S3:E8
[00:00:00] Todd Libby: Welcome to the Front End Nerdery podcast, a podcast about front end design, development, and anything else that may come up in the course of the day. And let me tell you, I have something that I've been waiting to do a long time here, and that's talk about the job market. I'm Todd Libby. I'm your host. And with me today is, you know, I value this guy because this guy didn't know me from Adam.
[00:00:29] Todd: And then I walk up to him at a, at a conference after his talk. And I said, you know, that talk was awesome. I'm going to take this knowledge with me. I'm going to use it. And did I use it? Yes, I did. And like, uh, I would say a couple of weeks, maybe more after I got a job. Putting his words into action. So with me today is Taylor Desseyn.
[00:00:51] Todd: Taylor, how are you? And, uh, you know, recruiter extraordinaire, you know, you're a wizard when it comes to this stuff and guys like me, you know, we need all the help we can get. So I'm going to introduce you that way, and then I'll let you fill in the blanks around that. How does that sound?
[00:01:12] Taylor Desseyn: I love it. I love it.
[00:01:13] Taylor: No, Todd, thank you again for having me. Um, it's a pleasure to be on here. I don't, I never take, I never take this for granted. Um, you know, I always say that, that as, as a recruiter, I understand that I've had an uphill climb in the software engineering world to, to be accepted and, and to be able to be invited onto your show and anybody else's.
[00:01:32] Taylor: Show podcast is a, is a blessing. So thank you for having me. Um, yeah, I've been, um, I've been at this thing for over 12 years now. Um, and, and, uh, you know, I, I've really seen the behind the scenes of at this point, thousands of job seekers and probably close to 25, 30, 000 job seekers. And then in terms of companies hiring and scaling at least a thousand.
[00:01:56] Taylor: Um, and, and so basically what I've realized is, is I can communicate. The best way to do things and to stay away from a lot of the pitfalls that I've seen through, uh, through social media. And so that's, that's really my medium to, to storytell and to educate and, and, uh, to obviously get me introduced to wonderful people like yourself.
[00:02:15] Todd: Well, don't let that secret out of the bag just yet. Then it might be a little wonderful, but no, I'm just kidding. Uh, we were just at, uh, Magnolia together. And, you know, I, I caught your, your first talk, which is, you know, your talks are just. If it's sitting in for five minutes or sitting into the whole thing, I get always get something out of your talk.
[00:02:41] Todd: So I wonder personally, thank you for that. Uh, first of all, so, um, are you ready to dive into those hard hitting questions?
[00:02:49] Taylor: Let's do it, man. Let's do a hard, hard hitting. I love it. I love it. I love hard hitting questions because, uh, uh, people don't usually like to answer them and I like to get into it.
[00:02:59] Todd: Yeah. So, um, You know, we're looking at a, a time in tech now that is a very volatile, uh, job market. I, coming from my perspective anyways, um, if, if somebody is coming to you and saying, Hey, can you hook, you know, can, can you help me, you know, with getting a job? Are the, you know, and, and they're very unsure about the, the, the situation going on with, you know, we have, uh, had all these layoffs and, you know, um, companies are going through, you know, turnover rates, you know, with, with people, what would you tell?
[00:03:49] Todd: You know, the people who are looking to you for help, what the job market is like now and where you think that it is going to in which direction.
[00:04:01] Taylor: Yeah, it's, it, I mean, it sucks, right? I mean, there's, there's just no better way to say it right now. It is, um, It sucks, but, but I, I do see some silver lining. So let me explain.
[00:04:14] Taylor: So obviously, uh, from 2020 to 2022, the, the tech industry, especially the engineering community experience, growth and hiring that I don't think we've seen in a long time. It's never happened in my 12 years of staffing. Um, and, and you could argue that I've been. Um, that I've been in the hiring world during essentially no bad times, right?
[00:04:37] Taylor: There's been, you know, I got in 2011. The last downturn was in 08. I was not recruiting then I was still in college. And so basically, uh, what we're experiencing now is a correction. Um, from the last two years. Right. And, and so, uh, there is a lot of layoffs, a lot of companies overhired and, and listen, there, I, it's on record.
[00:04:58] Taylor: That's why I like podcasting. Cause it's on the record. If you go back and listen, I called it that, that we were at a clip that we could not sustain. And, and, and so what's happened is, is that, um, the companies are every company over the last year is, is, is correcting itself, right? Whether it's a layoff of 10%, whether it's a layoff of 50%.
[00:05:17] Taylor: Um, those, I would be interested to see the stats, but those are directly correlated, most likely my opinion to how much they overhired, right? So they laid off 10%, they're probably overhired at least by 10%, right? So, um, so that's something that's, that we're definitely dealing with. And I would say, you know, if a job seeker, I've had a lot of people come to me right now, I go, Taylor, how do I find a job?
[00:05:37] Taylor: What do I do in this market? My biggest thing is go to gun. io. Backslash Taylor. I have a bunch of free resources there. I cannot help every single person and I feel awful. I really, really do. Like if it was up to me and I've, and I've thought about this, I've thought about a way to like come up with some sort of pricing tier structure where I could be a little bit more committed to everybody, but until, until the company stopped cutting us the checks and individuals start cutting us the checks, I am at.
[00:06:05] Taylor: I unfortunately am at the disposal of the company because the company pays the individual doesn't write. And so, um, so what I've done is I've tried to create a massive amount of content for people to go through. So if you go to gun. io backslash Taylor, it's there. And, and, and, but my biggest piece of advice, if, if, you know, if you're listening to this in the future and you're like Taylor, I'm too lazy to go do that.
[00:06:25] Taylor: Just, can you tell me now? Yeah. You're going to have to do something different. Right. The, the, the, the whole thing of sleepwalking through interviews is long gone. Uh, if you're a junior developer, just doing your capstone project at a bootcamp with no volunteer experience or no internship experience is not enough anymore.
