Data Mastery for Recruiters: How to Track and Transform into a Leader with Luke Eaton

Benjamin Mena [00:00:00]:
A few quick announcements before we get started on this awesome episode. First of all, book of the month for this coming up month is going to be 177 mental toughness. Secrets of the world class by Steve Siebold. Last month's book, never split the difference, by Chris Voss. I'd love to hear what you got out of it. I'd love to hear how it relates to your recruiting career, but make sure to pick up this book, this book of the month, and let's keep on growing. And one last quick announcement before we jump in, I want to say a huge thank you to the Titan Placement Group, a premier healthcare focused recruiting firm based in Sarasota, Florida, for sponsoring this episode of the Elite Recruiter podcast. Thank you, guys.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:50]:
I'm excited about this episode of the Elite Recruiter podcast. The reason is, is because recruiters suck at the data that they're using every single day. So many factors of what they're doing on a day to day basis, and it's keeping a lot of them from succeeding. So I have a special guest with me, Luke Ian. We're going to talk about the data that you need to track to win. On top of that, we're also going to talk about how you can actually use the data to do a lot more with a lot less. So I'm super excited to have Luke on the podcast. Welcome to the podcast, Luke.

Luke Eaton [00:01:24]:
So, we love your podcast and all the LNG and the topics that you talk about. So it's a privilege to be on.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:29]:
Well, and I. I think this is a super important topic because I can combination of, like, being an intro recruiter, being an agency recruiter, and, you know, having our own company. I suck at tracking data, but at the same time, whatever you track, you get better at.

Luke Eaton [00:01:47]:
Yeah, absolutely.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:49]:
But, yeah, before we jump in all that, how did you even end up in this wonderful world of recruiting? Because you got one of the most funnest stories.

Luke Eaton [00:01:56]:
Yeah. So I normally go from recruitment backwards, but in this case, I'll go sort of forward. So, started as a window cleaner, then went to college, studied chemistry, became a chemist. To pay through university, I became a croupier in a casino, a dealer, I always have to say, like, a crew, a casino dealer, not a different type of dealer. I also picked up a few magic tricks while I was. While I was doing card work in the casinos. And then I became a professional magician for ten years. So for ten years, I just went around Europe working with companies like Coke and Sony for their corporate events, things like that, to just add a little bit of magic and sort of interest to their trade show stands and product launches and things like that.

Luke Eaton [00:02:40]:
And then from there I moved into recruitment, started in standard sort of retail agency space, specializing in DevOps and infrastructure, and then I moved into internal with a hyper growing public cloud enabler when public cloud was absolutely exploding. I didn't know what hyperscale or cultural web two company even meant back then, but I learned a lot in that short period. We took them from about, I was employing them, 150 took them up to about 1300 before they were acquired by Blackstone, biggest tech bc in the world. And then I moved to a company called Seed, where I essentially was embedded as a head of TA or leader type. So various tech companies that just got vc backing, they just got maybe series A or pre seed investment, and then they would embed me for a couple of years just to stand up their ta function, set up the tool systems processes, make sure their hiring strategy is on point and data driven, and make sure they're hitting their targets and that people and growth isn't a blocker to their investment milestones. And I've been doing sort of some flavor of that ever since. I've had the privilege of working with some of the most exciting and fast growing companies in web two and in web three just now. But yes, it was a bit of a weird, a weird old trajectory from window cleaner to now.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:04]:
So real quick, like, you were a magician for ten years, traveling all across Europe. Has being a magician, how's that, like, impacted your recruiting?

Luke Eaton [00:04:14]:
You know, people always ask me that, right? And now initially it was kind of what got me the job. You know, in agencies, when they're looking for someone to start, they're looking for someone what, tenacious, not afraid to get in people's faces, emotionally intelligent, they can communicate. So I kind of had all of that, but due to the magic, you know, I was good at public speaking. I could structure a presentation as emotionally intelligent and those things. And you have to be tenacious to be a magician. You certainly need thick skin because you get some strange heckles as a magician. So that's kind of what got me the first job. The reason I went from magic into recruitment was the rate determining stat for a magician is themselves.

Luke Eaton [00:04:57]:
You're a single standalone person. You can't multiply your money because you can't multiply your time. So you just have to. There's a certain kind of cap, and me and my wife wanted a house, and you can't go to your bank manager and say, hi, can I have a mortgage, I'm a magician. Try doing that and seeing what happens. They'll call the police. So it started as just like a little side job thinking ill do magic on the side and I did that for a little spell but something weird happened which was that I really fell in love with sort of taking people on that journey, particularly in technology, and just learning about all of the exciting things thats going on in tech and being part of that world. And this weird thing happened where instead of me in the shower, what youre thinking about in the shower instead of it being a performance or a routine and thinking about a technology or a launch or an offer, and I suddenly I realized, im like, oh, im actually ive kind of found my people, ive kind of found my little groove here and it kind of went from there.

Luke Eaton [00:06:04]:
Its a bit of a strange journey, but it was pretty cool.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:09]:
And I think I love how thats kind of like wrapped into what youve done with helping scale companies because when you're like a, you know, maybe an internal recruiter, you're like your offering is coming in and being embedded. Like you get to be hands on and like these companies don't grow without you. Like how was that working with some of these like, you know, companies that have gotten influx of cash, they need to grow fast. Like how was that, that VC startup growth life?

Luke Eaton [00:06:36]:
Yeah, so initially my kind of curator trajectory when I was in cloud reach, which is my first real sort of hyper growth business, and that was when I was really hardcore individual contributor and recruiter through kind of my recruitment lead recruitment manager days, that type of thing. So I really learned hands on. And what I learned was that, you know, the, the systems that you build today won't be fit for purpose next year. So you have to sort of figure out, you know, how, how do we constantly change our systems and we're always playing catch up because whatever we build there's going to be an operational burden on it that's too much. It's excessive. Not just in TA, in people, your compensation, your performance management team structures. That's going to be different when there's 500 of you compared to when there's 100 of you. And I just, I learned this as I went, as my experience in the business sort of changed when I was in seed.

