The Problem with Time-to-Fill Metrics with Tim Sackett

In this episode, Brad Owens interviews Tim Sackett, president of HRU Technical Resources, about the metrics and measurements used in recruiting and HR. Tim challenges the common focus on time-to-fill metrics, arguing that speed does not necessarily correlate with success or quality of hire. Instead, he suggests measuring the quality of applicants and the conversion rate of candidates to interviews. Tim also discusses the importance of understanding capacity and resources when setting hiring goals, and the need for a data-driven approach to recruitment. He highlights the value of marketing automation software in improving candidate conversion rates and overall recruitment success.

Tim’s new book: https://a.co/d/hnffr7W

Follow Tim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsackett/

Full transcript automatically generated. May contain errors.

Brad Owens (00:17.614)

Welcome everyone back to another episode of Transform Recruiting. I'm your host as always, Brad Owens, but with me today, I wanted to bring in someone that truly espouses the meaning of this podcast, the ideas that people in tech that are transforming recruiting. So if you're in the HR world, it's kind of hard not to know this person. Currently president of HRU Technical Resources, $40 million IT and engineering contract, staffing firm and RPO since 2011.

been putting out content that's must read, HR and leadership stuff out at TimSackett .com daily, daily. No idea how you do that, but daily. And including the fan favorite, 25 rap lyrics that shaped my leadership style. Gotta go read that one. You'll also be hard pressed to find someone with a better Ted Lasso costume. Mr. Tim Sackett, welcome to the show, sir.

@TimSackett (01:06.682)

Hey, thanks for having me on. My wife calls me a micro celebrity. She's like, there's like 13 HR people in the world that want a picture with you, which I always think is super funny. And then the one time in my life that somebody recognized me in the wild, because it's one thing if you're at an HR conference and someone's like, it's Tim Sackett. Everything connects the dots. I was in the Detroit airport with her going on vacation, and somebody was coming down one of the moving walkways. And they're like.

Tim Sackett, are you Tim Sackett? And she was just like, I can't believe that you just got recognized. Like this is like the only time in my life it's ever happened and thank God she was right there by my side. So.

Brad Owens (01:45.293)

Now you can tell her, see, I told you, I wasn't lying.

@TimSackett (01:47.674)

It happens all the time. Like, honey, like that's, you know, that's why I try not to, you know, fly the late flights because, geez, it's so difficult getting to the airports. Yeah.

Brad Owens (01:56.621)

just to get a silent moment away. Well, that's cool. Well, thanks again. I appreciate it. So you have been in the game for a while. You've seen a lot of different things about recruiting, about HR, and how our TA leaders are handling or maybe not doing things very well. And we're coming off the heels of the SHRM conference. So I'm sure you probably heard a lot of different things there as well. And I know you had a chance to speak. One of the interesting things that you had mentioned to me

was about all of the metrics around recruiting and about what we're focusing on in TA. What did you mean by that?

@TimSackett (02:27.61)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had this conversation and so many people at SHRM were like, I can ask the question, like if you're in a room of a thousand people and you go, what's the one metric you use to measure your success in TA? And it's always some kind of a time to fill metric, right? It's either something like that. It's like, we opened the job here and this is when we closed it or here's where we got the offer or time to whatever.

And it's always been the one metric. And I noticed this about three years ago. So I started working with enterprise TA leaders, or even CHROs would call up and they were like, look, we're just broken. This isn't working well. Or we think we need new technology. And what they were really saying is because we suck or we're broken. Either way, it all kind of came to the same thing.

And I would just dig into everything. And one of the things I found out, because I'd always then bring in like the C -suite. I want to talk to like the CIO, CEO, you know, CFO to figure out like, was this really important to everybody? And almost every single time it was like, yeah, we paid out full bonus to our TA team the last five straight years. And I'm like, that sounds like they've really been killing it. No, we're terrible. We suck.

And you're like, well, so as you dig in, what you found was it was like, well, we started at 43 days time to fill. And so we gave them a bonus if they could lower it to like 42, then we give them a bonus. And then the next year, if they can lower it to 41, we give them a bonus. And then, and I'm like, but you're, so you're, they're lowering it, but it still sucks. And I'm like, is it not fast enough? And then they would look at you and they're just like.