[00:06:41] Taylor: Um, if you're a senior dev and you're only mass applying, it's not enough anymore. Right. I mean, there's. You know, I, I've talked to so many head of engineering and VP and director level people who are like, you know, we get 300 senior developers. I had a head of engineering text me the other day. He goes, I had 15 senior resumes, final round that I could have hired all 15 if I had the budget, but he goes, I have to pick one.
[00:07:03] Taylor: And so it's very competitive right now. I think the power of referrals is incredibly important. Um, and you're probably like, well, Taylor, how do I get a referral? You got to show up to meetups. You got to show up to conferences. You got to show up to the discords, the slack channels, start endearing yourself to the community you want to be a part of.
[00:07:19] Taylor: I would say those are pretty, some, some pretty substantial building blocks. I think a lot of people aren't, aren't, aren't doing right now.
[00:07:24] Todd: Yeah. Yeah. And probably get into, well, we'll get into this in a little bit, but myself, you know, I, I definitely understand that because I've been doing the discords and LinkedIn.
[00:07:38] Todd: Well, not as much lately, but LinkedIn and, you know, Conferences and even going as far as doing workshops at conferences so that I can get my name out there. So, and normally I don't do workshops, uh, as much as I used to. So, um, yeah, that's all, you know, solid advice. I, and, you know, when we originally talked and I was like, Hey, you know what you said worked.
[00:08:06] Todd: Um, I remember you telling me a little bit about that and, uh, So I definitely,
[00:08:11] Taylor: definitely took that. I do want to say this as you're talking. One thing popped up to me and I'm having a lot of these conversations with people. You need to be having two conversations a day. Two conversations a day. One conversation needs to be with a complete stranger.
[00:08:24] Taylor: And in a company area field that you want to work in, that you get off of LinkedIn, Twitter, whatever. And then the other conversation needs to be somebody in your network who, you know, to check in on them. So two conversations a day, that's it. You're like Taylor. That doesn't sound like a lot. It takes a lot of effort.
[00:08:42] Taylor: It takes a lot of reach outs to get somebody on the phone. So it's going to, it's going to be a full time job. Um, and I've put people through this framework and I have. held them accountable. Um, I, I do one on one counseling sessions for people. Um, uh, and, and the people who have done the one on one counseling sessions with me, and we've walked through them 15 minute calls once a week, they have all found a job and, and, and it hasn't been overnight.
[00:09:09] Taylor: Some it's taken three months, some it's taken six months. But they've all found a job because they've stayed consistent in networking. But it's the hardest part of the job search that no one talks about and no one teaches. And
[00:09:19] Todd: those are the things I think that if more people knew, we might not have as many people, you know, I wouldn't be seeing as many people going, Hey, I'm open to a new role or I'm looking for a new role.
[00:09:32] Todd: I think, you know, these people would be getting those jobs. Yeah. Uh, speaking of jobs and finding jobs. Um, I mean, I've tried to help. People getting in to, you know, tech as much as I can with my knowledge. And then other people, you know, that are on the level that I'm at, you know, these aren't, you know, these aren't just wisdom sprinkles.
[00:09:58] Todd: These are senior developer issues and
[00:10:01] Taylor: access. I just got my hair dyed. So I can be like Todd.
[00:10:07] Todd: Yeah, I don't know. Um, so for the junior out there for, for the junior or somebody that is just like, you know what, I'm fresh out of, you know, college or whatever, or looking to get into tech, what are you going to, uh, how, how should they be looking for a job?
[00:10:29] Todd: At that point in time. And then second part of that is how should the senior dev or whatever be looking for this, the, the same, you know, those jobs that are tailored for them
[00:10:45] Taylor: at the end of the day, the answer doesn't change too much for both. And it's networking, but let me explain a little bit more.
[00:10:50] Taylor: Cause people, I'm sure people are so freaking tired of hearing the word network, like great networking, networking, networking, networking. So let me break it down a little bit, because again, I never really understood how to network until recently. And, and, and I really want to break it down for juniors and seniors.
[00:11:03] Taylor: So juniors, right? So let's say you just graduated bootcamp, maybe yourself taught. I have a huge heart for junior devs. I think every developer has a heart for junior devs, right? It's the hardest break into, we feel for you. I always say, every time I see a junior develop post on social media and angel gets his wings is what I say.
[00:11:23] Taylor: Um, I like a little Charles Dickens kind of in there, but, um, If you're a junior developer, I've talked to so many people who have found jobs because they've merely just texted people they know of their mom and dad's friends or like aunt and uncles or like literally one guy who I know who actually helped build.
[00:11:42] Taylor: So, so I'm going to take this example, Jordan Ryerson, I use him because this dude. Did everything I asked him to do, and he's found a job, Jordan Ryerson hit me up right. I didn't know Jordan at the time. He hit me up randomly. He goes, Hey dude, been following you for a while. First off props to him. He used admiration and flattering the DM.
[00:11:58] Taylor: It gets people's attention. I'm trying to expand my, um, software development skills. Do you have any free work that I can take on? And I was like, yeah, Cause here's the deal, everybody, for the most part, any business owner is going to have free work. Now, here's the deal. I have people come at me with pitchforks.
[00:12:19] Taylor: They're like, well, I'm not in a position to take on free work. Well, then don't. Then don't like it's, it's very black and white. If you can, if you and you're in a position where you can't afford to take on free work, then don't take home free work. I'm not asking you to do something against your will. But what I'm saying is, is what all Jordan did is he asked for free work.
[00:12:34] Taylor: I gave him a project to create my other podcast because I have 16, 000 of them because a man can't have more than, you know, man can have enough podcasts. But, um, I said, I said, I need you to build something for my podcast, the unicorn finders. And he goes, okay, great. Built a site. Put it on his portfolio, then recently got a job because of that on his resume and portfolio.
[00:12:56] Taylor: And I'm pretty sure if I can remember and Jordan, send me a text if you listen to this and I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the person he got a job with like knew him or knew his family or like knew it was one of those were like, he knew somebody who knew somebody. Right. And I think what happens is that people, while I do talk.