Luke Eaton [00:07:30]:
What I realized was that there's certain commonalities to these businesses and the way that they interact with venture capital and the way they interact with investors and that is that a venture capital company, they dont just turn up with a wheelbarrow full of money like series a for a hyper scaling cool tech company, maybe $35 million, something like that. They dont just pitch it with a wheelbarrow full of cash and goes there you go kid, see you in six years. Enjoy. Theyve done a lot of due diligence. They are risk mitigators thats what they do. So they will have a risk register and the technology is not on that risk register. They've already done their due diligence. They wouldn't even be in touch with you.

Luke Eaton [00:08:08]:
They didn't think your technology was good and scalable. They have no doubt that the founders of a tech company can scale as their piece of technology. They're not worried about the app getting bigger or being robust or scalable, but what they are worried about, top of the risk register tax. So have they paid their tax? Are they going to pay their tax? Do they know how to pay their tax? If there was 1000 company or theyre not going to pay the tax and the CFO goes to jail, the company collapses and we lose our investment. So you can see why the risk register tax is very top which is why you tend to find companies like PwC, like the big four consultancies coming in. You basically say go mature my business tax and treasury, make sure they dont do something stupid. Theyre maturing the inside of the company to help them grow. Same with treasury.

Luke Eaton [00:08:55]:
So whats the governance around how you spend your money? But then the very next thing is people. How could you expect a founder who's probably a technical person to know how to take a company of 50 people and then in two years have them be 250 people, then in two years have them 700 people and then in two more years have them 1300 people, right. How can you possibly know? They literally don't have that capability in house. So thats really where a lot of these businesses start from, is that your venture capital companies that are trying to mitigate these risks, so they tend to go to specific search firms, but they need talent advisory, they need someone who can give them a strategy that will make sure that as the revenue generating bit of the business does this, the operational bit of the business, it doesnt make any money, doesnt do that with it, because then you're just not making any money, right. So you have to make sure. And if you remember like what happened to Facebook and meta, that's how they grew right? They just threw human capital at the problem. So the revenue generating went like this, they ended up with about 10,000 recruiters on crazy money. And then they all, they all got fired, right? They all got made redundant.

Luke Eaton [00:10:15]:
So what they need is someone who can come in and set up systems using data and using lean processes in the theory of constraints to reduce the level of effort to make one higher, and then scale up those processes and just give them the best tool, systems, processes to do that. And this is true of anything, not just ta, right? If you had a builder, if you needed to build a house, you could hire ten builders, or you could get one builder and give them power tools. You're trying to multiply the effort of everyone. So my role is to essentially just make sure that those processes are lean, robust, and then they're scalable with tools first and systems and best practices before we then have to hire another recruiter, because that costs more money than a tool. Please feel free to stop me because I could waffle and waffle and waffle about this. So let me know if I'm hitting the right marks here for you.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:06]:
No, absolutely. And here's one of the things that I'm sitting there thinking about listening is because there's a lot of like, you know, embedded fractional, there's all these different ways that you could serve businesses in the recruiting space. Now, when you're sitting there talking about building systems, what do you mean when you're building a system for these venture backed companies?

Luke Eaton [00:11:25]:
Oh yeah. So it depends on their growth targets, but it all has to start with their overall, the business goal, and then you have to work back from there. And that's why going full circle back to data, it's so important because without the data, you cant really track back from where you want to be in x years, two years, you cant track back how many roles and were. How much effort does that take with our current process, how much money does that effort cost? Is that as much money as we want to spend? So you have to be able to use and track data so you can work your way back and then offer the C suite a proper model, a proper model of like what, what the current state is and what it's going to cost them for the future state. So a system for me is anything that allows you to model in terms of cost, level of effort out the business goal. So let's say they want to make, let's say they want to make 500 engineering hires in the next four years. Okay. Include, not including attrition.

Luke Eaton [00:12:33]:
So let's say attrition is 15% and the business is 100 people, right. Well, from that, those initial numbers, you can kind of figure out how many actual people you need to hire accounting for attrition. So let's say what, 50% for us, that's what, 15 over. Did I say four years? That's like another 60 plus 75 if you include growth. So you're actually looking at nearly 600 engineering hires. And then you say to yourself, well, what's the current cost per hiring? Our current process, what is the volume conversion and capacity at every stage? And then you can literally work it all out and then you can attach things like everyone's salaries to each stage. So let's say 500 600 hires is going to take, let's say one hire takes 4 hours of engineering time, two engineers hiring, two engineers interviewing. So 4 hours of engineering time times that by 600 and then you've got yourself six months of engineering time gone.

Luke Eaton [00:13:33]:
How much does that cost to the business? So I'm just spitballing here just to show you, but the point is that there is a massive operational cost just to recruiting for a business during a scaling phase that isn't even being counted by most recruiters. They just look at cost per hirers like the salary of the recruiters plus some salary of the ATS divided by the number of hires. If you look at the operational cost, its massive and we have loads of control over that. We can make that as lean as possible, but right now we dont recruit, we dont measure it and were not very good at explaining to strategic leaders in a business the value of what we do and how much money it saves. So that was kind of the key for me.

Benjamin Mena [00:14:17]:
So pause right here. First of all, youre hitting some major points that I absolutely love is to be a successful recruiter you have to literally become a partner. Whether you're internal, whether you're a search consultant, retained like you are, you're coming in as a true partner. But here's my question for you. There are so many recruiters that are just happy to show up, recruit on what they're supposed to recruit on and then go home. Like how did you evolve to become this, like this ingrained like major part of an organization that these CEO's are leaning on?