Yeah, it turns out like speed had very little to do with whether they were good at recruiting or not. It was just because they got faster. And the thing is, it's such a metric that you can manipulate. And again, I'm not saying this as somebody who doesn't run the game. Like I have my own TA team now. I've worked on the enterprise side of very big companies and led TA teams there. And if I ever had to manipulate my time to fill metrics, I could easily go to a hiring manager and say, hey, look, I got a couple of things

@TimSackett (04:37.612)

on the books, it's been open for you know 365 days, we're gonna close them but just because we want to refresh these, we want to make, we want to get them better and they'd be like yeah sure and immediately you could manipulate your numbers in a very quick way.

and make them look any way you wanted right before it was bonus time. And I always thought, after I left that corporate environment and I didn't have some time to fill a measure, I was like, man, that's the worst measure ever. And it's the whole, you're correlating speed with success or with being good. In some ways, potentially, I could make that argument, right? I always tell people, if I had...

If I knew my market to fill an engineering job was 35 days, that was the time to fill market metric. And I'm at 90 days, like I have cancer, there's a problem. Like we really are not doing something right.

But if I'm at 38 days or 32 days, I'm no better or worse than the market. I'm just about the same. I'm in the ballpark. And once you're in the ballpark, then you're just doing things at the same speed of everybody else. But it doesn't mean I'm hiring better quality. It doesn't mean I'm meeting all the other kind of service level agreement stuff that I have with my hiring managers. All it means is that I opened a job and filled the job in a period of time. That's all that says.

I just think there's really low alignment to time to fill to success. That's what it came down to.

Brad Owens (06:12.132)

I completely understand the, you know, being able to manipulate things, being able to tweak it to make the metric look good for you. we've all been there, the same sort of thing. but the question is like, if you are talking to the, you mentioned at the start, like the CFOs, the CIOs, the people who like TA is really working for, like they're our customer internally. What do you feel like they should be measuring us on?

@TimSackett (06:23.194)

Yeah.

@TimSackett (06:40.25)

Yeah, it's great. I do think, like, because the other, I mean, we have another problematic metric, which is quality of hire, right? Like, so often, and the problem with quality of hire is that we just don't have one universal metric of measuring. Some people all go into a company and they're like, yeah, quality of hires are the most important thing. I'm like, cool, how do you decide what quality of hire is? And they're like, well, if they're here after 90 days, that's a good quality of hire. So I'm like, so you're measuring 90 day turnover as a quality of hire? Yes.

Okay, again, that seems to be a zero correlation. I would actually argue that quality of hire is not a TA metric or an HR metric at all. It's actually a hiring manager metric, right? They're the ones who choose the person. They're the ones who onboard the person. They're the ones who trains the people. They're the ones who actually administer the performance management of the person. They're completely directed, right? So I'm like, and every time I ran a TA shop, if they tried to give me a quality of hire metric, I would be like, no, we're not taking that up. That's not ours.

what I would give them in return would be I'll give you quality of applicant, which is simply is

I'm going to send you 10 candidates, and you're going to tell me how many of those you want to interview. And that ratio will give me my percentage. And unlike a major league Hall of Famer that can hit 300 and be one of the greatest hitters of all time, if I have a recruiter whose quality of applicant is 300, they should be fired, in my mind. And again, this is something we've built over decades of time between hiring managers and recruiters, where they just go, hey, I'm going to send you 10.

And then the hiring manager goes, yeah, send me 10 more. Send me 10 more. And you're just like, can you imagine the waste that we have in talent acquisition? I always say, can you imagine GM, if GM had 10 trucks coming off the line, and they immediately destroyed seven of them? They would be out of business in one day. Literally would not even have a company. And yet somehow we think it's completely fine to go to a hiring manager and go,

@TimSackett (08:38.874)

Hey, I'm going to send you 10, and just let me know if you want to interview any of these people. And so when I would run corporate TA teams, we would start with this kind of like, we would show everybody, OK, here's your actual ratio. And then I would tell them, your goal is to be at 900. I'll give a hiring manager one like,

like golden ticket to say no. Like I actually know Brad and Brad's not the guy for this job so I'm not gonna interview Brad. The other ones I don't know and you're telling me they're good so I'm actually gonna interview all of them. Like that's the only thing I want to hear from a hiring manager. The holy grail of that is to the point where you go, you have enough relationship with that hiring manager where you like, you just tell them, hey by the way I put five interviews on your calendar next week. And they're like sweet, I can't wait to see them. But they also understand like you're gonna have false positives. That's people, that's recruiting

recruiting, you might have somebody show up and you're like, hey, I interviewed him and dude, that was terrible. Sorry. Sorry about that one.

