Amazing Tips for Balancing Parenthood and Entrepreneurship with Nikki Adamson

Never Been Promoted Podcast with Thomas Helfrich

Dive into the dynamic world of startup hiring with Nikki Adamson, CEO and founder of Hustle Hunters, as she shares her expert insights on talent acquisition. With a unique background that transitioned from gym teacher to tech startup recruiter, Nikki brings a fresh perspective on identifying and nurturing talent within the fast-paced startup environment. Her journey illustrates the pivotal role of effective recruitment strategies in shaping the success of emerging companies.


About Nikki Adamson:

Nikki's career path is anything but conventional. Starting in the Bay Area's vibrant tech scene, she quickly recognized her knack for connecting with people and shifted her focus from physical education to the complexities of startup hiring. Through her experiences with various startups, including the candid leadership at companies like Shoot and Milk Stork, Nikki honed her skills in identifying and addressing the unique challenges faced by new enterprises in attracting and retaining top talent.


In this episode, Thomas and Nikki discuss:

• Talent Acquisition Challenges: Unpacking the common pitfalls startups face in recruiting and how to overcome them.
• Leadership and Mentorship: The impact of transparent and supportive leadership on personal and professional growth.
• Innovative Hiring Practices: Exploring effective strategies for inclusive and efficient hiring processes.

Key Takeaways:

• Effective Recruitment Strategies

Nikki emphasizes the importance of defining clear role expectations and ensuring a positive candidate experience to attract and retain the best talent.

• The Role of Leadership

Learn how candid communication and genuine mentorship can significantly influence company culture and employee development.

• Adapting to Change

Nikki shares her insights on adjusting business strategies to better meet the needs of a diverse workforce and the evolving demands of the startup ecosystem.

"In the fast-paced world of startups, securing the right talent is not just about filling a role; it's about building the future of your company." — Nikki Adamson


CONNECT WITH NIKKI ADAMSON:

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikki-adamson/

Website: https://www.hustlehunters.com/

CONNECT WITH THOMAS:

X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/thelfrich | https://twitter.com/nevbeenpromoted 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hovienko | https://www.facebook.com/neverbeenpromoted 

Website: https://www.neverbeenpromoted.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neverbeenpromoted/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@neverbeenpromoted

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com

Transcript

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Welcome to the Never Been Promoted podcast with Thomas Helfrich. Get ready for a thrilling adventure as we uncover entrepreneurial journeys and life changing business insights every week. And now your host, Thomas.

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Welcome to another episode of Never Been Promoted. If this is your first time listening, thanks for joining. It's the first of many. If you've been here before, you know that we're all here to, you know, help entrepreneurs get better at being entrepreneurs. And we do this through the stories and journeys of entrepreneurs wherever they are in their journey. So I want to make sure that you can get value out of every one of our shows by listening. I'd have you ask a question, but since this is a podcast, you can't. But you can emotionally ask a question to yourself and hope that we answer it. But today's guest is going to help us tell about some recruiting and talent for startups is Nikki. Nikki Adamson. She's a CEO and founder of Hustle Hunters. And Hustle Hunters really finds great talent for startups, or she claims we're going to get into that if that's true or not. Nikki, thank you for joining today.

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Yeah, I'm so glad to be here. Thanks, Thomas.

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It's my pleasure. You know, from those, whenever you do. Listen, we are filming this right around before Christmas time, 2023. And so I appreciate you taking the time out of a very, usually very busy time of the season to get everything wrapped up and getting everything ready for the holidays. So thanks. Listen, I always have all the guests fill out a bunch of stuff so they can be ready to come on the show. That's for you. I barely read it. The teams may read it later, but I want you to introduce yourself. You know, set the stage a bit, talk about your you a little bit, your company and maybe your background.