Luke Eaton [00:14:48]:
That's a super question. That's a really super question. And you've hit on something thats pretty huge, which is that recruiters and particularly recruitment leaders have almost no support to move into leadership roles. So recruitment hasnt really been a strategic part of businesses for that long. Its only when businesses, a business under hyper growth used to be like 20% year on year growth and now were looking at two x, three x growth for these tech companies. So its a totally different level, its a totally different priority. So recruiters haven't really had a seat at the table for that long. So it's important to understand that we are not particularly mature in the way that we operate as a function compared to say the project management office or the finance functions.

Luke Eaton [00:15:39]:
They have mature, time tested methodologies that we don't use and that's a shame because we can borrow a lot from all these more mature functions. Like project management is an obvious one. Right. Why don't we get project management training when we become recruitment leaders? That'd be very, very useful. Right. Number two, lean in the theory of constraints. What we do is manage a process well. Why don't we have training on how to make processes efficient? There's real good information out there that isn't accessible to us as recruiters because no one really thinks, oh, these people are a strategic partner.

Luke Eaton [00:16:16]:
They just think the recruiter as, here's the intake form, go away and get me my person. Without thinking about how does this work in aggregate for a business. Right. So how do you make the jump from one to the other? You do have to be quite proactive in your learning. You have to make sure that you're focused on the end business goal. So as an individual recruit, that could be something as simple as looking at your role requirement gathering form or intake form or whatever you call it, whatever. Meet that kickoff call, whatever it is, and focus it more on the overall business problem. Right.

Luke Eaton [00:16:53]:
What are you doing? Why is this person here? Are they going to be part of a feature team? Are they going to be any influence in the overall business? What is, what happens if they do really, really well? What part of the business is going to change? What's going to make more money? So you need to start talking in those terms and really listen to the stakeholders business problems and not just like skill requirements first and foremost. And then you have to just do some of your own research. Like a lot of what I did in terms of data was self taught. So no one's going to teach you how to be a project manager, but the agile handbooks like $30. Just go on Amazon and pick it up for $30. And I read it cover to cover, studied it for like two weeks and then got certified as a project manager. And now all of a sudden when I'm talking to engineering managers and they're talking about sprints and they're talking about scoping of work and requirement gathering, I can use the same language that they do and retrospectives, it all comes from agile and I can speak their language now. And the same with data.

Luke Eaton [00:17:55]:
I learned Li and the theory of constraints from like old six Sigma books and six Sigma green belt books. So you have to be quite proactive. You have to focus more on the business goal. Your day to day job doesn't change. You still have to be sourcing candidates and giving them great experience. But it allows you to look at your, when you track your data, it allows you to look at it and say to yourself in a more structured, sort of less arbitrary way and say, right, what am I going to improve by 4% this quarter? Is it going to be my outreach to screen? Is it going to be the technical interview? So I feel like there's a lot, it's a big question. I'm trying to give you a big answer here, but let me focus in on this. Right.

Luke Eaton [00:18:40]:
If you track, say, your volume every week at every stage, and then work out on the conversion and then maybe work out the capacities of every stage from that basic data set, you personally as a recruiter or as a recruitment manager or as a head of recruitment, it's all the same data that just aggregates. You can take control of your recruitment process and what you can start to do is build efficiencies in a structured way. So as I say, maybe q two, you're going to increase technical interview conversion by 5% and then you can look at what it does to your funnel. Oh, for the same level of effort. If I increase it by 5%, I've made two more hires. Same level of effort, just more people get through the funnel. Okay, how am I going to get that 5%? Well, maybe I'll shadow one of the technical interviews and make some notes and bring some of the more hardcore questions into my screening. Okay.

Luke Eaton [00:19:32]:
Now less candidates are going to get to the screen, but more of them are going to get through the technical process. Okay, cool. Well, that means for the same number of hires, I've done it with less sourcing. What we're going to do with all that extra time, let's take on another rep so you can start to really take control of it. Lastly, because I know, I'm trying to give you a huge answer here, it's not just about for the same level of effort, doing more, and this is what really I love, is that when you start tracking your data, it's fairly empowering to you, the recruiter individually because, yeah, same level of effort, more hires. So let's say you want to make a big promotion or whatever it is. Yeah, you can ramp up performance by ramping up efficiency. Brilliant.

Luke Eaton [00:20:16]:
But also, for the same number of hires, do it in less effort. Go pick your kids up from school, go to the gym, go take some time from yourself, whatever you need to be a complete human being that stops you burning out like so many recruiters. The point is that sliding scale, that exists, but it only exists when you can see it in the data and you can see what you're going to improve. And your manager, that's not their job to move that left and right. It's not my job to move that left and right. It's your job as a recruiter. You're in control of that little slider, from performance to efficiency and time back for yourself. So that's why I absolutely love focusing on data, because it connects the individual recruiter in a very granular and particular way, all the way through to the business goal of any growing business.

Luke Eaton [00:21:04]:
I'll stop talking, though, because I've been hammering away at that topic.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:10]:
So real quick, we're taking a quick pause. Luke actually has a ton of tools that he's put together that you should definitely check out. So in the show notes, if you click down the show notes, you can click on his LinkedIn profile, follow him, and check out some of those tools. I have actually been super impressed by this tools that he's been sharing, which is one of the reasons why I wanted him on this podcast, because I swear to God, if I ran across Luke 20, almost 18 years ago, 19 years ago, when I started my recruiting career, I'd be in a completely different place because of some of the stuff that he shared. So back to the conversation. Okay, so, Luke, we've talked about how important data is. We've talked about how you can become a true partner, a true talent partner. One of the things that you've talked about is after the systems, the technology that you can use to, like, I don't know.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:57]:
I don't know if I want to use the word amplify yourself, but, like, you can do more with less using technology than sitting there bringing on more and more recruiters, which you might need more recruiters, but let's talk about the tech side of the house.