[00:13:12] Taylor: A lot about talking to strangers and getting out of your comfort zone and like having these conversations, you can't underestimate the power of your network. The reason why I landed a job to start my career at Vaco, my previous company I was working at, was because there was this girl who lived in my hometown, who we all moved up here together, kind of sort of randomly together, and I asked this girl.
[00:13:31] Taylor: Um, I said, do, do, do you know anybody that's all I said, I said, I'm looking for a nine to five. Do you know anybody? She goes, why nanny for somebody that does pretty well. I said, great. Can you ask what they do? She calls me and goes, they're looking for a recruiter. Do you want to be a recruiter? Like what the hell is a recruiter?
[00:13:44] Taylor: And three days later, I'm a recruiter and I've never looked back. Right. So I've just asked somebody who I knew. And so. If you're a junior dig in to your contact list on your phone, see who's running a business, see mom and pop shop, take on free work, and then obviously continue to nurture those relationships.
[00:14:00] Taylor: Keep talking to random people, right? Um, so that's, that's my suggestion for junior developers for senior engineers, right? You're probably at a point where you're not taking on a bunch of free work, which I get that. But from a senior engineer perspective, I think you got to be on social media. I think you got to be on the Twitter.
[00:14:15] Taylor: I think you got to be on LinkedIn. Now, my brother who may listen to this, he's a senior product owner at Eventbrite. He has done incredibly well in his career with networking and he has no social media presence whatsoever. So he was going to listen to this and be like, well, Taylor's wrong. Don't listen to him.
[00:14:26] Taylor: Right. But. I will say this it's I've never talked to a senior engineer who has dove into the social media world. I'm not asking you to be a Mr. Beast. I'm not asking you to be a full time content creator. All I'm asking you to do is leverage the tools in front of you to network with people. And what is network with people?
[00:14:43] Taylor: Network with people is Todd tweets about something about lobster rolls. I like it. And then I asked him a question, Todd, I've seen a lot of different ways to eat lobster rolls. What's your favorite? Todd tweets me back and he tells me his favorite ranked from first to third. And I go, that's great. Then what happens if I'm having a lobster roll in two weeks, I'm going to take a picture and tag Todd.
[00:15:05] Taylor: Hey, Todd, I'm having a lobster roll thinking about you, buddy. Right. Todd and I at that point would have never met, but you know what that's done is that it's endeared me to Todd. Right. And I think that's what people don't understand about social media, social media. They think about Tik TOK and kids dancing and it being weird and whatever I get it.
[00:15:22] Taylor: There's a lot of it out there, but for me, I have just dove into social media to, to leverage and to, to get in, in rooms. I've gotten in so many rooms with people who I'd never deserved to be in rooms with, because I've just leveraged the heck out of social media in that kind of format. Right now I have a podcast.
[00:15:37] Taylor: Listen, it's a lot easier to get people in a room. If you have a podcast. A lot easier, right? If you're a senior person, your career, quite honestly, I would have a podcast. I probably like, well, Taylor, I don't really want to do a podcast. I don't have the equipment. Here's the deal. It doesn't matter. All a podcast is, is basically something that forces you to talk to somebody in an intentional matter, right?
[00:15:59] Taylor: I talk all the time, moving to Nashville, singer, songwriters, songwriting. It's like podcasting. It's the ultimate networker. Basically, if you, when I moved to Nashville, my lead singer would get in a room with two or three other songwriters and they would write for like eight hours a day for like sometimes a week.
[00:16:14] Taylor: Listen, if you're going to spend that much time with a stranger, you're going to become friends with them, right? And it's the same thing with podcasts. So if I'm senior, do a podcast, do something to, to cause you to engage with people. But then if you're also senior, speak at a meetup, speak at conferences, be public, be visible, get involved in the discord.
[00:16:31] Taylor: I've got a discord. James quick's got a discord. Everyone's got discords, right? So like you leverage them. Um, so yeah, those are my two strategies for juniors and seniors.
[00:16:41] Todd: And it makes sense too, because, you know, you get yourself out there, you know, people are going to say, okay, I'm going to be, you know, a little pat myself on the back here.
[00:16:49] Todd: But before the, before the pandemic, I, I think I did. I think I've earned that right to pat myself on the back, actually. I agree. Before the pandemic, you know, I'm going in and I'm just doing what I normally do for the, you know, past 20 some odd years and then all of a sudden pandemic hits and I'm like, okay, well, now I'm going to be stuck at home for who knows how long, what am I going to do to pass the time that I'm just, yeah, because a guy like me.
[00:17:22] Todd: You know, I'm, this is, this is the carnival up here. And once that carnival gets going, man, is it chaos and just, you know, madness. So podcast, I did, you know, um, all these, you know, getting myself out there and doing, you know, my first talk was at a virtual conference, Bar Camp Philly. And then it went from there.
[00:17:48] Todd: A year later, I'm talking to nine people in a room at Connect Tech in Atlanta. And then over time, the crowds have grown, you know, and yeah,
[00:18:03] Taylor: it's social proofing. Right. And again, I'm sure people listen to this and get so tired of me talking about the same thing, but like, there is, there is a, there is a push or there is a, not even a push, just like there's a trend and observation of mine that the people who can social proof their career.
[00:18:20] Taylor: As in put things out online to show what they can do. Like, for example, I just tweeted this right, right before this. I tweeted, I tweeted in six months of being at gun IO. I've been able to bring in five new companies that have needed help staffing up engineering talent. Love being able to work with both hiring managers to solve problems and creating content.
[00:18:38] Taylor: You know why I tweeted that is because there are people who I interviewed with before I landed up at gun IO that found me on Twitter that have been keeping up with my journey. Cause I, cause I get DMS from those companies. Right. And like, I just want to show them like kind of what they missed out on a little bit.
