better at your job. And I think ultimately recruiters are struggling to be good at their jobs for a bunch of reasons right now, but a big one is just because they've taken that relationship and human side away, and it's just gone.

[00:06:59] Mike Peditto: [00:07:00] Clicking boxes and sending emails until someone takes an offer. 

[00:07:03] Shannon Ogborn: Yeah, let's be clear, or at least in my opinion, this isn't like a fault of recruiters. It's a symptom of the market and the workload and not having the capacity to do the things that you used to be able to do. 

[00:07:19] Mike Peditto: Yeah, for sure. And you know, I think the majority of recruiters And like I said, even earlier, people doing their best, right?

[00:07:26] Mike Peditto: I, I think people have to sort of accept that people are operating with best intent and we've gotten away from that a little bit. Yeah. I don't think anyone's doing this stuff on purpose, but one thing I've really tried to do is find ways that even when I'm overloaded, what can still be done. So it doesn't feel like just kind of cattle being herded.

[00:07:44] Shannon Ogborn: If there's one thing I learned throughout my recruiting career, it was that the more trust and human touch you can build with candidates at the right place at the right time, yes, it might give you a higher offer acceptance rate, but it will actually get that candidate started [00:08:00] off really excited about the company that they're joining, really wanting to join the company.

[00:08:05] Shannon Ogborn: Not like I'm taking this offer because I simply have to because the market is Poo poo right now, like they're accepting the offer because they trust you and they trust that you are guiding them in the right way. And so like, yes, it's good for metrics. It's good for time to hire. It's good for offer acceptance, but it's just good for morale that people are entering a company with that kind of elongated candidate experience that moves into onboarding, that they're actually like, this is a company I want to work for.

[00:08:33] Mike Peditto: Yeah, exactly. I mean, we have somebody starting At Teal, who is coming in with that. I think most people we hire tend to come in with that because we work really hard to create an experience that's good for people. It's not just for those we hire, it's for people we don't hire, it's for what people go out and they say about us, but it's also just like, Yeah, you want people excited about what happened and telling people how good it was.

[00:08:58] Shannon Ogborn: Totally. There's this whole [00:09:00] concept of, obviously, we see what people post publicly on LinkedIn, X, I still struggle to call it, still struggle to call it X, in all of the social media platforms. But then there's this The entire concept of dark social, like what are people saying about you that you can't see?

[00:09:17] Shannon Ogborn: And that's equally as important. And so really being able to maintain this positive experience, it only really can benefit you and companies shouldn't wait for the pendulum to swing back to care about these things. Like you should always care about how you make people feel. 

[00:09:34] Mike Peditto: Yeah, for sure. And I also think it's just gonna make your TA teams happier.

[00:09:39] Mike Peditto: Recruiters right now, if you haven't checked on your recruiting teams, like check on them because they're, they're not okay for the most part for like all these reasons we've talked about. And the reason most people recruit is because of that like good feeling you get. When there's sort of success here, and we're taking that away and only really giving the opportunity to do all the parts that [00:10:00] nobody wants to be a part of.

[00:10:01] Shannon Ogborn: A hundred percent. That's why our podcast is called Offer Accepted because the feeling when a candidate accepts your offer, there's nothing like it. I would love to get into how does this all resonate at Teal? Are there any specific things that you all do that really help move this forward? 

[00:10:20] Mike Peditto: For sure. We try to do a lot.

[00:10:22] Mike Peditto: And one of the things that we're very big on at Teal, and this is supported by our CEO, and I think he actually was his idea, is we send all candidates the interview questions. At TO before interviews. And we have seen a lot of pushback on this, you know, on the internet. Every time I post about it, everyone talks about it.

[00:10:43] Mike Peditto: The post is going to go viral and people are going to debate about it. But the experience that we've seen it sort of create for candidates is huge. And the biggest reason we do it, and we can kind of get into whatever is interviews, aren't supposed to be a trick and they're not [00:11:00] supposed to be a trap.

