Brainfood Live On Air - Ep404 - In Conversation with John Vlastelica

0:05Do you know what, John? I might actually just solicit crowd questions from the newsletter and say, listen, I'm going to have 60 minutes with John here. What questions do you need to pose this guy? And then we're going to have him have you just give your hot take. You've got to give like one second answer or one sentence answers to these questions. And that might be a fun thing to do. um okay cool uh listen everybody welcome to brain food live on air bringing it to you every friday no fail um this time in a slightly different time than usual simply because i am in a different part of the world i'm in san francisco right now um and i didn't want to get our guests up at six o 'clock in the morning that's totally unfair i hate to do that uh so we've got it at a more sensible time at 10 a.m but i've been wanting to have this conversation uh for a very long time and I'm really pleased to be able to do it with you today.

0:59It is in conversation with John Blasterly, of course, one of the best and biggest thinker-doers, I call him, thinker-doers in our industry, someone who has amazing credibility and practitioner background, but also is a very prominent commentator and observer of trends in industry and amplifier of those things. So a person that combines sort of cold face know-how plus kind of that macroscopic view as to how things are working. So fantastic person to have us on the show. Before I introduce John properly, I just want to make a sort of do a few sound checks with everybody. Make sure everyone here and see us okay.

1:41Folks, if you're watching this on Crowdcast, let me know in the comments whether the audio and visual is fine. And let me know in the chat there. We should be broadcasting this also on my LinkedIn. I do believe Rob Walker is also live streaming this. A couple of other folks are helping us amplify this conversation as well. So if you're watching this on LinkedIn, do let me know whether the audio or visual is okay. Thank you, Colleen. Thank you, Simon. I appreciate it. Looks like Crowdcast is good. I think LinkedIn is good as well. So fantastic stuff. John, you're here on stage. Great to see you.

2:11I know. So for the folks who don't know you, I think everyone probably does and they should. But for the folks who don't and they were discovering you for the first time, Who are you and how do you describe yourself today?

2:22John Vlastelica: Let's see. So I am a yeah, I was a practitioner for, you know, about a third of my career and two thirds of my career. I've been doing consulting and training work. So I lead Recruiting Toolbox, which is a consulting and training firm focused on helping companies improve how they hire. So we don't do any search work. We're mostly working with big companies like Google or Nike or big banks, big pharma companies. I've worked in about 20 countries, 350 companies over the last 20 years. And a lot of our work is around elevating the role of recruiter to talent advisor, helping recruiting leaders win in their job and helping companies to find their hiring bar and train up their interview teams.

3:02John Vlastelica: Prior to that, I was the head of tech recruiting at Amazon. I was there in the early days, built a lot of stuff that scaled and then was the head of recruiting at Expedia in Seattle where I'm based. So yeah, I think of myself now as someone who is still very much a student of our space. I've said this before, but I feel like this is maybe the first time in a long time where I feel like there's a fundamental shift going on. The technology is not just a less shitty ATS and we're finding ourselves in a space where there's just incredible opportunity to get rid of a lot of the transactional work and really free our teams up to do some more strategic work.

3:39John Vlastelica: So I think of myself very much as a student watching this and then commenting and bringing a lot of insights from the hundreds and hundreds of TA leaders I talk to. Yeah, brilliant. And let's start right there, John. ChatGPT came out in 2022, two end of uh so it's been around now for three four years coming up too um when did you recognize that this time was different um like was it immediately obvious to you um right at the point of release that you thought okay this is this is going to make a big difference to what we do in recruiting um or did it take some of the time was there some of the moment where the penny dropped for you and you thought okay this is this is not this is not the same as before yeah i mean we all stand on the shoulders of other folks.

4:25John Vlastelica: You know, I think, I think for me, there's a guy, Yuval Harari, who writes a lot about, you know, humanity. I know you have a background in sociology and are interested in that stuff as well, Hung. But, but I think reading a little bit about his, his take on how technology has, has, and is impacting us from, you know, algorithms to what AI can do. That plus playing with Gen AI and just going, holy moly, we are in for a world of hurt with candidate fraud. I might have been the first person to write about that. Not that candidate fraud could happen, but how we need to very quickly as companies develop a point of view on what's cheating and what's not.

5:05John Vlastelica: And I started very early thinking about the challenges of of sameness, you know, not how hard it is to find a, you know, a needle in a haystack, but how hard it is to find a needle in a stack of needles. Like, how do you find the right one when everyone looks the same? And so that started to really help my thinking around the evolution of the role of recruiter and being more focused on assessment and just what the conversations we need to have as recruiting leaders with business leaders. and so yeah very early on I started to see more of the risk certainly potential and I got very excited with tools like you know Brighthire and sourcing tools and other things that I was just like this will never happen this will never get approved by legal I could have never got this through as a practitioner to record every interview are you kidding me like legal will lose their mind if we record the crazy stuff people are saying in interviews and then it happened and then suddenly we have all this data and this insight into an area that is largely been kind of a black box to us in TA.

6:04John Vlastelica: And we can see what people are asking and what we're evaluating and all this stuff. And so I love that I was proven wrong kind of in the early, early days that this tech will never get through the kind of gates of approval. And now I think we're in for just a complete transformation of how we recruit. So early-ish, I guess. I don't consider myself a technologist, but I definitely connect the dots on where this where this could go and where this is going yeah i remember the early early early sort of uh jocular applications of ai was you know putting your face on different places and you know you're literally like a photoshop a very convincing sort of uh type of image and it was yeah it was the front angle it was hang on um this image uh 12 months or so ago would have convinced someone that you were with John live in that place.