you know, we'll work harder. Why was he bad? Was it personality? Did he lack the skill? Because then that's on me that I didn't really go through enough screening to figure that out. And almost always it was a personality issue, right? Like those were the ones. So to me the quality of applicant one is huge. It's really any of the funnel metrics. I think what you're trying to get to for success in TA is capability. So when the CEO comes to you, the COO comes to you, the CFO comes to you, they're like, hey, in the fourth quarter,

we're going to increase hiring by 25%.

@TimSackett (10:11.29)

Right now, 99 % of TA leaders will go, right, yeah, we're going to work harder. We'll make it happen. And almost all of them fail because they have no idea actually what it takes to hire 25 % more. They don't even know where their own capacity is right now as a team. And if you knew you were running at 100 % capacity, 95 % capacity, sometimes 105 % on capacity, you would be able to go back to that CFO and say, that's cool. I can't wait. Here's exactly what I'm going to need.

from a resource standpoint to make that happen. And if I don't get that, understand I won't give you a 25 % increase in hiring, I might give you 5%. And they'll go, wait a minute, no, that's not doable, you can't do that. And I'm like, okay, let's go sit down with everybody involved. I want to get the CEO, I want to get the COO. And when I actually sit with leadership teams and we have that conversation, all I see is heads nodding and why the hell aren't we doing this right now? That's all you see. They're like, this makes complete sense. Why aren't we doing this?

And then it goes back to the TA leader, which is like, OK, so why are we nervous about measuring the funnel of our recruiters? And they go, well, it kind of feels like you're micromanaging them. And I'm like, no, I'm actually helping them be super successful. And that should be, again, that's one of those things of like, if I have a recruiter there, I'm going to ask them, do you want to be successful as a recruiter? They're going to say yes. Some might lie to you and say yes anyways, but they don't really care. And you're going to be able to whittle those ones out.

Brad Owens (11:37.912)

Yes, I love my paycheck. Thank you.

@TimSackett (11:39.546)

Yeah, I know, yeah. I love making 85 ,000 do nothing most of the week and spending all day on Facebook for friends on LinkedIn. Or Facebook for work, yeah. But I just think it's one of those things where that's really where we should be focusing is what's the capacity of what we can deliver. And it's really easy. People are always like, I don't understand. You're like, no.

you can easily follow your funnel. You know how many candidates for every position applied to a job, so that's your top of funnel, right? You know how many you had to screen to get to how many interviews, to get to how many hires, and at the end of the day, we have this great data funnel that comes down and shows you exactly the work that has to take place. And if you just go and re -engineer those numbers, you go, so my team on a weekly basis or a monthly basis or an annual basis can produce X number of hires.

And so if I have to do more of those, you can just go, if we need 10 more hires, I know I need, you know, 357 more candidates in the pipeline. Yep. You know.

And people are like, well, wait a minute. There's a difference between an administrative assistant and a software engineer. Yeah, there is. But again, you can bucket out certain kinds of work, right? Your high volume, low skill, no skill, your mid -career, or your really hard to fill tech executive jobs. And those funnels will, again, will be pretty similar that you can find your capacity on what you need. You don't have to really break it down that much.

And what I find is, all of a sudden those TA leaders have just a different level of respect from the leadership team. Because then there's trust. And they'll actually invest in the TA team. And they'll give them resources because they feel like somebody's data -driven and that they actually understand their business really well. Instead of going, well, we're at 36 .6 days. Yay, everybody gets a bonus. And you're just like, what does that mean? It means nothing.

Brad Owens (13:37.848)

And I like that idea because then we start getting into the metrics that we can start tweaking and adding. And like, we only had to use your number or whatever, like 300 applicants for this one thing, but the funnel came down to whatever we need more. Hey, marketing team, let's work with this. So you have those numbers that start digging down into truly, Hey, what we can accomplish for the business is based on this to this, to this, to this.