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Yeah, I had kind of a wild ride into the startup world, but I was a gym teacher working at the YMCA running kids programs and I loved that entry point into tech. But I was in the Bay area, so I had no choice. I was on that path and found my way towards, I guess, where the money is, right? And joined great tech startup called Shoot. No longer in business, but had a really, really great experience with the CEO, Ranveer, who was always really candid about both the great exciting things happening with the business, but also the hard decisions he had to make. He kind of knew that I wanted to start a business at some point and was always letting me in on what was going through his mind, which was such a gift. And then I ended up actually at another startup milk stork and had the same experience. Kate really was consistently, like, letting me know what was going on, really candid, like, no ego at all. And for me, those two experiences kind of, like, had very different paths of being a leader or a CEO, but, you know, both helped me pick, you know, what I really appreciated about them and helped me kind of become the leader that I am today. I would say that, you know, I kind of, my journey has led to me finding that startups are amazing and really dynamic and kind of do whatever they want, except when it comes to people, talent and hiring sometimes, because I kind of suck at hiring. I remember distinctly being in an experience, in an interview with someone and just like, interviewing this woman and being like, wow, you're too good for us. Like, there's no way in hell that you're gonna survive our roller coaster of a hiring process where sometimes we would just, like, leave someone in an interview room for an hour, be like, someone will come in, bye. Just because no one owned it, right? Because we all had jobs to do in addition to hiring and just kind of get pulled in ad hoc. And I've learned way more best practices there and found that, you know, there's no way we were going to hire the best people for our roles. We were going to hire the best person who was also willing to go through this really tumultuous process, which often wasn't, oftentimes was an okay person, but not always the best person. And I would say that hiring was probably the least polished part of our business. Right. The rest of it was really fun and dynamic, and we didn't really get to showcase that. Then. I had a kid somewhere in the middle of that journey and learned that my needs changed. So I still wanted to do really big work, but I also needed to come at 930 because I had a kid and I found daycare in the Bay area, which is, like, impossible. So you basically have to orient yourself around that quick plug for the childcare crisis. I know this is becoming more and more real to folks, as there's such a crisis here that families are having to say, like, great, we got childcare. We have to work every single thing in our life around it. Otherwise we're literally not going to have any child care. And I know, Thomas, you've got some little ones at home too. Like, that's when things get really mild. So for me, there was just a lot of connecting dots and, like, started this business around. Like, how do we support caregivers, right? How do we find folks like myself I felt like I was at the top of my career. But, you know, when I'd start a conversation in an interview for a sales role as a salesperson, the first couple of conversations, like, questions, I'd be like, oh, hey, by the way, before we spend too much time, here is your job. One that I could start at 930 instead of nine. And all of a sudden, the whole tone of the conversation would shift. Right? I was kind of being labeled like, a problem or somebody who cared way more about the flexibility and what this role would be for me than I could bring for the company. Like, and now I see that on the hiring side of like, kind of what I was being channeled into. But then I would talk to lots of their parents and realize, like, there's a lot of people here who would love to have these jobs. So when we're struggling to hire, it's because we're not really looking at the full talent pool. So all these dots kind of like, started connecting for me and actually, like, expanded now beyond thinking about just caregivers and parents. But we look at, like, how do we diversify innovation in general? The startup space can do so many things, but right now, you know, the folks in the rooms are all wearing Patagonia vests. They're all just a bunch of white men. That's one perspective I want, but not the only perspective that I want in creating this innovation. Right? So I had the opportunity to work with Kate, as I mentioned at milk stork, and her business philosophy is just like, put 1ft in front of the other. Don't get stopped by a business plan. Don't get stopped by needing all the paperwork in order. Just start and slowly, just make your lists and keep moving. And that's definitely kind of the philosophy that I brought to Hustle Hunters, which is now a team. There's four of us. I think we've really hit a peak sense where we work really urgently for our teams, but also have this great balance. Like, to think that we have a good work life balance and just culture internally. And I think that's ultimately when I look back, like, what was I trying to prove with this business? I realized I think I wanted to build a company that I wanted to work at. And I've loved lots of parts of the companies that I've been at, but I felt like I needed to before I could be all angry and say like, oh, this business should do things differently. Or other businesses I saw that weren't offering employee benefits, like milk store express milkshipping, for instance. This feels like an easy thing you could do for your employees. So instead of being angry all the time, I just decided to prove it for myself. Can a human centered team work? Can we do great work in that way?

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I would hope so. I mean, the best teams are the ones that are human. So on  Hustle Hunters, great brand name, by the way. You'd mentioned on your path there. And I think the takeaway was you had a couple good mentors. And I think the some people invest in a mentor in the form of a coach to some degree, but I think finding just an informal mentor that has a passion to help because they remember themselves in a spot where you may be also knowing that they're not trying to keep you there forever. They know, they know. They have the nature that they know the employees are going to leave. They know they're going to go and they want them to, but they want them to serve it. So talk to me about maybe the importance a little bit more under the mentoring. As you see other firms, too, like, are the ones that are more successful. Have them not. Is it present? Because I think that was key to you getting to where.