Luke Eaton [00:22:08]:
Yeah, sure. So I think the tech space is exploding right now. As you can see, like, AI enabled tech, the ability to sort of transcribe information and pull insight from text in particular, is huge. So everyone went crazy about generative AI, but it's just, that's not really the interesting piece. For me, it's the fact that AI can now make sense of huge quantities of text based data. If you look at an ATS, all of the information in an ATS is text based that we cannot quantify. Right now. We can't do that.

Luke Eaton [00:22:41]:
So we're probably about a year or two away from most ATS being able to measure, transcribe interviews and then measure them for sentiment analysis and biases, like automatically all the stuff that we wouldn't even be able to look at. So I think the tech space is absolutely exploding because the barrier to entry for technology, you don't have to be as technical as it used to be to turn an idea into something real and create an MVP. So you see a lot of recruiters now who are bringing their own technology to the market to solve problems, they themselves. So when it comes to actually using technology to multiply your time, it's a tricky one because you're going to see over the next few years lots and lots and lots of technology. But you have to almost be a bit of a Luddite. None of those tools solve problems. You have to remember that you're going to get look at LinkedIn right now. There's going to be six probably just today.

Luke Eaton [00:23:44]:
There'll be maybe 60 new tech tools that you'll be able to look at today. But none of those tools solve problems. All tools do is make problems easier to solve. And a lot of recruiters think tools are magic bullets. And I get this a lot when im brought into businesses and they go, oh, the ATS is terrible. Were so glad youre here. Youre going to bring in this cool new ATS and its going to make it so much easier. And then when I actually dig into conversations with all the stakeholders, im like, why is it so hard to schedule interviews are the stakeholder just doesn't get back to me, well, the tools aren't going to fix that, right? That's a governance problem.

Luke Eaton [00:24:23]:
So you tend to find that a lot of tools paper over business problems rather than. So you have to make sure that my view is a bit of a Luddite view. I love tech, as you know, I build my own tools for improving efficiency, but my overall view is that don't. Well, as recruiters we can't be distracted from the business problems in our business. We have to in particular look at governance. So how is accountability and responsibility distributed over the recruitment process if you don't have that, a tool's not going to fix anything. Same with a basic business process. If you're looking at a big system like an ATS, and you're looking at process efficiency or maybe, you know, integrating it with a HR system.

Luke Eaton [00:25:10]:
If you don't have a really well written out process, you don't write a flowchart that describes how the candidate moves through a system. Doesn't matter what system it is anymore. Like, you can't, you don't have it in your, in your mind. You haven't written down an ideal journey for the candidate. So if you don't know that, how can a tool help you? You don't even know what the solution is. How can you possibly, can it possibly help you? So my view is a little bit controversial because everyone's going crazy for tech over the past few years. My view is, calm the heck down, focus on governance, write some racy charts and build some racy charts into your communication with your stakeholders, and you'll find that your processes will get a lot more efficient and then scale that up with a tool. So I don't really touch tools until I'm really confident in governance and process is really well embedded and really well documented and has landed in the business, then that's when you sit on the tools.

Luke Eaton [00:26:11]:
So you don't use tools to solve problems. You solve your problem, then you use tools to make it ten times easier in the future. Does that make sense? It was a bit of an off topic, but I think it's an important distinction.

Benjamin Mena [00:26:24]:
It does make sense, but that goes into the question, like how? Like as a recruiter, like, you know, how do you get the CEO to listen to you to be like, hey, we need to change the governance first, rather than just go hire a bunch of tools and hire a bunch of recruiters.

Luke Eaton [00:26:35]:
Yeah, it's tricky. I get the benefit of the doubt now, which is something that recruiters don't often get. So I get to say really mean things to stakeholders, to CEO's, and they know that it comes from a good place, which is fun. I want to tell a CEO that to double to increase their hiring, we had to do half as much outreach, which was a very hard tool for them to swallow. And I had you actually use the theory of constraints and whiteboard it out and say, look, see if we did less recruitment, we make more hires. And he's like, ah, weird. Okay, let's do that. So how do you get those CEO to listen to you? Two strands to this.

Luke Eaton [00:27:12]:
Number one, CEO's are decision making machines. That's their entire value to a business, is to make a decision. Number two, they make decisions like we do, based on value and cost. What we tend to do is go to them with a really fluffy idea or an idea for a change that isn't battled with data and isn't visualized. So they can't visualize what you're trying to say. You can't visualize the benefit, but they can visualize the cost. So you're saying, I want to use a talent CrNM. I want to buy a talent CRM, and I want to bolt it onto our Ats.

Luke Eaton [00:27:49]:
And that's going to mean that we can send really well structured email sequences to lots of candidates, and that's going to increase the open rate by 50%. And then that means that we're going to, for the same number of recruiters, we're going to get twice as many hires. All right, cool. They're going to still going to say no to that because it's like a very fluffy concept. But then they're going to say, how much is it? And they're going to say, oh, $35,000 for the year, and they're going to go, right, well, $35,000 for nothing, that's a no. So you have to be able to come to them with something visual. So, yes, the data, but I always recommend mock ups. Use miral, use figma.

Luke Eaton [00:28:29]:
Try and get demo accounts for tools that you want to use. Like, say there's talent CRM, like isuite or source whale. Go to source whale. They're lovely. They're lovely people. They want to make sales and say, can I get a sandbox? And can I just add my CEO? And I can do all use a loom video and do like a video walkthrough of you doing something. So try and get a bit more visual and so you can describe what the value is in a very visual way. Like you were trying to explain to a three year old.

Luke Eaton [00:29:00]:
Like, that's how you should explain it to a CEO. So that's number one. And then number two, like, you try and structure it. I have a matrix I can maybe share with you. It's like a four stage matrix for how to speak to a CEO. But essentially, you need to be able to give them the problem. You need to be able to give them your suggestion because they're not there to solve your problem. They need a yes or a no.