[00:18:55] Taylor: Right. And so, but like also telling a story, right? Like, you know, if, if, if, if a CEO or CTO sees that on my Twitter, like, oh shit, well, he's brought in six, five, six clients already. Then he must be doing something, right. We maybe need to work with him. Right. And, and it's the same thing. If you're a react engineer and you're tweeting about react and blah, blah, blah.
[00:19:16] Taylor: Again, a bunch of buzzwords I don't know about. Right? You're, you're eventually going to cause it's FOMO, right? And it's, it's what I call like a professional FOMO where it's like, Oh, well, Todd's talking about accessibility. I don't know what accessibility is. That's FOMO. I don't know. That's FOMO. I feel left out because Todd's talking about, I don't know about it.
[00:19:34] Taylor: I want to learn more from Todd. Right. And, and, and, and so that's, that's what the power of social proof in your career is. Again, I'm not asking you to be a full time content creator. All I'm asking you to do is talk about what you're doing.
[00:19:46] Todd: So, uh, yeah. And you don't need. All the fancy equipment that you see, that's one thing that I tell people all the time is, you know, they're like, Hey, you do a podcast and yours is pretty good.
[00:20:01] Todd: And I'm like, yeah, well, it's a low budget podcast because I got this, I got this microphone right here and I have my webcam in my laptop. That's all I need. I don't need to go out and buy six grand worth of equipment as much as I'd love to and set up this professional because
[00:20:21] Taylor: it's going to take you six X the time to figure it out, how to set it up and then operationalize it.
[00:20:24] Taylor: And then by the time you figure that out, Todd's already put out 16 episodes.
[00:20:29] Todd: Yeah,
[00:20:29] Taylor: exactly. Exactly. I mean, Jason Langsdorff, I'll never forget Jason Langsdorff, right? He went full time for content creation and I think it was a lie that he and I were on together. And he was talking about how he was like, I got to get the camera.
[00:20:42] Taylor: Well, he moved to this beautiful studio. He's got this beautiful studio to do like really cool stuff. And he basically admitted on my live. And I don't know if it was my live mail, maybe a piece of content he put out. So Jason, if you listen to this, like I do, I'm sorry if I'm misquoting. But he basically said, he goes, I really, he says, he says, I got my dream studio.
[00:20:57] Taylor: And he goes, I realized I hadn't put out any content in a month. Yeah, because he goes, I was too busy with the gear and the tinkering. And he goes, I realized I looked up after a month ago. So shit, I haven't put anything out in 30 days. And so again, you don't, I'm not asking you to go spend money. I know a lot of people have messaged me and they're like, well, I can't do what you're doing.
[00:21:15] Taylor: Here's the deal. I literally started my entire content journey talking on my phone. That's it.
[00:21:23] Todd: That's it. Yep. And I had Jason on a few episodes ago and we talked about this. I don't remember if we talked about it. I think, I know we talked about it in the podcast. I think we might've talked about it before we recorded or after we recorded, but I remember him distinctly telling, you know, saying that to me as well as he hadn't done anything for X amount of time.
[00:21:47] Todd: Yep. Um, so I'm going to pivot here and I'm going to go to. Recruiting and, and. Here's where, you know, you and I, and I've joked around with you about this a lot with, you know, I'll go on LinkedIn on a Sunday and some recruiters saying, Hey, you know, I get this really cool data analyst position for 40, 000 a year, you know, you do you want to talk about it?
[00:22:18] Todd: And I'm like, Well, first of all, it's Sunday and, you know, secondly, I'm in accessibility. So data analysts, no, I'm not making that, you know, pretty much ignoring it. And, you know, they're, you know, and you pretty much, you said they're playing catch up. They want to hit their numbers and they're trying to play catch up my long and winding question here.
[00:22:45] Taylor: Okay, you're just like me. We'll get to the plot. Eventually, just listen. Listen, while we get there, please get that this
[00:22:54] Todd: is the setup. This is the setup here. Um, how do I use my recruiter to my advantage. I'm not, you know, Yeah, it may take three months, six months, like you said, but how do I use my recruiter efficiently and to my advantage so that it's not taking nine months a year, two years?
[00:23:18] Taylor: Yeah. I mean, I, I think, I think in my opinion, a recruiter is the most. Is, is the most underrated form of Google out there. All right. People think recruiters are transactional. We are most of us are right. Like if, if we, if we can't help you, we move on. And that's true. But if you have us for 15 minutes, you can ask us a lot of questions to gain a lot of insight on the market where you stand, right?
[00:23:48] Taylor: So now I'm not, I'm not asking a lot of people are like, well, does that mean I have to make calls to every single person I'm on a, that reaches out? No, you don't have to. Bye. What I would do is I would, I would, here's some basic questions I would ask a recruiter to get them on call. First off, can you critique my resume and my LinkedIn real fast?
[00:24:06] Taylor: Can you give me one piece, one nugget of something that should change? Right? They'll tell you. The second thing is ask them, uh, if they are getting any positions based off of like, if they get any positions, like what you do, right. And like, and like, The commonality or like the cadence of those type of positions, right?
[00:24:30] Taylor: So, you know, if you talk to a recruiter and, and you're a T net developer, you're like, Hey, I mean I'm a T net, angular Razor, Ang, Azure, blah, blah, blah, da guy, gal. And, and, and I'd be like, well, how many, how many positions are you seeing within my salary and within my, and within this like framework, you know, they could say, oh, we get one or two a month, or we get 15 a month.
[00:24:51] Taylor: So then you can kind of gauge the interest of the market a little bit, right? Another question I would ask them, how's my salary compared to everybody? Kind of my skillset, right? Be open with this, like be vulnerable with this question. A lot of people don't like to share salaries with recruiters. Listen, I get it.
[00:25:07] Taylor: But at the end of the day, like If you share your, if you share your salary with a recruiter, they can tell you if you're too high or too low. Now, if you're too high, you need to, you need to listen to them, right? If they tell you like, hey, listen, you're just, you're just priced out. Like, it happens a lot.