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Yeah, for me it was really a yes. And. And I think it was more just having really open modeling. Right. To get to see what the journey is and why I made decisions. And I have that experience with my team a lot where I'll say, like, does anyone want to know more? And I have some teammates. We're like, yeah, I want to know everything that went into getting here. And I have some teammates who are like, please, no. I joined this company because I want you to deal with all that. Like, I don't want that. So I just want to call it, like, there's a lot of different paths to get there. I have had a formal executive coach, Randy Braun, of something major who is full on badass and has helped me every time I'm ready to level up my business or my leadership growth, she's really the person I bring in and kind of, like, renew a coaching engagement there. But when I think, like, ways that that has really made a difference for me and then I look at the clients that I work with, is that it can be really lonely running a business, especially if you don't have a co founder or you need to talk about your co founder. Right. Or just kind of like, have that brainstorming session. I think most parts of the business, you can have that brainstorming session at work. You can talk about the product. You can whiteboard out the product. You can whiteboard out marketing. Right. You can talk about all of these things except the people. Because if I'm saying, okay on the chart, well, what if I shift this person into this role and I kind of just want to play it out as a thought experiment? Well, no one on my team can unhear that, right? So they're all thinking like, oh, is my job at stake? Or, oh, is that person getting demoted or promoted? Like, you can't unhear that just if you're trying to be in that brainstorm space. So what I find in my work is I like to think of myself as one part recruiter, one part therapist, and one part project manager, because a lot of what I do is just help me. That sounding board to founders, giving them advice of like, nope, seen that happen a lot of times, didn't go well. You might want to back it up, but just kind of noting that the people side in this function is a huge, lonely chasm for hiring managers and especially for founders, as they're kind of like thinking about the people side of it. So that's where I think whether it's a recruiting partner like us or finding someone is so critical because the amount of people issues that are being processed and need to be processed with someone like me on the phone, I realize, like, oh, there's a serious gap here and you might need to bring in like a full time major or people person or like a consultant on that front, I think would really benefit a lot of leaders.

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And that's, that's maybe the next question. When do they, for your role? When they're finding good people? Are they typically, are you sitting where there's really before HR? It's really like the founders kind of still maybe founder and a co founder, pretty managing people pretty flat. That's when you, is that, is that typically where you fit in? And maybe my fault to that is if that's a yes, when, when should this founder be at least contacting someone like you? Like, when should they start the conversation? Maybe they're not ready to hire, but when should they start the conversation to outsource the hiring piece?

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Yeah. So that conversation really needs to happen. I think it should happen sooner than it often happens. I think that a founder shouldn't ever be the one that's going through applications. It's just not the highest and best use of their experience. And again, they don't quite have that partner sounding board. I also think that if a founder is not able to, if they're the hiring person and they don't have the capacity to fully project manage a hiring pipeline, they need help. And that help can be just tapping someone on the team, an Ops manager or chief of staff to do that work. That work could be tapping a partner like me, just realizing that you're not going to get the best talent if you're doing it while you're also doing so many other things. That's the number one thing that I coach folks, too, is even if you're not going to use us, make sure you assign a project manager to this hire just to tell people what to do and where to go. They don't have to be involved in anything else. They don't need to know anything about hiring, but they just need to be in charge of the steps. And I would say that like the best culture team, I think of my friend Bhavin at Magoosh, I've never heard an entire subset of employees continuously say this is the best culture they've probably ever even been near. He hired a head of people at six employees and it showed, right? I hear lots of companies who wait till they have like 200 to hire. That's way too late. I would say somewhere between like 20 and 30 is probably when you need to do that. Assuming that you're using a really strong consultant or fractional team before that. Like, we partner a lot with a company called Growth Ops that helps teams kind of get to that place where instead of one crazy super generalist who can do it all, it's a good opportunity to use, you know, a team of five to each be able to step into whatever their pieces and put some processes in place. So then when you make that hire, that person actually has a little bit of infrastructure in front of them because they're going to show up and have so many problems on day one.

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So for the entrepreneur that's thinking of like, oh, I'm in the middle of all this right now and you're hiring. What's the one mistake they need to avoid? Like, I think you mentioned a few, but what's like, really? Maybe it's. You've already said it too. But just in short, what's the one mistake or one thing that an entrepreneur that's in that hiring mode right in that time just has to nail.

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Yeah, you have to nail, have any owner of the hiring process, for sure. The second thing is you have to nail the profile you're going after. Yeah, I find that so often folks go way too quick to market because you have a need. And so often I read these job descriptions and it's a list of tasks that after six months or after three months or even three weeks, they're not going to be as relevant anymore. They're just the things that the founder doesn't want to do anymore, which is a good place to start. That's a great start to a job description. But now we need to have someone kind of check back in and say, like, is this relevant in six months? What does this look like? So when I think about that, it's like, yeah, really, really scoping the role both for today and tomorrow and later. And I think coming back to this notion that the only thing we know about any job description we write is that in six months, it's going to be obsolete.