6:54And I was not. And then suddenly, okay, it's fun. But it's also, it was very, very clear that that sword could cut the other way. Yeah.

7:03John Vlastelica: And Johnny Campbell, I remember, I was in Dublin, you know, several years ago now, and he whipped out his phone at dinner and showed me a video. I do a lot of training on social talent. And he showed me a video of me speaking fluent Spanish, right? This was like two and a half, three years ago with my mouth moving, dude. And I was like, what? So I have someone on my team who's based in Mexico and I sent it to her and she's like, what is going on? You speak fluent Spanish. And I'm like, no, no, no, it's all AI. And that was, that was the two and a half year old version. Now you're just like, what does this mean for identity verification?

7:34John Vlastelica: What does this mean for truth and misinformation? And so, so a lot of, a lot of what I've been thinking about is, is, is certainly in the, in the, in the kind of space of of how do we, you know, recruiting, I think, has changed in a significant way because of technology. I don't know that we've changed our roles enough to match kind of where tech, I think we're lagging quite a bit still. And when I talked to heads of TA about their teams there, they've been very focused on kind of the quote unquote capital investment part of, you know, getting tech in there. But I think the team part is lagging quite a bit.

8:04John Vlastelica: And that's really what I focus more on. We don't do tech implementation work or tech selection work. Very interested in like, so So with the team, what are we doing with the team? How do we add value? Can I extrapolate from what I think is sort of the implications of what you've said there are, John, in the sense that you're saying that the candidate verification is one of the big problems, therefore assessment. So there's ID verification, InfoSec, which kind of is related to all of the quality of hire conversation. You know, that is part of the quality of hire. the role of the recruiter now shifts more towards assessment rather than acquisition of talent, let's say.

8:44So there was a big moment, I think, that the sourcing kind of peak was probably, what, 2005 to 2018 or so, something like that, where Johnny was actually, you know, main business teaching companies how to find candidates on the Internet. That was basically it. Maybe AI changes that. suddenly it's easy to find candidates, but actually there's too many needles and too many needle, too many haystacks. So now we have to put verification in there and how do we do it? So how do we do it, John?

9:16John Vlastelica: So it's interesting. There's a whole bunch of opportunity for recruiters to build kind of competence and confidence around candidate assessment. And I don't really want to talk about candidate fraud because there's a whole bunch of great stuff. Glenn Cathy and Kirk Rossroads have put out a lot of great stuff on candidate fraud recently. I'd rather have folks go read that and get into the tactics of how to do that. But in terms of kind of evolving the role of recruiter to focus on assessment, I think the angle is not just around mitigating candidate fraud and verifying identity. I think it's also much more around just the pull from the business that we need quality talent.

9:53John Vlastelica: And this has always been the pull, right? Their love language has been speed for many years. And I would say it shifted more to kind of quality and a kind of post-COVID overhire and a I'm getting my headcount cut kind of era. I think quality, quality, quality is first and foremost in the focus groups we do. And so when I think about the role of the recruiter, I think if you can give me a minute to kind of explain a little bit of how I think it's evolving, I'll say like, you know, level one recruiter is, you know, has that kind of intake mindset. Hey, hiring manager, who do you want in the interview team?

10:26John Vlastelica: I'm going to source and screen. I'll give you the talent. you let me know who you want to move ahead with. I think level two talent advising is kind of, I'm going to bring a little insights. Like here's who you had last time on the interview team for a role like this. Here's what the focus areas are. Here's some competencies we should focus on. I assume we probably want to use the same people and run the same process. Sound good? Great. You know, that's like basic talent advising. As you get into level three, though, I think this is where you shift from bringing basic information to bringing real insights.

10:56John Vlastelica: And more importantly, recommendations. So you're more kind of telling and selling rather than just kind of asking and capturing and feeding back. And so this is where we can use AI, for example, to say, hey, ChachiBT or Claude or whatever, here's the job description. Help me identify what type of interviewers should be on this. Not the names of people from our team, but who should be interviewing candidates like this? What kind of people would the candidate expect to interview with? Give me some good questions I can take to this meeting with the hiring manager. And I want to make sure that when I show up, I am kind of not just there as a good interviewer who knows how to screen, but I'm there recommending the right kind of assessment process a little more.

11:38John Vlastelica: And I've got some stuff with me. And that starts to extend as you go to more like a level four, where now you're saying things like, hey, I've done my research. I know your team. I know who the strong interviewers are. I know what these candidates are going to have questions about. I know where because of, a tool that has done interview note capture and we've done some review of that. I know where we have some blind spots typically when we try and make a hiring decision. I know what we're going to need to do to sell them. And I know which people on your team are aligned with this new profile we're going after.

12:11John Vlastelica: So given all that, I'm going to tell you, we should have these three people from your team as part of this interview process. Here's what they should focus on. Here's how we should assess them. I've got specific examples. We should do case studies here, project review here, interview questions here. So the TA, the recruiter is kind of playing that kind of bar raiser accountability role. And they're really trying to raise the bar on the process. And I think that's where that longer conversation piece is where I think, you know, I didn't invent this phase. I don't know who said it first, but this kind of act your wage idea.