[00:25:22] Taylor: Take, take, take into account with that. Um, I, so I'm trying to think of some other questions that would be really good. I mean, those are the big ones, right? Resume, LinkedIn, critique, where do I stay on my salary? Where do I stay on my skill set? Um, I think, I think those are the big ones just off the top of my head, but I have other questions to ask recruiters.
[00:25:40] Taylor: If you do go to my website, gun, IO backslash Taylor. I have a bunch of other questions as it relates to, if they send you a role specifically, like what questions to ask about the role, but even, even if a recruiters and call and contact you about role, there's still some information. That you can glean from them and then that way you feel like your conversation is more fruitful than most ghosting that happens with recruiters, because at least then you'll get like something from them.
[00:26:06] Todd: And I'm glad you mentioned the ghosting because. I see a lot of people, you know, I get to the fourth round and I get ghosted, or I get to the fifth round and get ghosted, and I won't go on the tangent, but, you know, three interviews, I am done. I, you know, if that's process is taking more than three interviews, then there's something fundamentally wrong at that organization that they need to correct because, and correct me if I'm wrong, but hiring is so fractured and broken.
[00:26:37] Todd: Um, You know, I've been ghosted. A lot of people I know are, you know, and I've
[00:26:42] Taylor: been ghosted. My last job search, I was ghosted. They ghosted
[00:26:45] Todd: me. So let me ask you this. To maintain a positive outlook, because if you know, in the past, when I've been ghosted, I'm just like, Jesus, you know, come on, you know, that's kind of like a slap in the face, at least give me something to work with, you know, no, you know, even the, even the, you know, auto responder email, sorry, but you know, you know, while you looked fantastic on paper, right?
[00:27:15] Todd: We hired somebody else. What would you say to somebody, especially juniors? What would you say to somebody about, you know, you got ghosted, keep pushing forward, keep going forward, stay positive. What would you say to them?
[00:27:32] Taylor: Listen, I, I get it feels like you're in an echo chamber to a certain extent, right?
[00:27:37] Taylor: Like, like if, if, if you, if, if you are getting ghosted consistently, it's exhausting because you don't know where you stand. That's what they talk about is look for the nuances of why you get rejected and see if there's a common theme, right? If you're too overpriced, maybe you've got to raise your salary, lower your salary a little bit, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:28:04] Taylor: My biggest thing is, is ghosting mainly happens. Because it's hard to scale the interview process intentionally. It's hard, right? Because right now there's 300 applications for one job opening. There's no way to be intentional with 299 rejections. There's just not, there's just not now companies. If you do listen to this and there's something we're working on gonna at gun IO, to be totally honest, cause we're technically a company too, right?
[00:28:31] Taylor: Like I know. We closed up before we can get you onto the platform, right? Which is something that's bothered me. And, and, and, and, and something that I have talked about, right. It's like, listen, like, well, if we're trying to set the standard, we can't be like everybody else and it's hard to do. It's so difficult to do.
[00:28:46] Taylor: But if, if, if I were you and you keep getting ghosted, um, try. To like, try to reach out to the hiring managers, like, Hey, listen, like, I know I got some automated email. Can you just give me one nugget? Here's the deal. I've talked, I've spoken, you know, this talk that I give at conferences, a manifesto and hiring.
[00:29:03] Taylor: It's basically around how you should structure interviewing. But for me, like if you, if you keep getting rejected, there's a lot of HR issues, which is why people don't want to give feedback and, and, and which sucks. Right. And, and I tell hiring managers, don't make it just make it black and white. Hey, we needed these three things of react.
[00:29:25] Taylor: You only have one of the three things. Sorry. That's very black and white, but unfortunately, company HR is really getting in the way now, and it's really causing the lack of that. So for me, I would message the hiring manager just once. You don't want to get too like clingy and too weird, but be like, Hey, listen, Mr.
[00:29:43] Taylor: Manager, Mrs. Manager, I know I got rejected. I just got automation email. Can you just give me one nugget of why I got like one thing I need to improve on or one of the reasons why I got rejected? I will tell you this for the most part, it's just because there's so many other applicants right now and you just weren't exactly what they want, right?
[00:30:01] Taylor: And, and that sucks to hear, but man, it just is so competitive right now that you're going to get ghosted more times than not. And, but that's why you got to have mentors in, in, in, with you. That's why you got to trust recruiters a little bit and build a relationship with other people. If you build relationships with other people in your kind of niche, you can, you can kind of get feedback with each other back and forth, right?
[00:30:25] Taylor: So like, you know, Todd, you know, I'm Todd, Chris and, um, Homer, right? Like all you guys are accessibility guys, right? Like. If, if you guys are experiencing something or you're seeing something in the market, I'm sure you guys are on a text chain. Like, Hey, I'm seeing this. What are you seeing? Are you seeing these roles?
[00:30:40] Taylor: And again, that allows you not to kind of be in this echo chamber of like this ghosted thing where you're not getting any feedback real time.
[00:30:47] Todd: Right. Yeah. And then that does happen. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you have been part of that for sure. For sure. Um,
[00:30:59] Todd: here's, here's just a fun little question for you and, and I alluded to this earlier. Why do you, why do I get approached by a, uh, recruiter out of the blue, you know, whether it's LinkedIn or via email and they say, Hey, Todd, um, his, his position for, you know, data entry, you know, entry level
[00:31:30] Todd: 35, 000 a year, you know, blah, blah, blah. Why am I getting that? Instead of, um, the, the obvious, Hey, you're an accessibility professional. Here's some jobs that we're looking for. I
[00:31:45] Taylor: mean, I talk about this a lot. I think there's just, so every single recruiting agency that I know of is down 20, I mean, 20, 30 percent could be more.
[00:31:58] Taylor: And a lot of recruiting companies that are either backed by PE firm or backed by some venture capitalists are going to have metrics because, because again, like we don't sell t shirts, right? So you can't like, you can't say, well, we made 15, like, it's not a math problem, even though I've, even though so many throughout my career, we've tried to math staffing.