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Yeah, that's, I mean, I know in our own experience, we try to hire deeply. And so in your eye, a lot of times it's like, I don't have time to do this, this and this, but it's tied to something bigger. So, like, for example, like video editing or something, it's like, hey, I don't have time to do that. We already have capacity here with these customers coming on. So those, you know, the specifics of how this person needs to video edit, that's changing every three to six months based on algorithms and other things. So when I, you know, I look at like, you know, the same thing for other startups. Like, I think the idea is conceptually, you need someone who is, you know, able to learn, good team player, has a set of skills that can be adapted or grown, fill the need, continue it. It's higher, deeply. It's making sure that that's the right person with about the right skill set. Because I think one of the big mistakes I see people make is they hire too much on skillset and less.

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On the person, especially early stage when we love that. Because when we think on the person, it's like, what about that person? So for me, I'm really big on, like, defining and identifying who, who is that core profile? Is it a person with a speed to bias or to perfection? Is it a person who likes to work collaboratively or like, independently? Is it somebody who, like, kind of figuring out, what are those? What is that bias that we're looking for? And what really thrives in our team? Right? Is it someone who's customer first or team first? Is it someone, like, when push comes to shove and someone has to make a decision that has a trade off, what values and data points are they going to use to make that decision? So for most companies, you have those values up on the wall somewhere, assuming they're put into play for real. That's where I like to ask a founder and say, great, what's the last time you made a decision that had a consequence and you used your values as a guardrail? I love asking that question because it helps me to see which of their values are coming in play. And then we're going to try to find candidates that have aligned values the same way, and we're going to try to pull that out of candidates as part of our process.

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Do people, typically entrepreneurs, are you seeing them hiring more on retained or on. I don't know if commission's the right.

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Word, but execution, yeah, it's a mix on both. Mix of both. I think we have kind of a hybrid model depending on the client. But for the most part, we're not just going to hire straight on contingent, which is contingent recruiting is normally where, like, you pay a percentage of the first year's salary only if they make a successful hire. So there's no money in the game before that. Um, we, as a business, like, we're way more on curation because we're trying to save our team time and really get to know their business and their ethos and, like, the soft skills that match. So we're just going to surface up the best candidates. But that takes a lot of time. Right. We recognize we're the first point of contact to talk to a candidate. I can't just be like, oh, yeah, there's this company that I don't really know anything about, but you should totally leave your current job and join them instead. I'm going to say, like, great. I know this company. I saw this in your LinkedIn profile. Your core value of this really matches what the CEO did. And here's a time that they made a decision based on that. I think your values are aligned and it's for the conversation. Totally different piece, but it takes a lot more upfront. So long winded way to answer your question. I like a hybrid of retained and contingent. It's all about who holds the risk and who holds the opportunity. Or do we share those things?

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Yeah. And, well, and I think, well, think about this. You have four people on your team. You're a parent in your own journey. What would you have gone back and maybe told yourself as you're starting your own company and it's, you know, it's a services business, it's, you know, you had some connections, but what would you have, what would you have gone back and done differently or told yourself, yeah.

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It'S funny that we talked about mentors. I wish I'd gone back and talked to more people on the recruiting side. I was kind of coming in fresh from the recruiting side, more transitioning from sales, but just and from startups and understanding where the startup need was. I brought some great folks onto my team who are really good recruiters. Ed joined me a long time ago, like three and a half years ago now and has done has recruited for every single function possible. So she really has taught me recruiting and together she mean Erica and Ashley, like we all have really built like what is recruiting look like for  Hustle Hunters? It's not necessarily what recruiting looks like other places. Recognizing a lot of it needed to be uniquely applied into the startup space. So I would find ask more mentors. Katherine has been awesome, the mentor for me. I think the first conversation I had with her, she was just really into my business and said like, increase your prices. Like, I would not buy from you because your prices are too low. And that's something we hear a lot, especially as women, I'm always hearing like raise your prices. So I think I wish I'd gotten more mentors in the recruiting space earlier on because there's a lot that I didn't know so well.

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That being said, what are you doing today? I always say you're time zero now, again, what are you doing about it?

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Yeah, I'm working with a lot of partners, so understanding more holistically what goes beyond the talent side of it. Talking to other folks who have run other service based agencies, really getting into what their models look like, doing more face time with my clients, doing a little bit more from like a user research approach to figure out what they're looking for and then kind of bringing that back to other fellow recruiting firm owners. Right. I have now a group of other women and we all run firms together and we love to. The last three years have been kind of wild to be running a business, especially in the hiring space. So it's given us that gut check as well as that like community support to help each other out to make sure that like, nope, what we're seeing is happening to all of us, or no, I haven't noticed that yet. So that's been really valuable to build that community up and it's taken a while, but I'm really happy to have that now.