Luke Eaton [00:29:22]:
So basically, you need to give them the problem, the solution, why it's valuable, and what you think the next step should be. You need to just tell them everything so that in five minutes they can go yes or no, but they're not going to give you more than 510 minutes, nor should they. Recruiters tend to be really bad at that because, and I think leaders don't like talking to recruiters because we're very loquacious and we want to put a name to a face and we're very emotionally intelligent. How was the weekend and all of that relationship building stuff we did when we were an agency, when we were to build relationships with candidates? I think C suite leaders resent that use of their time. It's much better to be curt to the point, respectful of their time, and have a really clear, visual, data backed request for them that they can compute in five minutes. So that's how I recommend dealing with the CEO. It's worked for me. Sometimes you get shouted at, well, it's all good.

Benjamin Mena [00:30:24]:
So there's going to be a recruiter listening to this and it's just going to be like, hey, I would love to be embedded. You know, find a way to embed myself or find ways to partner up with these like early stage seed companies that are about ready to have some skyrocket growth. Like how do you even get in these doors? How do you become the person that they go to?

Luke Eaton [00:30:40]:
Yeah, that's a, that's a simple question. Like a lot of, first of all, a lot of the recruiters that are in there that are doing a great job just kind of grew with the company. There are a lot of heads of heads of TA that essentially grow up from the first recruiter of an early stage company. I'd recommend if you're actively lucky, go on. Rather than looking on job boards, have a look at tools like seedtable or sifted or these types of companies. And what they do is they show you all of the startups that are out there that have recently got funding and you can filter it by fintech or whatever your domain specialism is. So if you're in cybersecurity, go to like, you need to be making a similar market map for a role. Market map.

Luke Eaton [00:31:24]:
All the cybersecurity companies that have just got like pre seed and series a investment and seed investment, make a big spreadsheet and then proactively reach out to them and say, hey, I love cybersecurity. I love to be your first recruiter on the hand. I've got some great ideas about employer branding. I've got a fantastic network. I can make referrals, I can make those hires really, really quickly. You'll get bites. And then lastly, I would recommend going to VC websites and go to their portfolio pages. They have little widgets where they have aggregated all the jobs of all of their portfolio companies.

Luke Eaton [00:31:55]:
So it's like a little sneaky little job board hidden within VC's. So maybe Google top 50 VC's on the east coast or in Europe or wherever you are. And you'll tend to find a lot of cool companies that way. Don't worry. If they're not looking for a recruiter or they're not advertising for a recruiter, that does not matter. You reach out to them proactively. You speak to their founder. You just LinkedIn, you messed them on LinkedIn.

Luke Eaton [00:32:21]:
Say, I'd love to be a first recruiter. Here's my network. Let's set up a call. That's a really good way of just getting yourself known in these spaces, particularly once you've actually built a reputation, you can work through the VC routes. Because again, VC's are risk mitigators. So if someone has done something well, they will signpost you to other businesses. So I can tend to get a lot of truck with like Atomic or Baldurton and HV because my previous company that I worked with worked with these companies. So now I get to just drop that name essentially.

Luke Eaton [00:32:57]:
Almost like recruiter. Say X Meta X Google. Well, you can say, hey, I supported a Baldurton port call. This is where we got them. I know you're on the same journey. I know what that journey looks like. Bring me on. So it's worthwhile looking at the VC space.

Luke Eaton [00:33:16]:
It gives you a lot of insight into how these companies get investment and how they operate and where the opportunities are.

Benjamin Mena [00:33:22]:
Okay, so you touched on a point like market mapping. And this is a thing that I wanted to ask you about because you dropped a free market map of, what was it, like, 10,000 startup companies. I feel like recruiters don't do a good job market mapping. How did you even build that? I know it's a long question, but how does a recruiter build a market map like that? So good and so quick.

Luke Eaton [00:33:45]:
Listen, every recruit knows how to build a Markham because you do it all day, every day for a candidate. Just do it for yourself, for it's the same skill. What I would say is that once you start digging into those spaces, you find that no one's hiding these companies. These companies want to be found. So you'll see huge, lots of websites that aggregate these companies and say, if you went onto, let's usually like one of the biggest VC's in the States, like Anderson Horowitz. Right. A 16. Right.

Luke Eaton [00:34:15]:
Go on their portfolio page, there's 1000 companies. Exit current companies and exit companies. They're all there. Go get a web scraper. Go get Google sheet. Okay. Up. Off you go.

Luke Eaton [00:34:29]:
Right. There's a thousand companies right there. That's just one VC. And then there are aggregated websites, like industry websites. So sifted is very good in Europe. It aggregates together all of like the best VC's in Europe. Not VC's, excuse me, startups, angel list these types of places. So that's a good place to start.

Luke Eaton [00:34:49]:
And then once you're there, you can follow them on LinkedIn. So you get your notifications when they get investment and just start from there, really. And everything else is just what you would do as a recruiter if you were sourcing for a role or a little bit of time in every day, do a little bit of time, enrich your knowledge of these individual, like figure out like a short list of. I have like three companies that I absolutely Star Trek fanboy over that I would love to work for. I'm not going to say them out loud because it kind of jinx it, but basically if I hadn't have done that and I've said that I've reached out to their CEO, one of them is quite a well known CEO. I've reached out to him and said I would literally do anything, like I would say my house on fire to come and work for your company. So I haven't been that crazy. But know you can kind of reach out in a very proactive way, particularly if you're in a niche play space.

Luke Eaton [00:35:38]:
Like if you're in big data or cybersecurity or medical devices or something like that. That's really niche. It's, that's kind of a good way to sort of start building your, your knowledge but also your visibility in that space. Awesome.

Benjamin Mena [00:35:53]:
Yeah, definitely. Like hit up luke if you want to see a copy of like one of the market maps. He did. Like, I checked it out. It's awesome. And I got to figure out how to do something for MySpace like that. Well put together.