[00:11:00] Mike Peditto: Right. So we talk about humanizing recruiting. This is the exact kind of thing we're talking about. Like, think about yourself as a human for a second and how off guard you want to be caught all the time or how prepared you want to be all the time. It's just one of those things that like is really the best way to hire somebody to figure out who can come up with an answer on the spot to a question you ask them.

[00:11:20] Mike Peditto: Ultimately, the answer is no. And by doing this for recruiter screens and for our values interview, you know, where it's the same questions every time, it's easy. We can send them over. And we can be very clear, here's what to expect. In other type of interviews, sometimes you can't always for a technical interview or a challenge somebody has to do, and we will send them kind of an idea of like, here's what's important to us, here's the general gist of what we're going to be doing, here's kind of an example or an outline, whatever makes sense in the situation.

[00:11:49] Mike Peditto: But anything that sort of shows people our goal is going to be to learn here and have a good conversation, not to trap you at any point. 

[00:11:57] Shannon Ogborn: Totally, and like you said, it is a delicate balance [00:12:00] between Getting the information that you need to predict job performance, because that's what interviewing is for.

[00:12:06] Shannon Ogborn: And also making sure that the candidate walks away saying, I felt like I was set up for success. I don't feel like I was tricked. I mean, that's why ultimately in the end, Google ended up eliminating the questions like how many golf balls can fit in an airplane. And it wasn't necessarily about trying to trick people, but that's what people took away from it.

[00:12:26] Shannon Ogborn: What they were trying to do was understand somebody's problem solving process, but there's more practical ways to do that, that are better predictors of job performance than asking somebody how many golf balls fit in an airplane. And so being able to provide people questions so that they're prepared, really great point someone had previously made.

[00:12:47] Shannon Ogborn: to me about this was that if you are going into a presentation, like you would want to be prepared, why does it make sense to just leave people kind of hanging and say, Oh, sorry, you can't really [00:13:00] prepare for this. And so then you do all this interview prep as a candidate and you're like, okay, I'm ready.

[00:13:04] Shannon Ogborn: And then you get into it, get into an interview and someone intentionally trips you up. It's beyond frustrating and really like, I think damaging to company reputation when companies do things like that.

[00:13:15] Mike Peditto: For sure. And we have hired people, we have people at Teal who I can look at today who I'm like, they were not good interviewers.

[00:13:22] Mike Peditto: They just weren't. We were able to get through that because they at least sort of were able to talk through the things and we're able to focus on what really matters. And people will say, well, that gives them time to over prepare, come up with an answer. Cool. I want people who prepare for stuff. Like I want people here who are ready for what they know is coming because that's usually what happens at work too.

[00:13:43] Shannon Ogborn: If you were starting to implement this today, what advice would you have on how to get started? Where do you start? I know for you all, it seems like the case may have been your CEO was interested in this and then it was kind of top down, but how can people [00:14:00] create that top down interest?

[00:14:01] Mike Peditto: Sure. I think it starts with defining the intention behind it.

[00:14:05] Mike Peditto: Like, why do you want to do it? Or even better yet. Why do you not want to do it? If it has to do with sort of coming across somebody who isn't a fan of it, you know, like what is it about the way we do it now that you like so much? Is it because we've always done it? Is it because you only care how they think on their feet?

[00:14:21] Mike Peditto: I mean, I think it's sort of getting to that intention of why or why not. And then finding ways that you can still kind of do that together. Now, what the hierarchy looks like your company, that could vary. That might be a head of CEO, whoever has to be the buy in. Right. But it starts with that idea and experimenting with it a little bit, you know, like one of Teal's values is test and learn openly, like we change what we're doing constantly, even during this, even when we send people questions and we do a bunch of interviews and we're like, These questions aren't getting to the heart of what we need.