@TimSackett (14:03.866)

You know what's really cool? There's only one tech on the market that does this right now. It's Crosscheck, and they actually purchased Talent Wall. So Talent Wall was a piece of technology that was separate. They purchased them, built them in, but they can actually predict, based on your pipeline, how many hires you actually already have in the pipeline.

And it's so cool to be able to look at that and go, wait a minute, we know based on your database, based on what's coming in top of Funnel, that, so let's say you're a big team, like a Facebook or an Amazon or whatever, and you're trying to hire 100 engineers a month, they could actually tell you to, hey, by the way, currently in your pipeline, you have 37 .2 hires, based on the numbers, raw numbers.

Brad Owens (14:42.488)

and they're using that based on how many hires come out of a certain amount of people.

@TimSackett (14:46.426)

They're based on all the predictive analytics, right? Because it's a pretty repeatable pattern. Once we get the machine turned on and you have your recruitment marketing and your branding and everything kind of working together, you realize, hey, for every engineering job we have, we need 17 candidates to top a funnel. And so if I have 144 candidates, you're like, okay, I roughly have six hires that are in the pipeline already. Now, is it gonna play out like that every single time? No, but again, this is data.

statistics and averages and all that. You might only get five, maybe you'll get eight, who knows. But like you can rely on that you probably have six based on that. And I think that becomes such a strength of that because you can also then start to leverage, like if you know you're going into a slow period of hiring and you can ratchet the machine down and go, hey, by the way, we're going to shut off our indeed kind of spend or we're going to kind of reduce some spend over here because we know

we don't need as many in the pipeline as what we already have. You can start actually pulling some of those levers and really working the machine.

Brad Owens (15:54.904)

So that's interesting to me. And I'd be curious to get your take because you're out there helping people with these types of changes. One of the things that I see come up over and over and over again is, well, we don't have that data. We don't have this stuff. We don't have that. We can't do anything. I'm like, so you're telling me just, it's going to be impossible. Like people really try and let the perfect be the enemy of good. Like you got to start somewhere. What are you saying?

@TimSackett (16:14.234)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, you're exactly right. Like, almost always, like, almost the main problem that we see with most TA teams, TA leaders, that comes down, if they're hiring, right, which is, that's really the main issue they're always gonna have, is we just don't have enough candidates. And so then I immediately go, what's your conversion? And they're just like, they look at you, like, what? Like.

When somebody comes to your career site, they turn into an applicant. For every person that comes to your career site, how many of those become applicants? And I can't tell you how many of those would be like, well, every single one of them, or half of them, or 75 % or 90%. And when you tell them the reality is across all these big giant machines that are out there, already turned on, that are measuring this stuff with programmatic, with Indeed, with Facebook, like everything, LinkedIn.

that the average is around 5 % or under, all of a sudden you go, you don't need more candidates, you need to convert. And then you start to really look at their process and how they've built things over time that were really trying to weed candidates out. So you weren't getting even the best talent, you were getting talent that was surviving your process.

And so you go, let's do some A -B testing, right? Let's so, like here's your current crappy process, right? That you know, you know, it only gets 5%. Even though you don't know that, I can turn it on for you and we'll show you that it gets 5%. And here's where we're gonna go. We're gonna go to like some of this high volume hiring software, like a Paradox or a Fountain or a Delalia.

And we're going to turn them on, and we're going to show you your conversion. But we're also going to show how they just capture some really quick data, like there's a name, an email, a cell phone number, and how they nurture those people to convert on a really high basis, maybe at 40 % to 70 % versus 5%, and how you'll actually spend zero money. And you actually could probably reduce your money on recruitment marketing spend and end up with exponentially more candidates overall. And they just.

@TimSackett (18:12.922)

Like it's unbelievable to them. And then, like that's the one thing, and I was just with Fountain last week, I was with Paradox like probably a few weeks before that, speaking with their clients. The marketing teams of all these companies are gonna say, my gosh, we're amazing, we do all this stuff. When you speak with the clients, like there's things I hear back from their clients on this kind of like software. And this is pretty new software, it's only been out like the last five years.