12:47John Vlastelica: Like, you know, if you want to make more than a hundred grand a year as a recruiter, we got to act our wage, right? And it's not just, you know, plugging stuff into AI and saying, hey, hiring manager, aren't you impressed? I've got focus areas and whatever. It's really knowing the talent we need to hire and then being able to translate that into an assessment process that'll get us, you know, good signal, right? When we get out the other end. I think there's a fifth level. The last piece I'll share is that this is where it gets very, very advanced. And I would say this is incredibly rare air. I would bet less than one in 50 recruiters will ever get to this point.

13:21John Vlastelica: But this is where you're having a conversation that is much more focused on the work itself. And this is where you are really focused, not so much on just making a quality hire, but you're thinking about what is this manager, what does she need in terms of capability and capacity on her team? And this is where I think you're probably going to get into a little more of that build, buy, bought, borrow kind of stuff that people are talking about. Again, and more of a talent management conversation and not just a kind of recruiting, who should we hire? What's their target profile? And who's going to do what in the interview process?

13:51John Vlastelica: I think that's going to be very rare. I think there's going to be competition for that role. I think the HRVP wants that role. I think some TA people think we want that role. I think the TA manager is going to play a little bit of that role across kind of in a multi-rec stage. So I think it starts with pretty basic sourcing, screening, intake kind of mindset and could move at least to level four, where there's a lot more guidance, being a lot more prescriptive, really influencing the hiring manager to change what she's doing to get the outcome she's looking for. Does that make sense? It makes absolute sense.

14:24And John, I mean, it feels like there may be a framework you have available. I don't know whether that is the case, but if so, I think people would love to see it. And if they have to pay to see it, that's also no problem. But put the paid link into the chat. Come to RecFest. Come to RecFest in Nashville

14:39John Vlastelica: because I'm going to be talking a little bit about this topic of his assessment, the new sourcing. And I think Jamie is going to record the session. And so I think it'll be available right after that. So, yeah. Yeah. I think it's really useful to have that sort of progression framework, isn't it, folks? I mean, wouldn't you want to see something like this as just on a one pager? Because it'll help map sort of where you are in this kind of framework. And I totally get what you're saying. There may be like a very tough upper limit. The fifth level might be, you know, really tough. And as you say, competitive, but it goes beyond just talent.

15:16It goes beyond talent acquisition and maybe even beyond talent itself, because this is where you're talking about functional capability. And now with the existence of AI, that has to be part of the conversation. It's not necessarily going to be a human being doing the job. can us in TA stay in the room if the conversation comes to, hey, listen, maybe we need an automation on this, or maybe we need an AI to be trained to deliver this function rather than just bulk up the team. I think it would be amazing if we could expand our skill set and scope to be able to stay in the room when those conversations happen.

15:53John Vlastelica: And I think that 100%, and I have a friend who was a client at another company. He's at a new company. And it's interesting because, you know, he is the head of TA plus workforce planning, which is not unusual to have workforce planning in your title over the last five years. But what's unusual is that workforce planning includes analysis that he and his team are doing to figure out what part of each job, each critical role in the company should be done by a human and which tasks should be done by AI. So he is a TA guy, a TA leader who is doing kind of job analysis, work analysis, task analysis, and trying to make that kind of, you know, human versus bot decision with a lot of stakeholders, of course, but he's actually leading that work.

16:37John Vlastelica: And that is ridiculously strategic work and could have a huge financial impact on the company and will really shape kind of what the target candidate profiles look like. What I see hung a lot is that if you go and ask an individual hiring manager a question about what should be human versus bot, or you ask even the talent you've been hiring, we're basically copy pasting our 2020 job ad into 2026 in a lot of cases. I think that is a big problem. If you were to share that with a VP, if you were to share that with that hiring manager's VP, she'd be like, no, no, no, no, no. The talent that got us there is not the talent that's going to get us there kind of thing.

17:14John Vlastelica: And we need to have more conversations around that. But I don't know that hiring, the frontline managers are in tune with the VP's vision for her future state org. And I think that's where recruiters can play real good kind of inspection and accountability partner roles with the business and say, we are going to be looking to make sure we are not hiring talent. Like, I'm not just going to take the order and say, give me the job description hiring manager. Great, I'll get this posted. Let's build out our quote strategy to source and screen. and interview and close and comp, I think it's going to be like, wait a minute, you have requirements in here that we don't want to be hiring people to do this kind of work anymore.

17:53John Vlastelica: And I think if you want to talk about at the recruiter level, getting to a higher up in the value chain, I think part of it is demonstrating your ability to take that VP or your CEO's vision for what the org should be looking like in the next two or three years and recognize, hey, this is a 50 person team. We're going to have 10 opportunities this next year, 20 % turnover. We're going to have 10 opportunities if we're staying flat to change up the makeup of this org. And I have a responsibility as an owner in this company to play a role in making sure we're not copy pasting five-year-old job ads into 2027.

18:25John Vlastelica: My job is to make sure we're hiring the right kind of talent because I am aligned to what this executive is trying to do with her org. That to me is a huge example of talent advising in 2026, not just being good at pushback and challenging assumptions and getting rid of unrealistic candidate profiles an unrealistic cop. It's really being an agent of transformation for the business. And that you don't have to be a senior TA leader to do that. You can do that at the rec level, but you sure have to be aligned with your kind of chain and aligned with the business to do that. How do you develop the confidence?