[00:14:51] Mike Peditto: So we're not going to use these questions anymore. And you have to be willing to kind of play around and see what works, but that's where I'd start. Why do you want to do this? What do you think you'll [00:15:00] accomplish with the change? And what can we do to replace the things? That we think aren't being tested now because of this.

[00:15:07] Mike Peditto: You know, something else we do at Teal that we've started with recently is we do paid work trials and we've seen candidates love it. I know it's another thing that there's a really hot debate over, but we pay them a good rate, the rate they would make in the job. And we give them a real project. We let them work with everybody and have full access to all the resources and treat them like their real employee.

[00:15:25] Mike Peditto: Our goal is if you're at that level. We want to hire you. We're not having four people there, like a game of survivor, like fighting with each other, but we think that makes up for some of that stuff. Okay. So maybe because we sent them questions, our concern is we now can't see how they handle a tough situation.

[00:15:42] Mike Peditto: Cool. Well, we're going to put them in a tough situation when we do this. And you know, your hiring process has to be a whole picture. Rather than focusing on each step and making sure that it does something. 

[00:15:51] Shannon Ogborn: One thing I love about sending interview questions to is it really forces companies to have their shit together.

[00:15:57] Shannon Ogborn: You can't really have a structured interviewing [00:16:00] process without having the questions and you can't send the interview questions if you don't have a structured interviewing process. So it actually pushes a lot of what should be best practices in the recruiting space that are. Kind of just a result of sending the interview questions.

[00:16:18] Mike Peditto: Yeah. I mean, when I have these kickoff calls with managers or when we're talking about getting a role, if they don't have questions lined up for me, I'm like, why can't start the screen? Because when I send my email to candidates to schedule an interview, I'm sending the questions to them. Now, this is your opportunity.

[00:16:34] Mike Peditto: You know, if you're a hiring manager at a technical company and you think recruiters don't ask the right questions and don't, you know, Dig in enough or learn or know how to figure this stuff out. Give them the exact questions you want them to ask. And I will send them over to the candidates and let them answer them.

[00:16:49] Shannon Ogborn: On the note of hiring managers, have you had any pushback from hiring managers or how would you deal with it if you did? 

[00:16:55] Mike Peditto: We specifically here have not, because I think when it's like a CEO [00:17:00] born idea, everyone's like, okay, this is what we're doing. Um, I was like, any pushback, take that up. But. In general, you know, I think, again, it comes back to that intention.

[00:17:07] Mike Peditto: So I, actually, that's not fully true. I did have a hiring manager I've worked with who Didn't love the idea, and often would say to me, like, I want to make sure we're not talking about this or that with candidates, like, I want to see how they're going to handle it. And I think you have to find that middle ground.

[00:17:20] Mike Peditto: One thing I want to say with this, is just because you send questions to the candidate, doesn't mean they have the whole interview script. Right? You can dig in. You can ask a follow up question. You can prod into something that feels like you're not getting the details. You know, we're not sending them a, hey, we're going to ask you to solve this math problem, and here's the math problem, so just come with the answer.

[00:17:40] Mike Peditto: God, I hate that, don't send math problems in an interview. But, you know, we're, we're saying we, this is what's important to us, and I think that's what's to get across to a manager. We're doing this because we're showing candidates, here's what we really care about, here's what we want you to be able to talk about, and now we won't walk away.

[00:17:56] Mike Peditto: The one thing I hate the most when I hear from hiring managers is like, Oh, I couldn't really get a [00:18:00] signal. on this thing. They say it all the time, right? This is a huge idea for us. We need this role, but I couldn't get a signal on that skill. We didn't ask about it. We didn't dig in about it. Having that stuff in advance, telling them we really care for you to show off these skills is going to let them do that and let you get a signal.

[00:18:16] Shannon Ogborn: Yeah, and that's where the Test and iterate really comes in because if a manager does an interview and they're like, I didn't get a signal on this based on the questions that we have or anything like that, then you can say, okay, great. We need to create a question on that signal. If it actually is really important to this job function so that we don't have to keep going back and forth to the candidate unnecessarily.