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One of the takeaways I hear you when you say you have a lot of partners, you know, that do different things is that you're also just focusing on your niche. And so what I see a lot of mistakes and are just things that kind of drain founders in particular. But the company as well is they pick up too much. They get too far away from their core offering or core service or core product and don't partner correctly to pick up. And they could be semi friendly competitors where other people may do some things that you might do or slightly, but they do some other stuff way better than you because that was their core business. And the more of those partners you can find allows you to focus on your niche better. I personally believe when I'm buying stuff, I hear someone says, hey, really? We just do this? I can refer you to other people to do those other things. You know, we could do it, but that's not really what we do. That makes me want to buy from them for the thing that I'm coming them to because I know that's what they're focused on. And I think that's what you kind of described there is that you, you focused in, so you get a network out of that and some other pieces.

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Yeah, I don't really want to do HR work. I will say I definitely have some shiny object syndrome. And I get really excited because I love solving problems and I am deeply committed to the founders that we work with. So when I have a founder that has all these other problems, I'm like, okay, let's get to problem solving. Let's do that. And I've been learning a lot from a colleague, Lauren, over at growth ops, actually, and she's been helping me understand that my brand is directly proportionate to the scope that I do and needing to make sure that I keep that really tight. So it's really, we really tried to branch out into more deib work and more operational work and realize that was too far off of scope. What we've learned is that our diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging work just needs to be anchored into every single second of our work. In general, it shouldn't be this, like, separate grouping over here. And then operational processes are maybe when they have to do with recruiting, great. But doing it more of a managed service than, like, setting up a process for somebody else so that, you know, we're owning some of the ATS build. But yeah, it is so difficult to stay in this narrow scope. And my good friend Mariela della Mora, she is so good on Instagram at continually reminding business leaders that, like, you have to keep doing that one thing over and over and over and over again. And that's how you, like, build towards your brilliance.

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You do. You can do more things. But the thing you're going to be publicly out there talking about until people trust you. And we have the same thing. So ours is people come to us to stop guessing what to do on LinkedIn, we do whole websites, we do email marketing. But I don't try to lead with that unless it's. And the reason is we tried that and it just becomes, you sell to too many and it just becomes convoluted. But if you help someone solve a very specific problem for you might be like, niche, you can then branch out to go do more. And I think that's a piece of advice, especially the add entrepreneur needs, is you'll have more opportunity in the niche and focus, but you see the opportunity across everything. If only you had time and money.

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And lots of Lee. But also, I say this is where community has been helpful, right? Like, there's a few, I've met a couple different groups of founders and we check in every month and it's good to kind of have that, like, hmm, that doesn't. To have that check back, that pushback, like, how does that fit into your core business line? Right. To have folks kind of like reminding you so that it's not just on me to make sure that I stay tight. But, you know, my team knows it's a challenge for me. My founding community knows it's a challenge for me. So, like, tapping into those communities has been really critical for me.

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And I always want to let people know in this kind of time of the show, who should get a hold of you? What are you going to do for them when they do, like, so who should it be? What would their next step be and what are they going to get out of that?

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Yeah, so anyone who's hiring, I look at it as like a high stakes hire. So if you're getting some heart palpitations as you're like, this is so high stakes, we cannot afford to miss it. We're the people to bring in. And that's just an email to me, nikkiustlehunters.com, or some poke around on the website. And then we set up a call just kind of to understand, and we're basically just going to get right into problem solving, figure out, like, who's this hire? Who do they need to be? I'm going to ask a lot of different questions, kind of to just understand better what's on the mind and what are the real goals that maybe haven't quite been put into paper yet for this role figure out, is this something that we have a niche a niche within that like we've done before. Figure what that looks like and then kind of understand, like, does it make sense to partner here? Figure like show what is our process? What is their process. Every single role we work is with a startup. So it's always going to be a little bit different and figure out what that's going to look like to make sure that we definitely have aligned on what are the core components that this role needs to have both hard and soft to make it a success, not only tomorrow, but in the coming months and years.

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What do you think the number one reason people don't take jobs with a startup? Where does it fall apart?

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Yeah, a lot of it is Canada experience. And I would say that right now Canada experience is kind of at an all time low. A lot of that is because companies let go their recruiting teams about a year ago and now there's hiring managers doing their work and kind of scrounging and now trying to hire quickly. Q four board meetings have happened. Everyone's like, oh, we get to hire for Q one? And like, what's the password to lever again? How do I post a role? Ooh, that other role is still up that should have been taken down. There's a lot of like candidate experience problems where candidates are applying to jobs that don't even exist and they're getting auto rejected. Puts a really bad taste in candidates mouths. I would say the other one is ghosting. People talk about that all the time. When I think of ghosting, that's like candidate goes through the process, doesn't get a, you know, they have an inter, they're like 2nd, 3rd interview and then they don't get feedback. Oh, that's, and then they're reaching out saying like, hey, what's going on?