They're like, it just works. We can almost never say that about TA technology. No one says that about their ATS. They don't say that about sourcing software. They don't say that about CRM. In this high -volume, hourly software, high -volume hiring software, I always say hourly because it works really well with low -skill, no -skill. But like,

At the end of the day, these TA leaders are like, holy crap, this actually works. And then for the first time, they actually have a real picture of their data. They know exactly who is coming to their career site, where they're coming from, how many of those are actually converting, where do they fell off. And then when they know they have a pinch point in that process, they'll go, OK, wait a minute. How do we change that? How do we test that? They really start to get involved in a really scientific way, where I just think they become.

They're becoming marketers for lack of a better, like that's really what they're doing, right? They're really looking at their machine like they're marketing people are looking at their sales process, you know, and figuring out how do we actually get people to sign on the dotted line, which is an application for us, you know.

Brad Owens (19:45.432)

How dumb have we been and how much in a box has recruiting been living that we had, we can look at this and say, wait, marketing does this and has been doing this for years and years and years and years.

@TimSackett (19:57.082)

I know, yeah. I ran into, I ran into, he was like a SVP of operations when I was at SHRM. And I'm like, that's a weird title. I was at the bar. He walked up to get a drink behind me and another, like recruiting guys. So of course, like recruiters and us, we're gonna have a talk with him. And so first week on the job, worked for a big bank out of Kansas City, and they gave him HR and recruiting. And he had no idea. So he just goes, hey, there's a big HR conference. I'm just gonna go figure it out.

But he actually also had a marketing background and he was just like, gosh, this seems like it's marketing, right? And he just immediately, even from being outside the industry, just connected those dots and we're just like, yeah, you'll be fine. You'll figure it out.

Brad Owens (20:41.478)

Yeah, you're good, man. And honestly, that has been drawing me to like completely different types of software that have never been thought of in the recruitment world before. So when you started saying like the other ones that you've been working with, where, what I had a problem with and still continue today to try and solve is at what point did these pieces of software leave off and where does another one have to pick up and what are we missing in the gap? So I'm curious to see what you're seeing.

@TimSackett (21:11.258)

Yeah, like the problem like so

When all of these high volume hiring softwares turned on, it was really a marketing automation. That's really all it was. It wasn't CRM. People were like, what's the difference? And I'm like, well, CRM is this big content nurturing machine that is opt -in and this and that. And it's really long tail marketing. Marketing automation is, I already have a set of people that I know, and I want to sell them this widget. And I know they probably want this widget. And I just want to jam it at them as fast as I can.

as possible, right? That's just like, click it, turn it on, go. It's a very quick kind of process. And that's all this really was. Some of it was set around scheduling, so self -scheduling of a candidate, right? So a candidate goes, they apply online, and all of a sudden, bing, this window pops up and says, we want to interview you. Click this link to schedule your own interview, right? And it was just like, god, that also seems very intuitive. Like, this should work really well.

What they kept saying they weren't was an ATS. And that's because if you're an enterprise client who's already using Workday, Oracle, SAP, Greenhouse, iSims, whatever, right, to try to go to your CFO and say, hey, we're going to go buy another ATS, they would literally punch you in the throat, right? They're like, no way in hell. You're not going to do it. That's a six figure buy per year. You're like, no way. And so they wouldn't call themselves an ATS. Now they've gotten to the point where they're sophisticated enough and filled in enough of those gaps where they said,

we actually are your ATS. We can be your ATS. You can actually go and say, hey, we don't want to have that ATS. We're just going to use this one. And still connect with your HCM and payroll and all the other good stuff and make it all happen.

@TimSackett (22:51.738)

So there's very few, I mean, I'll say this with like with Paradox and Fountain is very similar. With those two specifically, there's very little difference between, you can get rid of your ATS and still use them. Or you could say, hey, this is our hourly ATS and this is our, you know, salaried ATS. And there's also really good reasons for that. Like I love like the people at Greenhouse, they're so collaborative on like salaried hiring and that's their lane and they know it. They don't try to come up and say, hey, we're this big,

high -volume hiring machine. They say we're very collaborative with hiring managers and scorecards and all this interview feedback where you don't need that when you're hiring no -skill talent at, you know, 12 bucks an hour. So there's all those systems now that we started to kind of see that split where we're like, hey, if 90 or 80 % of your hiring on an annual basis is kind of low -skill, no -skill and 20 % is salaried,

They really deserve their own process and maybe their own technology. Now if you could find one technology that does both, great.