[00:32:22] Taylor: You can't because. Cause you can make two calls, like a prime example, right? I promise I'll get to the answer to this. I'm just like you with this. I got to take a whole story with it. Prime example. I worked with this one girl. She was a rockstar recruiter, but she and I went about recruiting two different ways.
[00:32:38] Taylor: Um, which now I kind of do what she does now, just 10 years later. Right. She was ahead of, ahead of the times I was very process oriented. I was the first guy in. I crushed it when it came to your traditional recruiting, cold calls, cold emails, job boards, LinkedIn recruiter. I was the man when it came out, nobody beat me.
[00:32:55] Taylor: The most calls the, I was really good with copy, which really led me to my content. I knew how to frame emails and to get responses really well. This other girl who I recruited with, her name was Alethea. She's a senior recruiter now at data dog. She would have no calls, no emails, but you know what she did?
[00:33:16] Taylor: She would go out and S and spend money and do lunches and dinners. You see like kind of what I do now, right? That the community building, right. And she and I were always neck and neck for top one and two in our division for recruiters. And it annoyed the ever living Dickens out of me. Right? Like, like I was like, you're, you're telling me I'm sitting here busting my balls to do it the way I'm supposed to.
[00:33:40] Taylor: And we got this Aletheia girl over here throwing parties and happy hours and not doing anything. And she's killing it too. So going back to your question, why do people, why are you getting called for jobs that are ridiculous? It's because there are metrics with a lot of these companies because they try to math staff and you can't math people.
[00:33:57] Taylor: Right. And so, you know, if you get a lot of these calls are just out of the blue, you just got to move on. There's just a lot of spam. I believe, or not believe it or not, staffing, starting a staffing business, while it is hard in some ways, it's easier than others. There's not a lot of overhead. You need a cell phone and the internet.
[00:34:15] Taylor: That's it. That's it. And like a really good accountant or not accountant, a lawyer, a really good lawyer. And that's it. My buddy started a company. He's doing, he's doing pretty well, uh, through, he started it two years ago. That's what he said. He goes, it's, it's low. I used to get cell phone, internet, computer, and you're good to go.
[00:34:33] Taylor: So for me, like that, that's why you get a lot of spam calls because like, even if you're bad at recruiting, you can still be kind of good at a recruiting, if that makes sense, because then you can just. And then it's just volume. And then you'll eventually get one because there's just so much volume.
[00:34:48] Todd: Yeah.
[00:34:49] Todd: It's like being a manager in tech. You can be bad at it, but you can also be good in it. Exactly. No, you can stumble back into the position and still be good at it in some areas. So yeah, I get that. So gun IO. Yep. You're there now. Tell me about it. Tell me what you do there. Tell me how you like it. Tell me, um, you know, give me the lowdown on, you know, I have my account.
[00:35:20] Todd: What do I have, what do I have to look for, uh, when, you know, you let, you're letting more people in and, and how are you going to help me?
[00:35:31] Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. Well, listen, we're at a crossroads right now. So I'll give you kind of a, so for those of you who are still listening to this podcast, first off, thank you. Um, second off, uh, gun IO is a talent marketplace.
[00:35:43] Taylor: So there, so there's a whole. I didn't realize this industry existed. It's basically like. Depending on how you do it, it's kind of like recruiting 2. 0, depending on how you structure your staff. Now, our staff, we have a technical development relations team who takes out everybody, um, who actually also helps match our candidates to your open jobs.
[00:36:05] Taylor: So, it's, like, it's really cool how we do it. Um, so talent marketplaces, for those of you don't know, the kind of the concept is to get into a community, a slack, a discord. We have a slack channel, a private slack channel where you're in community with 3000 other senior engineers right now. You have to go through an interview process with us originally at gun.
[00:36:24] Taylor: io. It was what I I've learned this recently when we started, it was kind of every man, women for themselves. You can join the platform. Well, that created a bunch of spam as I'm sure you can probably imagine. The quality was terrible. And at the end of the day, we're also a product company. We're kind of what I call a talent product company, because while we do play software engineers and jobs, our community is our product.
[00:36:46] Taylor: Right. And so, um, we're, we, we, we basically had, so the iteration was everybody on cut that off. And then the second iteration I learned recently was we had, uh, what was it? Kind of a pseudo signup. Like you had, like, you had to take like one eval, but the quality was still terrible. Like we were too many terrible engineers to still get into it.
[00:37:12] Taylor: So then now we switched like a three step process. Now that being said. Um, we have grown our marketing. They hired me. I don't know if it's because of me. It's I don't, I don't, I don't know if it's a coincidence that I joined four months ago, five months ago at this point. And then they had to halt the platform because they were getting seven, 800 engineers a week applying to be on the platform.
[00:37:35] Taylor: It's probably not me, but all that being said. We, we need to figure out moving forward on how to be intentional when it comes to both bringing on engineers to our platform, but also helping them find jobs, because what's happening is, is we were letting in all types of skill sets. So we had like our most competitive skill set in the platform is react to node.
[00:37:55] Taylor: Basically, like if you don't work at like. Netflix, you pretty much can't get on if you're a react engineer, because like our platform is so deep with talent. So now what we're trying to do is we're trying to figure out how do we be intentional when it comes to bringing our people onto our platform, but also giving them a chance at jobs too, because then if you have like a.
[00:38:16] Taylor: React developers on our platform. We have a job. You're probably, you're, you're, you're doing the same. You're in the same issue as you are with, if you're not on our platform. So we're definitely trying to figure this out. Our, our VP of engineering is former, um, Amazon, uh, engineering manager. He's very passionate about community.
[00:38:33] Taylor: And he, I mean, we're, we are an engineering led organization. We have a product team. We have an engineering team building this cool product for hiring managers to be able to see our talent too, which is coming out next year. But all that being said, we are, everything's kind of on pause to bring it on talent.