18:59As people listening to this, John will be nodding away, and I 100 % would agree. It's a bigger job. It's a better job. It's a more important job for the business. But a lot of us are going to say, I'm not there. Like, I can't have that conversation. You know, my history of being in the recruitment industry is just much further downstream. Part of our problem, as you say, you rightly criticize the, even the term intake. I think you have a problem with the term intake, which is totally correct. Yeah. Because it's like, okay, we just intake what you give us and we then execute. So TA then just becomes an execution and the delivery function ipso facto, not strategic.

19:39So stop complaining about not being on the table. You're not a strategic function, folks. So the way to become more strategic is to really have the conversations prior to the generation of the need. In fact, you should be shaping whether the need emerges. The big question is, how do I get there, John? Like, do you have an intuition? 100%, of course, of course, yeah.

20:02John Vlastelica: I mean, and I would say that it starts with business acumen, which sort of starts with curiosity, but there's really no way to be a talent advisor if you don't genuinely understand the work going on and the teams you support. And I've written about this and talked about it. I'll be talking about this at a conference next month too, that we have to, as TA leaders, we have to provide opportunities. We have to provide exposure. We have to get more business leaders into our staff meetings and get our teams more into their staff meetings. and do things like I did. When I was a junior, you know, young Jedi learning the craft of recruiting, I was out there doing sales call ride-alongs with salespeople in my business.

20:42John Vlastelica: I sat in on the mock community meetings when I worked at a telecom company that wanted to put cell towers in people's, you know, neighborhoods and people were freaking out about it. And I went to the mock meetings where our team practiced engaging with the community and watched that. I went with engineers to telecom towers. I, you know, watched people code. I read journals and articles and business acumen and my curiosity was probably the thing that differentiated me and got me promoted and got me pulled into strategic conversations. Not forcing myself in, but getting pulled into strategic conversations because I was able to add to the conversation.

21:20John Vlastelica: I was able to ask questions and I'd read an article and demonstrate. I would genuinely know what do you do as an engineer? What does that mean, though? And I would dig in that. And so I think that kind of like as a starting place, that's one. Two is, you know, the way you get better at conversations like this is you have conversations like this. And so I think I'm probably a, you know, nine out of 10 talent advisor. I'm probably a four out of 10 sourcer, you know, but my talent advising skills got better because I worked with crazy, unrealistic, hard ass hiring managers who challenged me in front of my team, in front of my boss, in front of people that mattered to me.

21:58John Vlastelica: And kind of, I don't want to say shame me into a talent advisor, but they had, Amazon was intense, dude. It was intense. I mean, it was hardcore. And so, you know, you don't have your numbers out to two decimal points. Someone's going in on that. We're going to spend 20 minutes picking apart this number you shared or you generalize or you, and I realized I had to prep a lot better. I had to understand my own, my own craft of what I'm doing and cause and effect a lot better before I go in and start sharing data and insights. But I, but I wasn't great at it the first 20 times. You have to get your reps in.

22:29John Vlastelica: The way to get better at pushups is not to watch videos and read books. You have to get on the ground and do pushups. And the same thing with these conversations. And I would say to the TA leaders out there who say, I want to help my team get there, you have got to provide exposure. You have to get your recruiters. I used to do something terrible with my team when I was a practitioner. I would say, hey, guys, we are so overwhelmed. You guys source screen and close. I'm going to go to the meetings with the execs. I'm going to go take our work and talk to the director. I'll handle that really hard conversation, Hong, because I know she's really challenging to work with or he can be a real hard ass.

23:04John Vlastelica: Let me take that for you so you can focus on candidate generation and getting the recs filled. And I wasn't doing that out of ego. I wasn't doing that because I was controlling. I genuinely thought that's a good way to divide labor with me as the manager. What I realize now, back in my late 20s when I was doing this, is I was completely not giving my team the exposure they needed to get the reps in. I wasn't even bringing them along. I thought I was doing them a favor. In short term, it felt like a favor. Long term, shame on me for not being a better leader to recognize that's how you get better at this stuff.

23:35John Vlastelica: You have to be, as Hamilton, in the room where it happens. You have to be in there to make it happen. Does that make sense too? I think it makes perfect sense. And thank you for sharing sort of some of those moments, those learning moments, John. I totally get sort of the motivation that you might have had as a young manager yourself at the time saying, okay, I've got to protect the team. I can't expose them to this dragon of a hiring manager. I'll deal with that. Let her breathe on me, that kind of thing. But in a way, that lack of adversity prevents the growth. and you need to expose them to these things in order to move forward.

24:15So, yeah, maybe we got a bit soft, John. I don't know. I mean, did TA get soft at some point where we stopped? I don't know. Were we a little bit, I don't know.

24:24John Vlastelica: I'll tell you, I feel like everyone needs, I mean, a lot of the organizations we work with, they're very nice cultures, you know, and there's some passive aggressive behavior going on, you know. Someone will do a focus group with someone, you know, know, a consultant on my team, and they'll say, recruiting adds very little strategic value, you know, I don't, I want more of this, more of this, more of that, I don't have confidence they can deliver it. But when they fill out their hiring manager surveys, they're like, oh my gosh, I love my recruiter. She's amazing. She's so great, you know. And so I don't think there's also enough realistic feedback getting back.