But you actually might split your stack and actually have two pieces of technology that work really great for what they're supposed to do. I think the big miss we had over the last couple of decades was we took salaried ATSs and then we tried to jam them on top of hourly workers who were like, really, all they wanted was, I just want to sit in the McDonald's parking lot and quickly apply to a job. I'm stealing Wi -Fi for whatever. And we were like, no, you're going to take eight

and you're going to go screen by screen and like it was just a terrible experience for everybody. Where like you and I working in front of a laptop all day, like we're totally conditioned for that, we're fine. We'll take 15 minutes and jump through your hoops and fill out for a salary job. And hourly worker just goes, bye. And they'll go to somebody else that says, just give me your name and your cell phone number and we'll text you. And you can, we'll text back and forth until you apply. And that's all they wanted, you know. So, yeah.

Brad Owens (24:46.909)

You struck a nerve there. You struck a nerve because when I looking out into the ATS landscape, like everyone who's a recruiter is like, we just need an ATS. So every single one of those ones out there comes with a resume parser and a search and match tool that looks at that resume. Y 'all not everyone places people that have a resume. Like a lot of people are taking jobs, but they don't need it.

@TimSackett (25:08.986)

No, the vast majority of hires, yeah. I mean, literally, you could argue 80 % of hiring in the world is non -resume hiring. And yet, we set up an entire system that said, if you don't have a resume, we're going to force you to fill one out for a pizza delivery job.

Brad Owens (25:18.589)

I'd be behind that.

Brad Owens (25:24.765)

Yep.

@TimSackett (25:28.026)

Are you kidding me? Like that's what we're doing? Like, it was norm. Like I was one of those guys, I work corporate, we're like, heck yeah, if they want this job, they'll do it. And all of a sudden we go, maybe in rich countries now we don't, you know, candidates are gonna actually be in control because we don't have enough humans and this, you know, we have to actually figure out what they want and how they will communicate with us and we actually do that.

Brad Owens (25:37.853)

You know?

@TimSackett (25:53.05)

We still have way too many. I mean, I would say the vast majority of companies still are forcing candidates down a pipeline or a path or a process that is good for the company, not good for the candidate. It's still a giant miss. Like I know the, you know, the talent board and, you know, Kevin Grossman, like they do this data every single year. And for a few years, like right after COVID or even leading into COVID, it was getting a little better, incrementally getting better every year. So people were like, okay, this is cool.

And literally in the last 18 to 24 months, it's just gotten worse. I mean, you still have 45 % of candidates claim that when they apply to a job, they hear nothing. Like zero. Not even a shitty canned email, right? Nothing. That's insane. In today's world, how does that happen? Like, you know.

Brad Owens (26:36.696)

Yep.

Brad Owens (26:41.144)

The thing that keeps, it comes back almost like once a year. So at one point I did a disrupt HR talk and the theme was why your candidates hate you. And it was just five minutes of me just blasting everyone for being a candidate black hole. And every year it keeps popping up on my timeline of like, remember this, like, holy crap, nothing's changed. It's the same thing.

@TimSackett (27:05.018)

Yeah, unfortunately, we just haven't learned from it. I do think it's a competitive advantage for companies that do. And I think those ones who are using this kind of new technology immediately figured out they really had to do nothing besides turn the machine on.

And all of a sudden, instantly, they had more candidates by doing nothing. And then if they decided, gosh, maybe we can start actually do some great social media branding or do some other stuff and spend our money more wisely, they just have been head and shoulders difference. And you see this with companies that are in the same marketplace. And you see one company using this technology, and you talk to their HRTA team, and you see a company not. And the level of pain between those two companies is drastically different. You have one that's actually

feels like they're lighter, like the stress is off their back. They're actually producing, they actually have data, and then you have one that they're still just fighting fires and their hair's on fire and they're getting yelled at constantly and you're just like, God, this is a miserable existence, you know.

Brad Owens (28:04.021)

Yeah, that's rough. So I do want to be conscious of time. I want to make sure that everyone has a chance to hear about what you've got going on because there is a new release that you need to talk about. So tell us about what's new in your life.

@TimSackett (28:09.402)

Yes.