[00:18:38] Shannon Ogborn: I mean, there's nothing worse. I feel like on the candidate side, then them being like, then a recruiting team or hiring manager being like, Hey, so we actually have. more questions for you about X, Y, Z, like, can we jump on another call? And it's like, well, you should have done that on the previous call. And so the more you prepare for interviews as an [00:19:00] interviewee, the better the experience is for the candidate being interviewed.

[00:19:03] Mike Peditto: Yeah, exactly. And it's, when it's standardized like that too, you get very good at asking these questions. You get very good at reading the signals and digging into the stuff you need to and know what you're looking for. Um, of course, we all know then it becomes also easier to look at two candidates and understand what answer appeals to what you need more.

[00:19:22] Mike Peditto: But yeah, it's, there are so many hiring managers who love that idea of just like, oh, well, just hop on another half hour with them, like an hour with them. And I was just like, that is for getting the human side. That is the pretending that all this person needs to be doing is like pleasing you in their life and nothing else matters.

[00:19:37] Mike Peditto: Create an environment where you can see them at their best I think is another big reason and kind of push of what to tell someone like we want to see somebody at their best not at their worst. Because that's ultimately the environment we want to have for them when they work here. In real life, is it going to be somewhere in the middle?

[00:19:54] Mike Peditto: Does everyone have good and bad days? Of course. But we don't just want to evaluate people based on how they do in [00:20:00] the worst of situations.

[00:20:01] Shannon Ogborn: A hundred percent, a hundred percent agree. And I understand that there's also in kind of how this resonates with Teal, there's also another bit, there's several, but there's another one that I am really curious for our listeners to hear about.

[00:20:15] Shannon Ogborn: Yeah. where you give non hired candidates teal plus. Can you walk through the thought process on that? 

[00:20:22] Mike Peditto: Yeah, this to me was really simple. This is just a gesture of goodwill. This is, maybe this comes from my own like internalized guilt as a recruiter. I hate rejecting people. Everyone does, of course, right?

[00:20:32] Mike Peditto: And I do not ghost people, but I get why recruiters ghost people because rejecting people is just like the worst thing that there is in this job. And when I reject people, I put a lot of thought into my rejection to them, typically. We spend some time talking. And at Teal, especially, we want to back up that, you know, like, we think everybody is a Teal user.

[00:20:52] Mike Peditto: People who work here, people who have jobs, everyone's a Teal user. And I want your search to go well. So if you're [00:21:00] struggling to search, here's, here's Teal Plus. Maybe you hate it. Maybe you already use it and it's just nice to have a free month. Maybe you'll never look at it. Maybe you'll love it. Doesn't matter.

[00:21:06] Mike Peditto: There's no auto renew turned on. It's not a trick to get anyone. It's really just this idea of like, Hey, you're in the search. I couldn't help you with this role. I want to try anything I can to just sort of like make the search better for you. And I think this is something a lot of people can do with companies.

[00:21:21] Mike Peditto: It can vary. You know, I know. Bonnie Dilbert, Zapier talks about a lot that like she'll send links to people of like other remote jobs that are similar because people applying there generally want a remote job. Um, like these little things you can do that are just like, Hey, I only had one opening, but you know, I still care that you're human looking for a job.

[00:21:42] Shannon Ogborn: Yes. And what I've found over My former career, I should say, in recruiting is that a candidate that may not be a good fit for the organization you're at today could actually be an amazing fit for the organization you're at in a year or two. And having that really strong network [00:22:00] of candidates who trust you could mean all the difference between Um, and so it's always really important to keep in mind, like, this is not just a short term thing.

[00:22:12] Shannon Ogborn: The recruiting space is small. If you're recruiting for, let's just say like a niche type of candidate, like that space is small too. Like, you may want to ask for that person's advice or talk to them. You know, reach out to them for a job later. And so having those really strong relationships is huge and showing these gestures of goodwill, I think it's a really good way to accomplish it.