[00:38:47] Taylor: Um, which, uh, is a bummer because I know there's a lot of interest from guys like you and just my community who want to get on and I want to get y'all on, but we got to try to figure out how to be intentional, which again, I love being a part of gun IO because I'm a part of the engineering community, which is wonderful.
[00:39:03] Taylor: They're allowing me to kind of be my full self at work, which is obvious. It's very rare for that to happen. Um, and then also to, um, I can also leverage my network and help my network more. So we have a lot of things we got to work on. And, and again, I mean, I'm very vocal on Twitter about this, like bear with us, but, um, you know, I definitely think that, um, what we're trying to do is going to radically change the way companies hire engineers.
[00:39:28] Todd: Yeah. And I, I got the feeling. So when I initially signed on and made an account, I initially felt this is different from your normal Indeed, Monster, uh, LinkedIn, very, very different. So I, you know, and I'm with this, I'm, I can, I can wait all day. I am very patient. So when that door, you know, swings open, I'll walk right through.
[00:39:57] Todd: Yeah. Yeah. Um, Cool. And we'll have all these, uh, you know, all the information in the show notes, uh, for, for everybody. Um,
[00:40:12] Todd: and we've gone over, you know, how to maximize and how to use, leverage your, your network to your advantage, you know, but is there anything that you, you can think of that we might've missed as far as that goes, leveraging your network to your advantage? Um, At any level,
[00:40:32] Taylor: really. Yeah, I, my, my biggest piece of advice is if you're going to go down this road and you're in, and you're like, let's say you listen to this podcast and you're just fired up and want to run through a brick wall after this podcast, which I understand we have the tendency to do that to people.
[00:40:47] Taylor: I will tell you it's going to feel weird because we as human beings. Confuse activity with productivity. So people are here. I submitted a hundred applications today. I don't give a shit because it's not going anywhere. Right. But if you told me, man, I had three meaningful conversations with potential hiring, man, with hiring managers in my network, I'm going to say that person wins the day.
[00:41:15] Taylor: Right. And so I will tell you, you're, you're going to feel like you're not getting anywhere. You're going to be seeing online of people applying to hundreds of places. I would say this, none of their applications are getting viewed. None, none of them, none of them. Now, of course, I have people that listen to podcasts in my labs and I say this and they get, and they're like, well, I found a job at mass supply and we'll props to you.
[00:41:35] Taylor: But you also can't build a house with just a screwdriver. So don't only just rely on mass supply and for your job search. So if you do this and you do it, well, it's going to be exhausting. It's going to take time, but you're also going to find a job a lot quicker. Yeah.
[00:41:49] Todd: And I want to throw this out there because I just saw somebody that who wrote about it.
[00:41:56] Todd: And if I find that post, I will put it in the show notes. They, um, took the data from easy applying on LinkedIn. And did something like 180 or 120 or 180 or so easy applications, only like seven responses and one, they get to the second round, but then they get ghosted. So easy apply is not so easy when it comes to LinkedIn.
[00:42:25] Taylor: Especially right now, you got to remember like everybody's on the job search right now. So literally like easy apply was a lot better when it was two years ago because everybody had jobs. But now again, think about it. Like if you apply, you're applying with 300, 400 other people. It just, the math just doesn't math.
[00:42:44] Todd: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So which, which area of tech do you see the more? Okay. I guess I want to say most promise as far as job openings go, but you know, maybe it could be worded a little different. I mean, the, the best outlook, I guess, as far as which part of tech, like, you know, react developers or view
[00:43:08] Taylor: developers.
[00:43:09] Taylor: So I will say this. I, I see glimmers of hope. I have been approached. I, like I said, I've brought in five clients in five or six months. That's a pretty good clip. Like, that's kind of like normal times for me. Um, I, I've messaged with one of my recruiter friends, he has done, he's had so much interest lately that he's actually starting his own thing and, and I've seen a lot of my recruiter friends kind of post the same thing.
[00:43:36] Taylor: So I do think there's light at the end of the tunnel, however. I think when it comes to technical skill sets, I think back end engineering is where it's at right now. I think there's just a plethora of front end folks. I think accessibility is still niche enough where I think there's just not a lot of, a lot, a lot of y'all running around.
[00:43:50] Taylor: Um, but I, I do think like back end engineering, Python, Java, um, cloud services, DevOps, like when React came out, there was such a money grab for React devs that I think there was a lot of folks who were maybe full stack split, just went all in on React. Y'all there's like a gazillion of y'all out there now, like, like, you know, and if you're listening to this, you're like, well, I'm fucked.
[00:44:16] Taylor: You're not fucked. I'm just, I'm just, I'm just saying, like, I think if you have an interest in going back to the backend, I would probably consider it at least right now, because there's a dime a dozen react engineers. But then when we get a buy backend Python or Java engineer, like where the fuck do we find these people?
[00:44:33] Taylor: Yeah,
[00:44:33] Todd: exactly. Um,
[00:44:39] Todd: where do you see the least? growth, um, and I'm looking at from here, from my perspective, a few months ago, I was like, you know, I'm, I'm trying to move out of accessibility simply because I don't want to do the auditing part anymore. The auditing, I, I, it burnt me out months ago and, you know, I just. You know, I, I, I'm out of that burnout and I want to stay out of that burnout.
[00:45:11] Todd: You know, I, I, I want to move to something else. And I'm originally thinking DevRel because DevRel, I do advocating already for accessibility. So, you know, a lot of my DevRel friends are in people we both know are like, you know, you're 50 percent there already. It's just the other half that you have to, you know, you have to learn and focus on.
[00:45:37] Todd: I'm looking at DevRel now and being like, you know, companies aren't valuing DevRel at all. And that's taken a hit. So where would you, where would you see the, you know, the, the space that's the, you know, getting the, I guess going downhill,
[00:45:54] Taylor: so to speak. Uh, let me, let me know if this answers your question. If not, I'll try to reframe it.