24:56John Vlastelica: I also think some hiring managers just have low expectations. Either they just never had good recruiting support to know what good looks like, or they just kind of want to squeeze you out. And it's not because there's not value there, it's there's not perceived value there. So why would I have a 45 minute, you know, level four, John Blastelica level four, you know, kickoff strategy meeting with you when I think your job is basically to take my 2020 job ad posted on Indeed and LinkedIn, and then route candidates to me. And then I'll tell you who we want to interview and you schedule and then you help me close them and get confident.

25:31John Vlastelica: Like, if that's how I perceive you, why would I give you 45 minutes of my time? So big opportunity for us is, you know, where there's pain, there's motivation to change is we have to bring more of the pain. We have to elevate the tax that the business pays when they're not spending enough time. Like it could be pain and turnover. It could be pain in a fat funnel. You know, someone had to interview 10 candidates to fill a$60 ,000 a year job. That is ridiculously expensive to fill a$60 ,000 a year job. We've got to bring a terrible close rate front and center and then be the problem solvers that know how to diagnose and solve that.

26:12John Vlastelica: And that insight, the kind of, would you like to hear why you have a 60 % close rate hung and Johnny has an 85 % close rate? Would you be interested in having at our next meeting, just talking about that with your team? Anyone who experiences the pain on the hiring, on the business side is going to say 100%, I want to know what's going on. It can't be show up with your LinkedIn talent market insights and sound like a victim. The economy is rough. And maybe there's only 4 ,000 of these people in all of New York and we have in my job and I've got 20 managers. You're not my only manager, Hong. This victim-y make-ourself-small mindset is awful for this.

26:51John Vlastelica: We have to show up much stronger and bring real value to the conversation. But a lot of managers at least in our focus groups, they haven't seen that before. So they're not asking for it. And some of us are waiting for permission. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. We're waiting for permission. And we kind of have this institutional, maybe professional lack of confidence. And, you know, I do wonder whether this comes maybe a little bit from the, I mean, you look at how recruiters come into the job, it's either through one of two routes. You're either an agency from the outside, third party in, right? You're a third party person that goes in house.

27:28I was, I was that, I don't know whether that was your journey as well, John, but then that's when you're a customer service person. You're very used to saying yes to any client, you want the business. So you service the customer, um, or, and, or you come from a HR function, which is more like compliance driven, which again, it's a, it's about like, here's the rules. So, you know, it's not pushing sort of your process into, into, into, uh, the business. So, so yeah, I think our route doesn't help, but we need to build sort of a new identity for ourselves and a new confidence, particularly at this moment that we have right now.

28:02Kim, yes, it is being recorded for live viewing, and you can replay this as soon as we end the broadcast. So yes, indeed. Okay. Your sort of focus in recruiting toolbox, John, you're probably your career after you finish being a practitioner has more or less been to try and build the recruiter community to that level, isn't it? To try and move them up that framework. Can you describe any characteristics that you've found or any patterns you've found between those that have succeeded to get there and those that have really struggled to move forward? Is there any consistent pattern you've identified or any behaviors you think, okay, this is one of the reasons why this individual, this group of people are going to just struggle to get to this level that they say they want to get to?

28:51John Vlastelica: I think, yeah, I'll share one thing just to kind of emphasize something I said earlier. I think the curiosity, I've written about this quite a bit. Curiosity is really hard to teach. Like it's hard to teach someone to be curious. I kind of say blame their parents if you have a 28-year-old who's not curious about the wrecks they're actually working on and what the people are doing in the lab or in the office or when they're coding or selling or whatever it is. So I think I found that people that are genuinely curious who have less of a fear of kind of people pleasing, their fear is more missing out on great talent and not being able to provide enough value.

29:37John Vlastelica: kind of they want to act their wage. So they're driven a little bit by, I want to show up and be that partner to the business. And I don't see the hiring manager as my customer. I see the company as my customer. And if the company is my customer, just because you hiring manager want to have an 11 person interview team, I'm calling bullshit on that. The 11 is way too many for this role. And I'm willing to get an escalation and get in trouble. Part two, I would say about the teams that get there is some TA leaders send very mixed messages to their teams around talent advising. So for example, I want you Hong as my recruiter to push back on Gene because he's really difficult and unrealistic and dah, dah, dah.

30:16John Vlastelica: And I want you to have the tough conversation and you go and you do what you have to do to get him so that he's going to get his 10 roles filled by the end of December. Right. And I tell you that. And then Gene is upset because Gene's not getting what he wants and he escalates to the HR partner or he escalates to me, your boss. And then I come back and say, Hung, I just got a really hard call from Gene and he's really upset and we got to go smooth things out. And you're like, WTF? You told me to be a talent advisor and now you're punishing me? And maybe I didn't handle it the right way. Maybe I need some coaching for sure.

30:53John Vlastelica: I'm not suggesting you're going to do it perfectly. But we have this incongruency in what we say and what we do sometimes. And so I think one of the things that I see in teams that are actually evolving more, and I would say maybe 25 % of corporate recruiters are operating as talent advisors. Maybe. I'm being generous to say that probably. But the ones that get there often have managers that are willing to accept the noise, accept the feedback, accept the upset HRBP who is like, what are you doing talking about level three stuff with my manager. Like that is my comp, you know, you are a fulfillment organization.