Luke Eaton [00:36:04]:
Yeah, I use fork for that, which is useful. You can just pull in all your imports and then enrich it in one click, which is handy. So I recommend maybe using fork. But you don't have to use fork. You could use to like notion or something like that. Or earth table or just a Google sheet. Just as good.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:21]:
Well, before we jump over to the quick fire questions, is there anything else that you would love to share about data or anything else that we talked about.

Luke Eaton [00:36:27]:
Yeah, I think we went into like a really high level. I quite like the global stuff. I think we really spoke about some really big topics and how data applies. What I would say is just in terms of low level advice for recruiters, is that the sort of the way of improving yourself as a recruiter is not magical knowledge. It's not brand new. They've been making cars using like, by identifying bottlenecks and using the theory of constraints, they've been improving the manufacture of cars that way for like 60 years. Up until 20 years ago, DevOps engineers have been increasing the rate at which they can release software using the same thing. They take a mature, they take a data driven look at their process, they identify capacity problems in their funnel.

Luke Eaton [00:37:15]:
Volume for us as candidates, conversion for us as pass through rates, capacity interview slots, it's the same thing. It's all just a process. So if you can take a data driven view of your, not just the qualitative metrics of your offer. Right, rejection reason. Time to start. Yeah, you can definitely get great value from that. What you can also do is look at the quantitative metrics that you can literally do that with a Google sheet. And again, I've got a 2024 stat sheet that anyone can download on LinkedIn, where you can measure volume conversion at every stage per week and you can filter it.

Luke Eaton [00:37:51]:
And what that allows you to do is to vastly improve the efficiency of your work. So I would definitely recommend any recruiter doing that, but also it aggregates up the way it scales. So what you're learning as a, as an individual recruiter, making those improvements in a really specific way makes you, empowers you, makes you feel good, puts you in the troll, makes you more hires. But you're also learning leadership skills, because as a recruitment lead or recruitment manager, what you're going to have to do for an entire team, you have to measure that. So you've already got those skills. And then as a head of or a director, what are you going to do? Have to do with an entire department, you're going to have to measure that data so it costs you nothing. You can get a Google sheet right now if you don't have to download mine. Google sheet right now.

Luke Eaton [00:38:40]:
Just start tracking what you do every week. How many outreach, how many screens, how many interviews, whats the percentage rate, pick out a single thing thats annoying you and then say, this quarter, im going to improve that by 5%. And then once youve got something really specific in your mind, then its much easier for you to come up with a solution rather than saying, God, how do I make 50% more hires for this company? How am I going to make 50% more hires? You can say how am I going to increase this one thing by 5%? And then the next quarter I'm going to do the next thing by 5%, then the quarter I'm going to the next thing by 5%. So I would just, that's the kind of the take home message I want to give to individual contributing recruiters. This is not just highfalutin stuff for recruitment leaders talking to fund managers. This is something you can do to make more individual hires right now. And that's where I started and that's how I built my knowledge base and it's practically free and it's what you.

Benjamin Mena [00:39:41]:
Track is what you get better at. And some of the highest billers, whether it's internal, external agency, have their own firm.

Luke Eaton [00:39:49]:
Yep.

Benjamin Mena [00:39:50]:
You can ask them like how many hires and they can literally tell you like their numbers fast because they know it. So absolutely great. A great way to put grow is to know your numbers.

Luke Eaton [00:40:02]:
Yeah, it certainly is. I did a post on that a few weeks ago where essentially do you want to be able to say to new customers, let's say you're an agency or who's going to get the business? The person that says oh, I've got, we've got a really big database of all that nineties recruitment agency nonsense. Oh, we have our own database. You mean a small portion of the Internet that you downloaded, well done, right. No one cares about that anymore. So if you say oh yeah, we've got a big network, it doesn't track. Whereas if you say I've hired 48 JavaScript engineers in this location in the past two years, my offer accept rate has been 85%. And here's why you're getting that business and what you're doing there.

Luke Eaton [00:40:44]:
If you've been tracking data, which takes no time at all and it's free, you're just reading that from a sheet, it costs you nothing. So it's hugely beneficial to just start tracking your data and seeing what you can do with that. Awesome.

Benjamin Mena [00:40:58]:
So jumping over to Quickfire questions, what advice would you give to a brand new recruiter that's just getting started in our industry this year?

Luke Eaton [00:41:04]:
Oh, simple. It's quick fire. Basically sit next to your stakeholders and learn absolutely everything there is to know about them. Forget about recruitment for a second and just say to yourself like I need, what do I need to know about this stakeholder. So if you're an internal person, sit next to the stakeholder and just learn about them. If you're recruiting for engineers, sit next to the engineers, listen to what they talk about, who they gripe about, what companies that they go to when they're really annoyed and they don't get the promotion. That's how you build your knowledge base in your domain. If you're an agency, exact same thing.

Luke Eaton [00:41:35]:
Sit next to the best recruiter and then look at their habits. Are they talking when everyone else is talking? Do they send loads of emails or do they not? How do they speak to people on the phone? Are they friendly? Are they professional? What do they do once they put the phone down? You know what? When I'm getting my lunch, getting a coffee, what's that person doing? Why is everyone listening to that person? Is he talking quiet? Are they talking loudly? Are they aggressive? Are they friendly? What is it? But you just have to, like David Attenborough, just like to sit and stare at them like they were like a bird. And because it's totally meritocratic in an agency, whatever they're doing is making their money. So you copy them until you can figure out how it works for you and until you find your own voice. That's what you do. You find someone who's making a ton of money, sit next to them and stare at them until they feel uncomfortable.

Benjamin Mena [00:42:27]:
I love that same advice for somebody that's been in the game for a while. What advice would you give to them?