[00:22:35] Shannon Ogborn: Now, I'm curious, has anyone ever reacted poorly? 

[00:22:39] Mike Peditto: For sure. You know, people will always react poorly in almost any situation. I've had one person who reacted very poorly. They were upset. I get it. It's a long process. The ultimate weren't chosen. They felt it was a little bit insulting, right? Because teal is not expensive.

[00:22:54] Mike Peditto: And just sort of like their response was, Oh, how about I just bill you for all the time that I [00:23:00] interviewed versus save your 9. And that's fine, you know, I get it. It's fine. You're upset. I have gotten very good at those situations. It's sitting in my hands. I have a little bit of a reputation of like a quick replying hothead on the internet.

[00:23:12] Mike Peditto: And it's something I'm really working on. It's different in my role at Teal. It's different when I deal with job searchers, of course, in those situations, but my instinct is always to be like, blah, blah, blah. Here's why I wanted to help. Like, if you don't, this is how we dodged a bullet here with you. Like, I managed to not do that.

[00:23:28] Mike Peditto: The most feedback I get from people if they don't say yes, is just sort of like, thanks for the offer, I'm good. And in that case, Teal was probably a random company they interviewed with. They're never going to really think about Teal again, and that's fine. That's their MO as well. But we do get a lot of applicants who are Teal users, because that's just, the space makes sense.

[00:23:45] Mike Peditto: And for them, that's sort of like the, oh yeah, that's the brand loyalty. Teal says they want people to be treated like humans. This is them doing it. 

[00:23:55] Shannon Ogborn: It's funny what you say about the emotional stuff though, but it's hard not to get emotional when you truly feel [00:24:00] like you're doing everything you can for someone to be successful.

[00:24:03] Shannon Ogborn: Shout out to Chris Page. I sat next to Chris while I was at Google and there would be times where I'd be like, Oh my God, Chris, can you believe this? And what I really wanted him to do was to just like spout off with me. And he'd be like, Yeah, I can. It's okay. And I'm like, Well, that's not what I wanted to hear right now.

[00:24:20] Shannon Ogborn: I wanted you to like go off with me and he's like, yeah, there's no point. It's okay. Everything's not going to be good for everyone despite like all of your effort. Sometimes, you know, people are having a bad day and like you're the recipient of it. And like as a recruiter, you really have to be able to separate yourself from that.

[00:24:35] Shannon Ogborn: And it's hard because like you care and you care and you react the way you do because you care. And so yeah, it's, it's hard when people. Give negative feedback to something you're genuinely trying to help, but I think in the end it sounds like it's really worth it to do things like this because most people either react neutrally or are really appreciative of it and at least creates a reputation that you all [00:25:00] care about the person past rejecting them.

[00:25:03] Mike Peditto: Yeah, it's exactly that. I mean, I have someone who I just like, will write a response and then send it to them on Slack. I'm like, Hey, here's the message I got. Here's what I want to say. And they're like, LOL, okay. And I'm like, okay, now I'm going to delete this email and go about my day. And I think sometimes you need that.

[00:25:18] Mike Peditto: But yeah, everyone's frustrated, right? Job seekers are frustrated. It goes back to what you said at the beginning. Recruiters are frustrated and emotions are high. And we are dealing with people. And a very tough time for them. And I think Teal even lies right in the heart of that, right? Because our members are the same thing.

[00:25:33] Mike Peditto: Our members are generally people who are in spots in their careers or in their lives where they're struggling a bit. And, you know, we hear from them a lot on that kind of stuff. So it applies all across Teal, uh, and how we respond to this and, you know, Dave, our CEO, is really good at this. Dave is someone who, this isn't about hiring as much, right, but will take a very mean email from somebody who's just mad at Teal not working and like send them his Calendly link to like book time to like talk with him and like walk through.