31:30John Vlastelica: You help us, the business and us fill recs. You're not in there having strategic conversations. You're not going to their QBRs. I will go and I will let you know if there's anything recruiting related you need to know. If that's the environment you're in and you don't have a TA leader who's fighting that, who is saying, we are not going to make ourselves small. We are not just rec fillers. We are playing a bigger, more strategic role. If they're not fighting for that opportunity and dealing with some of the noise and letting you know it's okay. It got a little loud hung, but I'd rather have that noise than Gene not getting his 10 critical roles filled by the end of December, because that's the pain to the company.

32:07John Vlastelica: Gene may be pissed at us, and I'd rather have an angry, pissed off Gene hiring manager than one who ignores us and sees us as a simple transactional process manager fulfillment organization. I want to show up differently and I've got your back. Does that make sense too? Totally makes sense. And the killer sort of point you made is this concept of who the customer is. The customer, if you have a customer mindset, fantastic. But the customer is the business. Your duty of care is to the health of the business, not to the individual hiring managers. And maybe we are a little bit up for adopting a business partner mindset or the talent partner structure, because it adopts the concept that the, that only the customer is this direct sort of person that you're dealing with.

32:58Of course, you're just going to over-service that and do what, if this person adjudicates whether you're, you're doing a good or bad job, of course, you're going to, you're going to do that. You're going to basically be a supplicant to that person. It's the business. And Hong, if I can add,

33:12John Vlastelica: I'll tell you something that's in this moment and the last since 2024, when the big kind of tech layoffs were kind of peaking is I was talking to some of my friends, heads of TA at big companies you would know. And some of them we had done work with in 2021, 22. And as we were leaning into the 2022 to 2024 kind of big layoff season, one of the things that companies, leaders that did all the right things in those early years were recognizing that as soon as the recruiter layoff started, some of that, I need to please my customer. I need to make the hiring manager happy behaviors were creeping back in because people are feeling insecure about their jobs.

33:53John Vlastelica: And I completely understand and relate to that. And it is hard because I've seen teams that have gone from, you know, I have one client who had 700 people in their corporate TA function that is down to two something right now. And we're talking about like 14 waves of layoffs. In that environment, you do tend to make yourself rather than going strong and big with the business, you tend to get into a little more of a people pleaser mode. And I think that's quite natural. So I'm not I'm not dissing on folks that have been in that space. But I will tell you long term, it is terrible for your career to make yourself small, especially because the transactional work is going away.

34:29John Vlastelica: And the stuff that's left requires confidence and competence and requires us to just frankly, show up very differently than a lot of us have. And that's the act your wage part. That's the part that's, I think, going to be so critical. And I feel urgency. And I've been kind of, you know, I'm getting kind of preachy and I'm very passionate about this, but I feel urgency for our profession to get there faster because it's just, there's a race. Because AI is coming for the easy stuff. Hiring managers self-service is around the corner. Like, you know, we don't We don't even need hiring managers to log into software, right?

35:04John Vlastelica: They're going to go in Slack and Teams and there's headless software. They're just going to start interacting with stuff. And if they, especially if their perception is, you know, TA largely posts my jobs, collects who applies, does some real basic proof of life screening, and then passes me people to interview. And then this other tool schedules it. And like, where's the high value in there? And I feel like going back to my comment earlier, if people haven't seen it before, like, We got to show them. You can't order off a menu you've never seen. Like they're not going to ask for it if they've never seen it.

35:36John Vlastelica: And so we need to get out there as TA leaders, as recruiters, and demonstrate that value right now. And so that they start to say like, wait, wait, what do you mean? What do you mean Hung is going to have 100 recs and work with 25 managers because of this AI? No, no, no, no, no. Hung plays a critical role in helping me shape my organization, building capability on my teams. I want his input on candidates to interview. I don't want him just doing proof of life screening. I want his opinion on the candidates we're hiring. I have critical leadership roles. He has incredible insights. So I'm going to call your boss Hong and say, I knew you freed up to do more of this high value stuff.

36:11John Vlastelica: That's a world I would like to live in. I'm not sure that's the world we're in right now, but that's what I wish was happening right now. Yeah, I hear you, John. So what you're saying is ultimately the default, if we leave it as is, if we take a hands-free approach on what's going on. The AI is going to eat a huge amount of the work that we currently spend overly too much time doing. And then ultimately, the business will rightly say, well, okay, we don't need you guys anymore. Because AI is going to do the sourcing, it's going to do the processing, all of the stuff there, hiring managers are going to actually revert back to the pre-digital era when that was the structure of recruiting.

36:54Prior to digital emerging, there was no such thing as internal TA. It was just a function that HR occasionally did. And what they did was indeed post jobs on a, well, it was field advertising then. It was posting on a newspaper and then processing the candidates and then just batch routing them to the hiring manager to review. There was no other function for recruiting at that point. We expanded out of being a task of HR into becoming its own discipline, its own professional identity. And now the task is, you know, we have to continue the expansion rather than the contraction, because I think AI has the effect of eating a lot of the stuff we do.

37:34John Vlastelica: Yeah, 100%.

37:38Headless software, John. A lot of people will be thinking, you know, I've heard this term before, but what does this mean? We have seen a very, a really interesting deal just this week, haven't we, with Salesforce integrating, how do you even call it, with Anthropic in some way, they're calling it Claudeforce. And the concept seems to be, you know what, you don't need to log into Salesforce, just speak to your agent in Claude, and Claude will interact with Salesforce. And basically, Salesforce is just a database and uses interface with the agent. Now, if that is what headless software looks like, how does that transform the recruited job in your opinion job?