Luke Eaton [00:42:32]:
Governance. Governance, governance. Almost all of your problems at a leadership level in recruitment comes down to governance. And this is something that I have been tackled tackling for a number of years. And by governance, I mean, how have you mapped out the responsibility and actions of how a business process is going to happen? So, as an example, let me use a very quick thought experiment for this quick fire question. Software developer, they don't develop. They're always getting their pull requests rejected. They're not turning up to things on time.

Luke Eaton [00:43:08]:
They're not doing when they're in per programming exercises, they're not doing a very good job. They do that over and over again. What happens? What happens to that software developer? We get fired. All right. Business development representative. They're turning, they're not getting much sales, that when they're on calls with customers, they're kind of not having a very, they don't have a very good rapport with them. They're not doing a very good job overall, what happens? Okay, hiring manager. Right.

Luke Eaton [00:43:34]:
They've got bias interviews, they don't, they turn up late, they reschedule last minute. They're not particularly interested in recruitment at all. They've not read any of the, or done any of the training. What happens? It's, yeah, and that's a key piece for me is that there is almost no accountability. This is like the lowest priority for these people, which is fair enough. So we've got, we've not put any governance on this process. This is their lowest priority. They want to be doing something else.

Luke Eaton [00:44:05]:
Why do you think they don't care? Why do you think they reschedule? Why do you think they don't do the training? Because there's no governance. We've not given them that. So we can't just keep hitting this same problem and going, oh well, it's the hiring managers. Oh well, no, no. In that kickoff call, in that project kickoff, in that ATs implementation, whatever it is, you get a racy chart. Who's responsible? Who's accountable? Who should be consulted? Who should be informed? Every task involved in that process could be an individual piece of recruitment. And I recommend this for individual recruits, like put a racy chart at the bottom of your kickoff form or your kickoff document if you have one. And just every task involved, feedback, giving feedback, doing the interview, training, decision, like debrief calls, whatever it is, and then you say, right, who's responsible for that? Who's accountable, who should be informed and so on, and just fill it out.

Luke Eaton [00:45:02]:
Doesn't have to, you don't have to fill out every single bit. What it does is it creates accountability in every stage. So for recruitment leaders, I would say the biggest threat to any major program of work, if you look back and go, that six months was a disaster and it should have been fantastic and it was a disaster or this thing didn't land in the business the way I expected. 90% of the time. In my experience, it comes down to a lack of governance at the beginning and thats why project management office, its really sophisticated and its another one of those things you can borrow from other bits of the business. I borrowed lean from DevOps engineers. I borrowed project manager agile from project managers and software developers. Good governance, borrow it from the PMO types and the analysts.

Luke Eaton [00:45:47]:
They do this for a living. Theyre brilliant at it. We need that as well. But no one thinks to give us the training. So you go out and get that training for yourself. I love that.

Benjamin Mena [00:45:58]:
And that kind of goes into your next question. Has there been a huge book that has had a huge impact in your career?

Luke Eaton [00:46:02]:
Two, the first one is, this is going to be a bit of a weird one. The Phoenix project. Now this is a book about DevOps. It's not a book about recruitment, and it's actually a fictionalized account. It's not a non fiction book. And the DevOps engineers put me onto this. DevOps was my specialty when I was like a recruiting, so I used to hang out with the DevOps engineers. The advice that I just gave you, new recruiters, I was in there with all the DevOps guys and they were always banging on about the Phoenix project, so I needed to figure out what it was because I'd read the DevOps handbook and all of this stuff.

Luke Eaton [00:46:32]:
And basically it's an account of an it manager in an american software company. They're trying to create this brand new product, this brand new product and their old way of working is having such a big impact on them releasing software on time that it's basically killing the business. And it's about like a chance encounter with like an old professor in his old college talking about lean and the theory of constraints and how he can apply that to software. So it sounds weird. It's not like the best written book in the world. It's not like Dostoevsky or anything like that, but it's a fantastic way of seeing how these types of processes can have a huge impact for these types of, these human methods and philosophies can have a huge impact on a process. So I thought to myself, like, surely this can work for recruitment. And that's what really switched me on to this stuff was like, is there, has recruitment had its Phoenix project moment yet? And that that book is actually a plagiarism of a book called the goal by a guy called Eli Goldrat.

Luke Eaton [00:47:37]:
So the first one I read was the Phoenix Project. I highly recommend, highly recommend reading the goal by Eli Goldrap because it's the same thing about what it's about manufacturing, and it gives you a good idea of the philosophy of lean and how to do more with less using data. So really fantastic book. And then lastly, deep work by Cal Newport. Fantastic way of chopping up your time as a knowledge worker. I use that all the time.

Benjamin Mena [00:48:02]:
Deep work, that's a great book. Do you have a favorite rec tech tool that you love at the moment?

Luke Eaton [00:48:08]:
I mean, right now I'm just Mister Ashby. I'm deep inside the Ashby ACs. I know that's a big tool, but it's just such a step change to other ATS's. It's huge. Beyond that chat GPT, I use that to iterate first drafts and it's basically whenever I'm doing the documentation phase of a project, it used to be the big boring, used it two weeks of my life and it was boring. Now what I've realized is people are, we're really good at picking out things that are wrong. So even if you create a first draft that is wrong or not very good because it's chat GPT, you know why it's wrong? You can kind of tell, you can figure that out. Whereas if you just sat in front of a blank page, you have to go through that, the pain of writing out that first draft and then rereading it.

Luke Eaton [00:48:55]:
So I use it as a first draft machine for so much, for so much documentation. And I find it really valuable. On my LinkedIn I put a video of me iterating through a role scorecard, turning the role scorecard into a set of success criteria, turning the success criteria to competency based questions, and then creating a rag status for each competency based question. So like a bad answer that would not meet expectations, meet and exceed expectations against competency based questions. And you can do it in like 30 minutes. So you can go back to customers and customers, stakeholders, interviewers, and say, right, thank you for this role scorecard. Heres the success criteria that I can see. Here are some competency based questions that I think could be really valuable to put into the final stage interviews and heres a rough idea of what a good candidate would say.