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I've known people personally in my life that have done in person meetings for 4 hours and never heard back. So they did 4 hours of conversations of meetings. We go along, I mean like interviews, final steps, never heard back. And I'm like, and I always say you just dodged a bullet is all.

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Really well and that's what it shows, right. But I will say that on the other side of it is normally a really scrambling, like working their ass off hiring team that either doesn't have a project manager, doesn't have a capacity, or oftentimes it's because they don't have a good answer. They don't know yet. It's, hey, you're second place, but we're trying to see where it goes with the first place person. But that first place person is on a. They have another offer coming in two weeks. So we're kind of trying to, like, elongate the process. But I guess I should start typing that email, and then they start typing that email, and then they get distracted and by the next thing you know, it's Monday. Right. So guidance we always give to folks is every Friday, try to have a candidate touch point. We're often pretty good at this. I mean, at the end of the day, we're all people. And that's where I think I always encourage candidates. Like, if you haven't heard in a while, reach back, get your name back in there. Oftentimes, it's a normal, casual mistake, but again, it also sometimes is just a team that doesn't think about candidates as teammates until it's the final candidate. Right? Like, I think I've been on a bunch of teams where you're interviewing and you're like, ooh, they requested me on LinkedIn. Should I accept? Because we're all, like, worried about letting them into this team we're on, right? We're worried of, like, ooh, am I gonna. If I accept, or say, like, congrats, you did great, or, I hope you join our team, am I over committing to them? Right. So instead, we do nothing. And then as soon as the offer's out, you know, the CEO will message the whole company and be like, give them some love, send them an email. We want them to work with us. And it's like, that's too little, too late, right? We need to show them that. Like, we need to. Instead of designing processes to weed people out along the journey, we need to design processes that keep people in, and then we get to make our decisions of who shouldn't stay in the process anymore, I think. So. I think. How do you design for your best candidate, basically, right?

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I think that experience, I think if you're helping people consult on that, I mean, you don't even need to start up for that. There are big companies who are so, I think, become so dependent on their workflow processes. They have, they've missed sometimes a human connection to it.

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And it's that nitty gritty. It's like, I don't really have an answer for you, but I still am really interested. The yeses and nos often happen, to be honest. It's the non updates and the, like, nuanced human update is the hardest one. And I think that's where our team brings a lot, because, yeah, you could be any size, but at the end of the day. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of mental capacity. Like, my team is tired on Friday afternoons because we like. But we've also been holding hopes and dreams for both candidates and hiring teams all week. That's a lot to hold.

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And your own company, too, right?

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In our own company. Right.

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It all works together. It's. It's. It's a. We have a few customers in the space, and it's. It's been an interesting year for some and others. I mean, the retained search teams have done really well, and some of the more contingent ones have really struggled just because of. But anyway, here we are in December 2023, I believe. January 2024, a bunch.

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It's definitely starting to look up. But I have now been through, like, three major global economic crises as a business leader, so I am still crossing my fingers, and I won't count it as a win until it's behind me.

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Yeah, agreed. Let's get into kind of, like, a little speed round here. So I want to give some advice. I always do this in every one of the interviews to just.

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Yeah, totally.

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But here's what other entrepreneurs are using. Thinking, reading for you. I always start off with, like, what kind of technologies are you leveraging in your business that you really like and, you know, your choice in the tech, but what's. What's working for you to help your life be easier?

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Yeah. I really love searchlight AI. I use them for their references specifically, but, like, also an intake form. That's how we do the soft skill matching. You pick the qualities. Then when we do references, they pick the qualities for this candidate, and it's a really good way to see if there's alignment or something else to probe into. I also love teamable. It lets us write hyper personalized campaigns to go out to candidates.

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Interesting. Teamable. I've never heard that one. All right, what, uh, what's your favorite business book? Or at least I'd say differently. What's a must read business book?

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Okay, right now on my mind is we should all be millionaires. I would also say the other one is the wake up that has, like, a really strong Dei slant, but says, like, why are we even talking about Dei if we don't know our personal connection to it? That I highly recommend that book to lots of teens.

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And I always ask this a follow up, too. It's your favorite quote. Like, what's your go to quote?

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Oh, I feel like I have so many. One comes back to me from a high school athletic director, and I was like, never too high after a win and never too low after a loss. That, like, even keel space. I'm going to go with that one for now.

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That's a good rule for golf, too, by the way. If you don't get too excited about your good stuff, you won't get too excited about your bad stuff. I agree. Not a bad life lesson there. If you were LinkedIn or whatever else, who are you following? What's a recommended person do you think is a good use of content? Just interactions. But who do you recommend?