38:23John Vlastelica: I think in some ways it's good. So I think, you know, one of the challenges I had as a practitioner that everyone that's ever rolled out a new ATS or some new, you know, hiring manager process, You know, there's so much friction. There's so much, like no one wants a new login. No one wants to go into some new tool. Hiring managers don't want to have to review resumes in the ATS or even in a LinkedIn, you know, folder or anything. They just want stuff the way they want it. You know, email me, even print this out so I can review it, you know, kind of thing. So I think in a way, it's going to make having hiring managers engage with something on the backend a lot easier if they're engaging with it through whatever tools they're using every day anyways.

39:07John Vlastelica: So I think in that way, it eliminates some friction. I think the risk is really what I highlighted earlier, that if we haven't shown a menu that shows what real talent advising looks like, and this bot is 24-7 instant response, every best practice hung on almost any topic, but certainly in recruiting, every best practice known to man in recruiting is a 30-second Gen AI prompt away right now. So, so, you know, if I have a tool that can not only like an agent that can actually schedule and do some basic kind of, you know, pre-qualification kind of, or sorting for me and, and, you know, can, can do, can do a lot of things that have been transactional recruiter, you know, tasks in the past.

39:49John Vlastelica: And then I can also ask it questions like, Hey, how many people should I have on my interview team? Like I heard Google does this four thing and Amazon has this bar raiser program. Like, how should I be doing that? ChatGPT is very good at engaging with you on that stuff. And so my fear for us is that, you know, where are we inserting ourselves not to replace what it can do because there's real value in hiring. I love hiring managers that are interested and want to learn stuff. But I wonder like, where do we insert ourselves in, in a world where the kind of hiring manager self-service becomes baked into, I can fill my own rec.

40:27Not that I want to, but I can kind of do it.

40:29John Vlastelica: It's not hard. When you see a Paradox demo, for example, which has been largely headless software from the first time I saw a demo of it, it's fascinating how easy it is to use. There's so little friction, right? And so I think that's where we're going to see some opportunity is I think it's going to be easier in a way to deploy some stuff and some company-specific stuff on the back end. And I'm not talking about just generic chat GPT, but, you know, some company specific process and guidelines and comp and stuff. But I think we're going to see hiring managers largely not want to have a 45 minute kickoff strategy meeting when they can just do it throughout the day and ping little questions and just kind of keep things running.

41:11John Vlastelica: Right. I think that's going to be quite normal. So then the question is, what is the recruiter going to do? And that's where if your business is going through some transformation, you know, what got us here isn't going to get us there. If the executive is saying, you know, I need my org to look like this in the next five years or two years and a hiring manager that hasn't trickled down, I think a really important role of the recruiter, as I said earlier, is going to be the inspection and accountability mechanism to make sure that hiring manager who's not engaging with recruiting isn't just is not building the wrong org.

41:44John Vlastelica: I mean, that is a very high risk right now is that they just kind of copy paste, use generic best practices, generic messaging, the stuff that isn't necessarily going to get us the org we need. Yeah. And also, I mean, I'm a fan of hiring managers self-serve generally because I think a little bit more ownership from the managers is a good thing. But there's going to be an alignment problem. If organizations, for instance, are in this transformational moment, everyone recognized that's the case. It's a different organization in two years than it is today. But who is ensuring all of the managers are actually hiring towards that end goal?

42:24They have slightly different incentives, given the fact everyone's a person managing their own career, managing their own jobs. Lots of managers are going to hire based on what's best for them individually. And again, not necessarily best for the company. so this is where TA ends up becoming either a gatekeeper or all the bar raiser and the coordinator or the aligner of all of these disparate teams but even better maybe they become the talent sort of true talent acquisition in the sense that they end up becoming the recruiters in a truest sense they make the hiring decision and what we call hiring managers today simply do the performance management sort of wants to present in.

43:09So maybe that's -

43:11John Vlastelica: I think at a minimum, yeah, I think at a minimum, 50 % of a recruiter's job will look a lot more like an executive recruiter today. Like I think we'll see recruiters do, you know, very inefficient, high touch, lower volume kind of work for critical recs. And I think hiring manager self-service or automation will take care of a lot of the well-defined, you know, higher volume roles that where you can just frankly, because of the market candidate expectations, you can just, you know, leverage a lot of automation. You don't have to do a lot of, you know, outbound sourcing, you don't have to do a lot of selling, you don't have to get special comp approved, or, you know, remote work approvals, or those kinds of things.

43:51John Vlastelica: So I think that's going to be a piece of it. But I would add, you know, back to the kind of what role the recruiter plays, you know, inspection and accountability, I'm very passionate about, because there's very little of that that goes on. We don't even have invisibility into, for example, what hiring managers and interviewers are asking in interviews. And some of us don't even have visibility. We're not only not leading a conversation, a hiring decision meeting. We're not even in the room or we're not even on the call when it happens. I think that fundamentally we are in the translation business.

44:22John Vlastelica: And what I mean by that is that the talent advisor and the TA leader who succeeds in the future has to be fantastic at going to the business and understanding kind of business goals and the capabilities that they're trying to build in their teams. And then we translate that probably in partnership with the HR team into the talent implications. What does that mean? Based on the current mix we have and what they're saying they're gonna need to do in the next two or three years, what are the talent implications? More of this, less of that, more generalists, more senior, more technical, less technical.

