Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today I'm delighted to welcome on the show Alison Daley. Alison is the founder and CEO of Recruiting Innovation, a business focused on helping recruiters who don't know how to speak to engineers and don't know how to confidently assess them. And if you know in 2021, I think just about every company out there is promoting themselves as a tech company and mentioning that hiring engineers is their number one bottleneck. So, there's a huge demand for people trying to figure out how to interview engineers intelligently, and this is where Alison is gonna be able to help us, I hope. During our conversation we'll cover methodologies and techniques that can be applied to technical recruiting. Welcome to the show, Alison. 

Alison: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, I'm glad to be here.

Max: Delightful to have you. And I think you didn't grow up wanting to be a technical recruiting trainer. So, what happened? How did you end up doing what you're doing today?

Alison: That's my favorite question to ask recruiters or people in talent space is like what's your origin story of how you got here because most of us didn't have dreams of working in recruitment, let alone study for it. I actually call myself the accidental recruiter. I've fallen into recruitment four times, and I've kicked it three times and I think it's just that at this point now I'm all in on recruitment and being an extrovert, as extrovert, this is definitely my industry. And at this point, I've recruited for Fortune 500s, boutique [unintelligible] firms, hydro start-ups, and you know I cut my teeth on the top 5 staffing firm in the world. So, I've seen it all at this point and part of where I got, how I am where I am today is that I actually chose to come back into recruitment after I've left it where I thought was gonna be the last time, for real this time. And the story behind that was that my last recruiting role at a hydro start-up here in Colorado, I kind of was burning out. As an industry, it can be a tough industry to stay, you know, fulfilled in, and especially if you don't feel like you're growing professionally or growing up the ranks, and that was kind of my situation. And so, I had decided I was gonna take my people skills and pivot into user-experience research. I used to be a dedicated UX, user-experience recruiter, and so I used to live vicariously from my UX candidates that's such a great blend of analytical and creative skill set and I did a UX boot camp. I actually landed a role very quickly as a Junior UX Researcher because my network was so big, so strong after being a UX recruiter and got on a software development team and became the person tasked with figuring out who are our end-users, where are they, get them to talk to me, follow the UX methodology of sort of assessing, you know, what were their goals related to the product, their experiences, their frustrations, and synthesizing those stories back to the team to make informed product decisions. And I had this aha moment, maybe 9 months into the role, where I realized that this methodology that exists in software development within a user-experience umbrella, to systematize talking to these end-users, getting their stories, and then sharing them back to the team, I thought, oh my gosh, what if we could take this methodology and we'll bring it to the recruiting space, especially in tech recruiting where it often feels like we're navigating in a foreign language. Having a methodology to follow to have these conversations would not only give recruiters a leg to stand on with technical talent and learn to speak their language, but it actually would make us more effective at our role. And looking at the market, no one was really out here solving for the very known issue that recruiters don't understand what software development process is, who those different roles are, and how do I engage with them effectively. And so, one year in to my UX role, after having left recruitment in the dust, of course, I actually quit the role in UX and then came back to save tech recruiting.

Max: To tackle a bigger problem. 

Alison: That's right.

Max: Yeah. You mentioned that, you know, your traits include being an extrovert and communicator and high-energy person. I suppose you meant by that that recruiting typically attracts these types of psychological profiles as opposed to perhaps engineering which would be more likely to attract introverts. Just to set the scene a bit, would you say that the majority of tech recruiters are not engineers? I think that's a fair statement. 

Alison: That is totally a fair statement, yes. 

Max: So, I've done a lot of tech recruiting myself and sure, I never had a single one of them where I felt smart. You know you're looking for a certain set of keywords and the interview is over in like 30 seconds when you've gone through them. 

Alison: Yeah, I call it keyword-jousting, when you're just trying to match the keywords from their resume to the keywords in the job description, yeah. That's sort of what we're rendered down to doing if we don't understand the background of what these folks are doing and how to get a story out of them. 

Max: Yeah, yeah. So, I'm your target audience, right? People like me who dread coming into an interview with the sense that they're gonna feel stupid. 

Alison: Yup, been there done that. I mean that's the thing too about our industry in general. As an industry, we really believe in a sink or swim ethos to new hire onboarding, and honestly, I think that that's an old era. We gotta think about what is recruiting look like in the 21st century and that means that we need to be prepared to train and enable our recruiters to meet the insane moment that we're in right now. And so, it requires cohesive training and onboarding. And so, that’s the goal of what I've built is to help recruiters sort of, and teams, circumvent the unnecessary need of just throwing people in the deep end and hoping that if they talk to a few candidates and a few hiring managers, they'll suddenly know that Java's not short for Java Script and, you know, basics like that. But I think having a cohesive training is the way of the future, that's for sure. 

Max: C++ isn’t the latest version of C, and stuff like that, yeah.

Alison: Right. 

Max: But those are very superficial examples. There's never, I mean an engineer is gonna be proud of what they know and proud of the knowledge that they've accumulated, and quick to judge somebody who doesn't ask the right questions as well, so it is a tricky audience. Is your methodology going to go deep into teaching, you know for example all those different languages and those frameworks that developers use so that you can kind of jump from one tech to another while you're doing interviews, or is it more of a general approach that you can apply for any field of software development?

Alison: What we're gonna cover today is the latter. So, what I'm gonna be able to fit in to 10 or 15 minutes today will be specifically around how to have conversations that's sort of an agnostic general foundational level with any type of technologies on a software development team. But my company, Recruiting Innovation, we offer an online tech recruiter certification program where the course includes the framework th...