[00:46:03] Taylor: I think if you want to stay in DevRel, I think you got to just be okay with, uh, with coding and doing DevRel on the side, if that makes sense. Kind of like me, right? Like, I'm a sales guy that does DevRel stuff on the side, right? And so, I think, I don't think the market will pick back up with DevRel until Much longer.
[00:46:25] Taylor: So, right. Yeah. I don't know if that answers your question exactly, but, but in my mind, like, like people want company, want people to code right now. So I would, I would, I would say to, to do that. Yeah. So,
[00:46:43] Todd: yeah, it's, it seems like in the past few months, two, three, four months that just DevRel is just taking a hit.
[00:46:50] Todd: So hard. Yeah,
[00:46:51] Taylor: it is interesting. This could be a whole nother podcast, but like, I think what a gun I was doing to me, I think is really interesting. They basically created a marketing attribution on the website that like, when you sign up, if you're a company or, or a candidate, you have to pick where you heard about us and you can pick from me and it's actually been a pretty good, uh, indicator on what I'm doing.
[00:47:12] Taylor: So like, but the latest stab before we paused it, I brought in a 90 developers in about four months of the platform, three months of the platform, 30 developers a month. That's one a day. Right? And then from a company perspective, you know, I've, I've brought in, I think some of it's spam, don't get me wrong, but I think there's been like 20 companies that have selected my information and, you know, have closed about five of them at this point.
[00:47:36] Taylor: So, you know, and that way they've been able to track a little bit more. And so for companies who listen to this, I think, I think that's actually a really good way to, to maybe talk about how to quantify your DevRel a little bit.
[00:47:47] Todd: Yeah, definitely. Um,
[00:47:53] Todd: Yeah, those are the, those are pretty much the questions, you know, the, the topics I wanted to hit to today. And I know we're probably I think we're coming up around time already now. Yeah. But, uh, you know, Seeing you and hearing you at conferences is something that I highly suggest anybody that's, you know, has any interest in what Taylor has to offer.
[00:48:19] Todd: Go, you know, go grab those tickets, go see those talks, go see those, you know, presentations. You know, you, you have your, your podcasts and you have your, you know, your, your streams, they are, you know, you're on LinkedIn, you're on YouTube and you're everywhere. You are, you are, you are like the guy in my area who is on the billboards everywhere.
[00:48:41] Todd: Call Rafi. You're like, call Rafi. You are everywhere, but it's, it's great to see because you are, you know, you're a valuable resource, especially in this time, you know, where everything is so volatile as far as the job market goes. So. I want to first, thank you for coming on. Absolutely, brother. I want to secondly, ask you this beer league hockey.
[00:49:06] Todd: Let me tell you how bad I miss getting out on the ice because this old guy, I I'm about 150 pounds heavier and two bad knees and two bad ankles later, you know, blocking shots and stuff.
[00:49:25] Todd: I see those and I'm just like, I'm living vicariously through you. I hope you know. Um, how's the team doing? And, uh, you know, tell us a little bit about that.
[00:49:37] Taylor: Yeah. So, um, I'm on a upper B league team here in Nashville with there's a upper a. Um, which is essentially like X pros. Um, there's a lower a, which to be honest, we could play lower a actually subbed in a lower a game and it was about the same tempo.
[00:49:51] Taylor: Um, and then upper B, which is what we play lower B, et cetera, et cetera, all the way down to rookie. And, um, so my brother and I run a team, um, we're sponsored by a local barbecue joint here in town called Martin's barbecue. Um, we kind of took over the team. We're at the bottom of the table, little soccer term, bottom of the table and the lower B league, and we took it over one lower B and.
[00:50:09] Taylor: Now we've won upper B and we've gone to the championship four times in four years and, and, or four, four times in two years, there's two, two seasons a year. But, um, and we're two and two, we've, we've won two and we've lost two in the championship, but yeah, it's fun. So right now we're, we're five, one and one off to really our best start, I think ever.
[00:50:27] Taylor: Um, and, uh, we, we, we have a good group of guys, a lot of Michigan guys, a lot of, um. Uh, a lot of Michigan and New York, actually, what's crazy just about the power community is a lot of the guys on my team, like one guy helps me with my content. Um, another guy runs like a health podcast and then he's gotten another guy on my team because this other guy is big on the health side of things as well.
[00:50:47] Taylor: So we have a really good community and really good team, a bunch of good dudes. So it's fun playing with them.
[00:50:52] Todd: Yeah. And every, you know, like I said, every time I see those posts you have, it's just like, man, what I wouldn't give the, you know, just go, what, even one shift out on the ice and just, yeah, I miss it.
[00:51:07] Todd: I really do. But, um, yeah. And also at the same time, this is also, uh, you know, we're talking about hiring or talk about the job market, but also I'm glad we talked about community because community is very important. In that networking. So I'm glad we, we got all these topics that we could cover and it kind of encompasses the whole thing.
[00:51:29] Todd: So this has been a fantastic podcast for me. And as always, it's always good to see you. Always good to hear you. And, um, yeah, is there anything else that we might've missed that you want to, you want to cover?
[00:51:42] Taylor: Not at all. Not at all. Go follow me. Social media. T D E S S E Y N. Appreciate you having me, Todd.
[00:51:48] Taylor: It means a lot.
[00:51:49] Todd: Yeah. Thank you, Taylor. And, you know, thank you listeners and viewers on YouTube channel. Um, this has been the Front End Nerdery Podcast. I am Todd Libby. This is it. This is going to be a bonus episode for December. Uh, the regular, uh, episode will be out and then this is my bonus episode. We will probably have a end of year wrap up.
[00:52:13] Todd: little, um, episode after, but I'm looking forward to next year because my cohost Homer and I are, we've got some changes in the books that are going to be awesome. So awesome. Uh, with that, I want to thank you again, Taylor, and thank you listeners and viewers for watching and listening. And this has been the front end nerdery podcast, and we'll see you next time.
[00:52:37] Todd: Peace.