[00:25:59] Mike Peditto: And I [00:26:00] think that's just like the attitude we have to have here. But then especially when it comes to people who are actually taking the time to try to work here. 

[00:26:07] Shannon Ogborn: Well, I loved hearing about these more in the weeds things. I would love to take a step back and get your take on hiring excellence. So at Ashby, we have a hiring excellence framework.

[00:26:21] Shannon Ogborn: We talk a lot about Kind of what that means broken down, but I always love to hear from our individual guests. Like when you hear hiring excellence, what does that really mean to you? 

[00:26:31] Mike Peditto: To me, hiring excellence, when I hear it, I think of a process where everybody involved outside of the recruiter thinks it was way easier than it was.

[00:26:42] Mike Peditto: All right. Hiring excellence means like managers like, Oh, that was great. Like I just saw a couple of candidates and we had great conversations and we gave great feedback and we hired one and candidates are like, Oh, that whole thing ran so smoothly. They don't know everything you're doing on the backend.

[00:26:54] Mike Peditto: And they're just like, Oh, you must've just had a easy pick of candidates to kind of go through. That to me is [00:27:00] excellence where nobody has time to even be like, Hey, what's going on here? What's going on? Everyone's just like, wow, how'd you make it run so smoothly? That to me is excellence. Right? Candidates.

[00:27:08] Mike Peditto: Managers both just like that was easy when every recruiter knows it wasn't. 

[00:27:12] Shannon Ogborn: I guess the negative side of that is that people or recruiters may think, okay, great, now my thankless job becomes more thankless because it was so, because it becomes so smooth. But it is true, and I think it's really important to include hiring managers as part of that because.

[00:27:28] Shannon Ogborn: Recruiting is a team sport. You can't do it alone. A lot of companies, especially even smaller companies, may be decentralized where hiring managers are doing a lot of work as well. And so the hiring manager has to have a high committance and really a good relationship with the recruiters that things can run smoothly because when there's conflict there, the experience can be felt by the candidate that there's misalignment.

[00:27:55] Mike Peditto: For sure. Yeah. And I think that like, it's a totally different topic that I could go off on and I won't, but like [00:28:00] the idea of a recruiter and hiring manager having to partner together. If a recruiter hears that hiring experts More people will not realize what I'm doing. A hiring manager should know, of course, everything that's been done, right?

[00:28:11] Mike Peditto: They should realize, Oh yeah, you did create all these questions for me. You did have these scorecards in place. You did have this. Now, if they're going to refuse to acknowledge you, I'm sorry. I am sorry that that's happening, but hopefully you have sort of done all that work with someone who like, appreciates the work you went in, even when it feels very easy.

[00:28:26] Shannon Ogborn: 100%. Well, we are on our final question here, which is my favorite question, and as an opinionated person yourself, that's own words, by the way, I would love to hear what is your recruiting hot take? 

[00:28:39] Mike Peditto: My recruiting hot take, I guess this is more for job seekers if they're listening than recruiters and I'll leave you alone for a little bit, is the hiring process isn't broken and it's fine.

[00:28:48] Mike Peditto: And I know everyone loves to say it's broken. I know I could go viral every day by coming out there and saying that the hiring process is broken. The hiring process now is the same process that it was five years ago. And nobody said it was [00:29:00] broken then. What is broken is the world around it. You know, going back to what you originally talked about, sort of everybody being overworked and on edge.

[00:29:07] Mike Peditto: Our company's not hiring as well. Sure, because in general, just kind of all that overworkedness, but the idea of resumes going into an ATS system, recruiters looking at them, setting up interviews, moving people through interviews, putting out offers, has not changed in years and years and years. The recruiting process is fine.

[00:29:28] Mike Peditto: But there's a lot of broken things happening outside of it. 