@TimSackett (28:19.226)

Yeah, so the new book came out. It's actually like, it was funny. So Sherm produced my first book called The Talent Fix, and that was in 2018. And so they had came to me last year and were like, hey dude, it's five years old. Like, come on, we need a new one. So they really just wanted me to do like the second edition. And that really felt like a college textbook to me. I was like, I don't like that. And I'm like a huge fan of Guardians of the Galaxy, like how they did like volume two and the volume. And my initial cover actually had a cassette.

that tape on there, and they were just like, it's too close. We're going to get some lawyer calling us and yelling at us. So I called it Volume 2 because I said, yeah, I'll update the first one, but I have so much more content that I wanted to add. So there's literally 40 % new material that's in there. And they let me get really aggressive with it. So the first time I went through a sherm,

Brad Owens (28:50.004)

Yes.

@TimSackett (29:13.242)

It was like five levels of editing and they were like, hey Tim, you said darn here, are you sure you wanna use darn? And I'm like, yeah, I think I do. And that's how it was just edited down. And so this one I went, I'm like, I'm gonna go super aggressive, because I know they're gonna edit. And then they came back and they were just like, we did all the grammatical edits, but this stuff's on you. If you wanna say these things, you own this now. And I was like,

Cool, let's do it. So I have the white guys guide to diversity recruiting. And I thought for sure they would change that, they didn't. I have a whole chapter on hiring pretty people. I thought they would change that. They told me they couldn't write it, they did it. One of the chapters is like...

Like basically the solution to every TA problem can be solved with money. You know? And like just all this stuff that. So it was pretty cool. They let me write. And I did actually a full chapter on kind of this high volume hiring in like the 10 components that you actually need to actually build that machine. And that's actually the talk I did at Shurm. I was like, I was told, like everybody that was there, I was like, hey, this is chapter eight. We're just going to go through it. And you're like, so you know, if this is, if the only thing you wanted from the book was chapter eight, I'm going to give it to you right now. We don't need that.

but the rest of it was pretty good. So that's been great. Sherman's just been a great partner to work with. I got the third kind of book that's already kind of in the works that won't be talent fixed. It'll be something completely different, but I'm excited about that.

Brad Owens (30:43.952)

I'm glad they let Tim be Tim in the new book. So we'll get a better insight into who Tim really is and be able to spot him on the next walking, moving walkway or whatever. that's incredible. All right. Well, how can people find out more about you? Where do you want to send them?

@TimSackett (30:47.13)

I know, yeah.

@TimSackett (30:58.938)

Just go to the Google machine, put in Tim Sackett, you'll find me. My SEO is pretty good. There used to be a truck driver chaplain named Tim Sackett out of Minneapolis. And so this is like 10, 12 years ago. If you Googled yourself, like we all do, or maybe it's just me or any other narcissist that's out there, he would pop up and there would be articles about the truck driver chaplain. And I was like, man, wouldn't that be sweet if I was the same guy? Recruiter dude during the week, truck driver chaplain during the week.

I'm sorry.

Brad Owens (31:05.264)

Humble Flex.

@TimSackett (31:29.352)

We were totally different and I'm sure he hates me. He's probably not. He's a man of God. He probably doesn't hate me. He just doesn't have any SEO anymore. I've stole all of it. So yeah. You know now people go, you just have AI do that. And I go, no, I've been writing for like 15 years every single day. I don't have AI write my stuff.

Brad Owens (31:38.158)

That's what you get when you do daily writing since 2011. That's all related to the same topic. That's incredible.

Brad Owens (31:53.389)

There's got to be habit at this point. Knocking out two paragraphs can't be that difficult for you at this point.

@TimSackett (31:57.818)

I tell people, it's a weird skill because no one knows, you don't know all the skills we have. I always laugh about the whole skills conversation that we have in TA right now as well, because I always think, what can you really measure? We're all a bag of thousands of skills, and we're gonna try to measure 12 and say we've solved the world's problems by having a skills taxonomy.

I have a skill that you could give me any topic and 15 minutes later I can give you 800 words. It might be crap, it might be amazing, it's probably average and that's just like that's how you write every day.

Brad Owens (32:29.357)

Nope. The only way to get out of writer's block is just to write. Yeah, that's incredible. All right. Tim second, everybody make sure you go check him out on the Googles. we will make sure to have a link to, do we have a link to the newest book we can share? Perfect. We'll make sure we share that as well. And, thank you, Tim. I really, really appreciate you taking time out, man.