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So many. Desiree Morton is one I come back to all the time. Catherine Castro. She used to work on my team. She's an incredible Dei lead. She's actually looking for work right now, but definitely recommend bringing her into the pool. Just, I know how much work and effort she puts into every single piece of content she puts out in the world. So you're basically getting a masterclass for reading a post on LinkedIn. So those are two folks that come to mind.

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Just to pivot just slightly on the DEI space. I feel like that was a big thing a couple years ago, and I feel like in the second year, like a year ago, it started taking a turn to polarization of just the term itself. I mean, almost. Almost aligned to, you know, we have a rule. We don't do any polarizing topics unless told to by customer. That's things like religion, war, politics. And a lot of people in the last year said, hey, no more dei comments, no more interactions, no more content. What happened in that space? Because I feel like the need is still there. Maybe it's being called something different now, but what's going on a bit with that.

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Okay, so I'm going to give my hot take here. There are plenty of other hot takes. I always recommend listening to the more marginalized lived experiences than mine as a white woman of some affluence. But I think it was a very buzzwordy topic. Folks were like, oh, my gosh. George Floyd, Grana Taylor, they were murdered. The police. Oh, my goodness. There's all this stuff going on, right? It's this huge movement. Folks were getting backlash if they weren't making statements. So it kind of became in 2020. This hot topic was great for my business because I also did some really big thinking, and that's when I started working with Katherine Castro, actually, and, like, hired a DEI consultant, realizing that I wasn't the right person to reset my business around other lived experiences that were not my own. Fast forward to today. I think we're learning that to do dei diversity, work equity, and really driving towards equity. Well, it can be really uncomfortable. And to jump on a trend is one thing. To jump on a trend that makes us look inward and do really uncomfortable work and realize that most of the systems that have helped us advance in life are also pushing others downwards. It's a pretty hard reckoning. And then you start, okay, so, great, I got myself discomfort. I'm moving forward, and now I'm realizing it's so nuanced. And I'm realizing, wait, this is a really big hill to climb and might not be climbed in my lifetime. Right. So then you're kind of looking at all this work. And that's why I really recommend the book the wake up. It really figures out it's not about, like, kind of that old quote. I think it's like an aboriginal group from maybe New Zealand. It says, like, you know, well, we're not all, like, no one is free until we're all free. And then also, like, don't do this work for me. Do it for yourself. Like, you can't. You can only be in this work to save. I'm butchering the quote. It's so embarrassing right now, but along the lines of, like, don't try to just like, hero, save me. Only be in this work if you're doing it for yourself. Like, are you fighting for trans rights because you think we all have been oppressed by gender? Are you fighting for racial equality because you realize we've all been harmed by white supremacy? Okay, now we can work together. And that not everyone is quite at a place where they're able to recognize that because it means saying goodbye to a lot of previously held beliefs. And that's where I love the work by Adam Grant in his book think again. And kind of this notion that, like, oh, actually awesome to be wrong, it means you learned, right? But when we think, like, you mentioned about these, like, polarizing hot topics, we have this, I think as a society we're like, oh, well, that's an entrenched belief in me, so I'm never going to change it, even if truth comes about. So that's my personal take on kind of where a lot of this is going is that a lot of us don't like discomfort and have really benefited from how the systems are there, so why are we changing them? It's a lot easier to step away. But I will say, in the long run, candidate polls are watching. I think the shuffle is not going to go balance. People know where they want to be.

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Yeah. And I think I think it happens. I think just bringing light to it, but I think happened was, became a polarizing topic of just where the benefit intended. Then those who are protecting current systems push back and then, you know, then that's the polarization happens. But I think from just, you know, demographics to gender, all those things, there's just a lot. I think it's, it's just not going to improve fast enough, honestly. It's not going to, it's not going to have equality quick enough. At the same time, on the flip side, right, the best candidate should get the job regardless of any other factor of where they come from, what they do, their, you know, personality experience, those.

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Thomas, if I just go on LinkedIn and I click sales and I just pull up all the profiles and I'm like, you know what, I'm just going to go one by one. The first 72 are going to be men and then the last, not first, but like, of the first, 172 are going to be men and the rest are going to be women based on like a quick phenotype look. So the status quo is not equal. So the status quo is. It's anchored in these systems. Right. Because LinkedIn uses algorithms that who knows what the data sets they're typed on, right. We look at AI. Okay, well, it depends on, you know, one of the foundational texts that data sets were built on was Enron's corporate emails. We trained natural language processing on a fraudulent company. So read Atlas A. I was not aware of that. I would definitely highly recommend reading Atlas AI. It gives you like the best, like one liners to just like, stop conversation in a party because people are just like Agape by Kim Crawford. Really great book, but yeah, so the status quo isn't equal. Like, it's steeped in a lot of oppression as well. And that's where on my team we talk a lot about, yeah, we want the right person to take to get the job. But for instance, if I want to make sure that women have a fighting chance in that example I just gave, I would actually have to center women. I couldn't just go line by line and think that, like, inaction is action here.