[00:29:31] Shannon Ogborn: Yeah, I think the thing that I feel very passionately about is no tool will save you from a bad process or bad best practices. Like, you have to have the fundamentals in place, and like you said, I think largely the fundamentals haven't changed in that, you know, we want candidates to have a good experience and ultimately, What do we want to do?

[00:29:54] Shannon Ogborn: We want to hire the right person for the right role at the right time. That [00:30:00] is recruiting. And I agree with you in that I don't think that part has changed. The outcome that we're looking for is largely the same. That's the outcome we want. We want to hire the right person for the right role at the right time.

[00:30:10] Mike Peditto: And I think everyone is still doing that for the most part. There's just a lot more kind of noise and people around. You know, there's a big difference when 30 people are in for a role versus 1, 000 people are in for a role. And you know, one thing I always tell people is just like if 1, 000 people, which is a lot, and I don't think it's as normal as everybody says, but if 1, 000 people like apply for a role, 999 people are going to think the recruiting process was broken.

[00:30:32] Mike Peditto: They're going to think that it was a fake job and a bad system and bad this and bad that, because only one out of 1, 000 people got it. And that makes it feel like nobody got it. 

[00:30:41] Shannon Ogborn: Totally. The numbers today aren't in candidates favor, that's for sure. And it's like you said earlier, like it's hard. It's really, really tough for job seekers.

[00:30:52] Shannon Ogborn: Always. Anytime someone is job seeking, it is the hardest thing. I think even when I, back when I was working at Hired, we [00:31:00] came out with a report that said that people would rather get a root canal for a job because that's how time consuming and emotionally taxing and mentally taxing it is. And so, yeah, it's easy to fall.

[00:31:14] Shannon Ogborn: into these traps. But how do we bring ourselves out of that and really focus on like moving the needle where we can with that humanizing process like we talked about? 

[00:31:24] Mike Peditto: For sure. I've done both of those things recently twice. Two root canals, two job searches. The job searching was definitely worse. And I think that's sort of what inspired all this.

[00:31:32] Mike Peditto: And that's something I tell people all the time. Like I've been there once. Recently enough, and I do think that there's something, I do think a lot of recruiters out there, if you haven't been on this market in a really long time, like if it's just been like going well for you, I will ask you as like another side of the hot take probably like, just sit on it for a little bit.

[00:31:50] Mike Peditto: Just send your hands for a little bit before you write that next LinkedIn post about what JobSeeker should be doing if you haven't actually had to do it recently. 

[00:31:56] Shannon Ogborn: Well, I think we are coming up on our time. Where [00:32:00] should people go to learn more about you and Teal? 

[00:32:02] Mike Peditto: You can find. Me and Teal on LinkedIn, you know, Mike Pedito is right there on LinkedIn.

[00:32:08] Mike Peditto: TealHQ. com is where you can find Teal and check out our job tracker and any tools like that. And I would also, you know, I'd recommend following myself and Teal are very active on LinkedIn talking about what we are trying to do in the hiring and job search space, not just for job seekers, but also to set an example of some things that people can be doing to try and improve the process too.

[00:32:30] Shannon Ogborn: Amazing. And you also are on TikTok. 

[00:32:32] Mike Peditto: I am. You can find me on TikTok and Instagram at Realistic Recruiting. I don't always plug that when I'm here to talk about Teal, but if you want to see me go on a little bit more hot takes where I no longer have to represent a company, that's where you can find me as well.

[00:32:45] Shannon Ogborn: Amazing. Well, Mike, can't thank you enough for joining us today. Super great insights on what companies can do to rehumanize recruiting. Really appreciate you spending some time with us. 

[00:32:56] Mike Peditto: Yeah, thanks for having me. 

[00:32:58] Shannon Ogborn: This episode was brought to you by [00:33:00] Ashby. What an a TS should be? A scalable all-in-One tool that combines powerful analytics with your ats, scheduling, sourcing, and crm.

[00:33:08] Shannon Ogborn: To never miss an episode, subscribe to our newsletter at www.ashbyhq.com/podcast. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.