Luke Eaton [00:49:51]:
And again, they can see that theres a lot of effort been put into that. So Jagbt is just very, very versatile as a piece of technology. So right now thats what Im obsessed with.

Benjamin Mena [00:50:02]:
That is awesome. So what do you think has been a huge part of your own personal success?

Luke Eaton [00:50:07]:
I think it's just being, connecting to the mission of the business has really been part of it. Like you, if you're in the startup space, anyone could go into a bank and make some money. Why is no one doing that in tech? Why they would rather disrupt than join somewhere that's successful? You have to ask yourself, why are so many Gen Z and techies and engineers doing that? Well, it's because they get to have influence over something. They get to join a business that has a specific mission and they get to sort of be part of that. For me, I realized I worked a lot better when I was really connected to the mission of the business. So any kind of transformational leadership, anything, whether it's a vision, the business that's kind of the secret sauce to my success. It's not, you know, waking up at 05:00 a.m. And learning about data and going for a run and all of that sort of hustle culture stuff.

Luke Eaton [00:51:04]:
It's just find something that you're thinking about in the shower, like, work wise, obviously, nothing weird, but find something where you're like, what? In your head? You can't wait to get to work to solve that problem or to say, to present this thing that really is for me. So say no to stuff that bores you, and say yes to stuff that excites you, and you will perform a lot better. Better than any time management tool, better than any anything else like that. You can't manage your time in a job you hate, doesn't matter how well you manage the time. But a job you love, job you love, you'll do at your absolute best to make yourself better and make the company better. Right? So simple. But that's what I think has kind of got me a where I am, but be, like, there and happy and not burned out. That's kind of the real goal, isn't it? It's not just getting the job title, it's getting there and actually being a happy human being at the end of it.

Luke Eaton [00:52:05]:
And that's kind of what's got me there.

Benjamin Mena [00:52:08]:
So you've got a chance to work with the incredible companies, like high growth companies, you, agency recruiter, you've been a magician. You've had a lot of, I'm sure, ups and downs in your career. If you had the chance to go back and, like, have a cup of coffee with yourself or a beer with yourself at the very beginning of your recruiting career, what advice would you give your. Sit down and give yourself.

Luke Eaton [00:52:28]:
Yeah, shut up. I would literally tell myself to shut up. Everything that got me through my agency days and got me into that first job, I had to sort of unlearn in order to make the next stages work. And that was, if you've ever been on the phone to, like, a new agency recruiter, nothing wrong with, you know, lots of age, a lot of energy, a lot of tenacity. Have you ever tried to put the phone down and get off of a call with an agency recruiter? Have you ever tried to do that? It's a nightmare. It's impossible because they just want to constantly talk. You ask them a simple question, and I say, why use one word when 15 will do? That's the kind of, that's the idea, right? And I was that guy times ten. A nightmare.

Luke Eaton [00:53:13]:
For it. And what I realized was that I was actually destroying all, destroying my ability to make relationships with more senior leaders who value just gent like information. So now I go out of my way to not talk. You wouldn't believe that from this conversation, but we're two recruiters, you know, but I try and talk the last. I try and talk the least and try and talk last. And what tends to happen is people get curious about what I think and then they ask me, and I have, it's like game theory, right? You have the most information because you've heard everyone else talk. I take a deep breath before I open my mouth, and then I give them what I think is the solution and why. And people start to respect that.

Luke Eaton [00:53:51]:
And they started to respect me as soon as I got that. But you had to unlearn all those habits. It's a communication style. That's your natural communication style. Then you have to realize, oh, that's one tool. But actually there's multiple tools, and I need to learn these and I need to be able to chop and change. So that's the advice I'd give myself, is just shut up, listen and communicate like a grown up. And funnily enough, grown ups will listen to you.

Luke Eaton [00:54:18]:
So that would be the advice I'd give myself.

Benjamin Mena [00:54:21]:
That is awesome for the people listening. How can he follow you?

Luke Eaton [00:54:25]:
Yeah, look, I've not. I've not got loads of things to sell or anything like that. I'm just a joby recruiter guy, so best place to get me is on LinkedIn. And I just. I release something every single day. My rule is it has to be practical and useful for recruiters. I do actually have a newsletter that I've just launched. You can access my website via LinkedIn, but it's a brand new newsletter, so it's basically like me sending like two people an email, but it's just going to have all of the nuggets and the practical stuff condensed into one space.

Luke Eaton [00:54:53]:
So you don't have to look through, like a year's worth of my posts to get valuable stuff like the links to the, my market map of 10,000 people, the process lab bi tools that you have access to. You can get it all in the one place. So that's. That's where you can get me, is just hit me up on LinkedIn.

Benjamin Mena [00:55:10]:
Well, Luke, I'll sign up, so that way it'll be three people for you.

Luke Eaton [00:55:14]:
Okay, thank you.

Benjamin Mena [00:55:16]:
Well, Luke, before I let you go, anything else you want to share with the listeners?

Luke Eaton [00:55:20]:
No, I think. I think that was. I think I did enough talking for one lifetime. I just wanted to say thank you for having me on. I really, really, genuinely do enjoy your podcast. It's one of the. The top ones. I always look forward to them.

Luke Eaton [00:55:34]:
So thank you for having me on.

Benjamin Mena [00:55:35]:
Well, thank you, Luke. And I was so excited about bringing you on because data is so important, and I think so many recruiters do such a shitty job at tracking their data, and because recruiters do a shitty job at tracking their data, it causes a lot of career frustration. The extra 510 minutes of tracking can completely change your future in recruiting. Thank you for coming on and for the recruiters listening. Make 2024 your best year yet. I cannot wait to see you succeed. Talk to you later, guys.