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Well, in part. Well, right. So when I make the comment that the best candidate. Right. It depends on where you're looking in the experience because of the systems that were set up in place. Right. Well, they're not. Right. Some people been favored more than others. So therefore, in certain roles, the most experienced person are going to be that because they were favored to get that earlier. Now they have it in young, younger hiring, I think you have a little more chance for it now. I'd say it that way. It's your own biases of the hiring manager, which I'm tying it back to is where you could come into help remove some of those biases and predetermined ideas.

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And that's why we like to really define what. Who are we looking for? Tell me, what does communication look like for them? What does problem solving look like? Is there a bias towards speed or perfection? Don't come out of an interview and say, like, we didn't vibe. Don't leave an interview, like, oh, my gosh, I love them. Without talking about the core competencies and how they score based on our ranking there. So I think that's where we spend a lot of our time really defining what we want so that then we can pattern match to that, not pattern matching to, like, the people you happen to have encountered in your executive lifestyle.

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Agreed. Listen, take another moment and give the call to action. Like, what should people do? Like, once again, specifically, what's the really the Persona type that should get ahold of you and how they do that?

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Yeah, if you're a hiring team for a small business. So we're looking at like your third hire, your 20th hire, 50th hire, probably up to about 100, maybe a little more. We're the team for you. If you're thinking about, like, how do I deal with this giant pile of applications? Because over the weekend, 600 applications came in. Tap us in, that's all. We're like, really good and have all the tools in place to dig through those applications and make sure that only the best get serviced to you. If instead you're like, oh, my gosh, no one is applying to this job. Let us look at the job description, figure out, like, what's going on here, and I will let you all know. Sitting back passively is not our move. We're going to go out and hunt and find the right people to bring them into your role. I hear all the time, well, it's kind of a unicorn hire, and sometimes it's not real, but we're going to tell you, like, hey, there's no way in hell you're going to find this person. Or, hey, here's a couple profiles. Or maybe you need to change these levers, right? Maybe this one required skill is holding you back. Let's see if there's other paths. Like, I talk to clients all the time and say, like, well, I want somebody went to Stanford. Like, well, why did you want someone to win Stanford. What does that mean?

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I watched suits and they did Harvard, and I want Stanford.

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But once people actually, like, define the quality. Yeah, well, exactly. Once somebody defines the qualities, they're like, oh, I want that. I want someone who's done X, Y and Z. It's like, great. Well, what look for x, Y and z? Not just a Stanford grad, maybe a Stanford grad. So it just kind of lets us be dynamic there. So, yeah, if you're kind of thinking of like, who am I hiring? What does the pool look like? How do I even make a decision between all these candidates? My whole job is resting on making this higher and making it well. The whole business is resting on it. Tap us in. That's all we do. And we work really fast at a pace of urgency. And our urgency is really anchored on, like, empathy because we really care about our hiring teams and also the candidates and then also proactivity. So we're going to project, manage the shit out of a hiring process is something that we're definitely becoming known for.

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Wonderful. And listen, Nikki, thank you. Hustle Hunter, CEO and founder. Last question. Have you ever been promoted?

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I promoted myself from never being a recruiter to the CEO and founder of a recruiting firm. I also have been promoted, but in a typical startup way, where you basically build a new role around somebody internally that matches both their goals and the company goals. So I've never, like, been up for promotion.

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I'm going to let you into the club. I'm going to say that you've never.

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I know I was getting in the back door, but I feel like it's a club of only.

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I feel like you're, in early days, have never been promoted. Like, that's definitely. And later on back. Yeah, it's just still, you've got an advancement for somebody else. So appreciate it.

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Love it.

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Nikki, thank you so much for joining today.

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Yeah, I appreciate your time. Thanks so much. Great questions.

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I appreciate. And anyone who's still listening at this point, I'm very appreciative of you, unless you fast forward to this point just to hear this so you can feel better about yourself. But even if you did, thank you.

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Another backdoor into the club.

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That's right, it's a backdoor. And if this is your first time listening, thank you for listening to the Never Been Promote podcast. If you've listened a few times, once again, thanks for coming through us with the journey. In the meantime, until our next episode, go out there and unleash your entrepreneur. And it doesn't matter if you've been promoted or not. Just become the entrepreneur you want. Thanks again for listening.

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Thanks for listening to Never Been Promoted with Thomas Helfrich. Make sure to check the show notes for our guest, contact information and any relevant links. Connect with Thomas personally at neverbeenpromoted.com.