44:55John Vlastelica: And then we translate that into what good looks like. So now we're defining the hiring standards for that kind of talent. And then that turns into talent strategy. How are we going to source, assess, decide, close, onboard, ramp, measure this stuff? I think that's something that is going to be more front and center for those folks that are making really good money in recruitment is they're translators of stuff. And we've always been translators at the rec level, right? Translators at the rec level is, you know, I might have to, when I'm sourcing, I have to think like, what's the actual work? and it might not just be someone who's done these exact nine things on this job description.

45:33John Vlastelica: I have to go out, for example, at Amazon, one of the things in the early days, you know, I had managers telling my team, like, you know, we want someone with five years of large scale e-commerce experience. And this is like 2000 where like we are that like there's not people like, what are you talking about? There's what companies are we going to go to there, right? And so we had to be like, so tell us more about the work. And as we got into the work, they're like, oh, we need people that deal with, you know, really high transaction, very, very high transaction systems. I'm like, like banking.

46:03John Vlastelica: No, we need e-commerce. Okay. We need people that really know security really, really well. People are nervous about putting their credit cards on the internet. Okay. So like banking. No, we need e-commerce. Now we need companies that are global, that have millions of transactions that like banking. And eventually we started to identify these adjacent industries or these adjacent skill sets that we could bring in. And that's the kind of stuff that I think you could ask ChatGPT to do that if you knew to ask that. The issue is I think recruiters are particularly good, the good recruiters are particularly good at listening to hiring managers, got unrealistic expectations or such a narrow profile.

46:41John Vlastelica: They have to come out of this company, this school, this background, this job title. And they're really good at going, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait a minute. Before we jump to that, help me understand the work, like the actual work this person's going to do. And then let's back our way into the capabilities or skills they need. And now let's start to talk about together collaboratively who we, you and me, Hung, think we should target the profiles, plural profiles, not one single ideal profile. Let's talk about that together. And maybe we'll uncover there's some universities or there's some industries or there's some companies that might produce that kind of talent.

47:15John Vlastelica: That kind of translation skill, I think, is there for a lot of us, I think we need to level it up a little more from kind of a single rec mindset to a multi-rec or department or org level kind of thinking. Yeah, very, very good, John. I totally sort of hear your feeling on this. And I want to just kind of double down a little bit on this concept of how the recruiter function, the TA function might evolve. You mentioned that sort of the mechanics and the behaviors that we see currently in exec search will start trickling through the rest of the organization because companies will be more motivated to hire these extraordinary talents that are gonna make the times 10X difference on whatever department it will be, and perhaps less interested in just getting bodies to man a team.

48:09And the bodies to man a team, maybe that is hiring managers self-serve. So arguably, if bodies in the team could do the job, that would be also in the line sort of in a target area for future automation, because you think, okay, if it is as mechanical as that, then perhaps there's no longer huge longevity in those types of jobs. And so hiring a manager self-service is basically stepping stone towards full automation. That's great. TA can step away a little bit from that. where we need to be is being that the talent scout for these people that make a huge difference and this is where conversations will require multi-year cultivation you know you don't hire this type of talent by putting an advert and having them apply you need to have the conversation and not even have these people ever in pipeline like a lot of the elite type of recruiters are never processed.

49:04You don't put them through a pipeline. What you do is you build a relationship with these people. And when the time is right to have a conversation as to how they may contribute to the organization, that's when you're the person that needs to bring that sort of fellow into the mix.

49:19John Vlastelica: I see Simon Mullins - And that kind of person, Hong, cannot be carrying 40 recs. Right. Like, I mean, executive recruiters don't carry 40 recs. That is an incredibly inefficient recruiter in the sense that not ineffective, but inefficient. That is a recruiter who is manually scheduling and rescheduling stuff by phone or by text, who's not saying, click on my Calendly link. That is a recruiter who is not using LinkedIn recruiters AI to generate, you know, customize and quotes, you know, outreach. They're finding someone that knows this person to get to them. They're doing, you know, I hate to say it like this, but like the real recruiting work of like headhunting a lot more.

50:00John Vlastelica: And the offers are more complicated. And

50:06John Vlastelica: getting the executives aligned on what they're even looking for and coaching the business to think about the trade-offs because candidates aren't perfect, that is incredibly inefficient, incredibly important work. But if it's measured the same way that we've measured recruiting historically, someone's going to say that's not a good recruiter. And yet they could be the game changer recruiter that elevates the whole organization or elevates the function or drives real revenue or reduces the expense of having lost revenue of having all these vacancies in critical areas. And so I think that's going to be one of the things that is going to be looked at a lot more with scrutiny.

50:46John Vlastelica: And this is where TA leaders have to be really great is the traditional thinking around how big should my recruiting team be of, well, we have to hire 100 recs and one recruiter can do 20 recs, can fill 20 jobs in this time period. So therefore, we need five recruiters, right? And I think that math is done. And that's the math that most people have been using up until very recently. It's a math I used. And it's the math I inherited from whoever did it that way before. And that's how finance likes to think about it. And I think now there's going to be a really different justification for how we're segmenting our teams.

51:20John Vlastelica: And we have to be able to explain inefficiency as a feature, not a bug. The fact that we are doing things manually, we are doing things that are like old school, like scheduling in-person interviews and not just doing a Zoom. And we're doing a realistic job preview with another person. And that takes an hour to do. And yeah, we could have done a video and just put it on our career site, but we're actually connecting Hung with someone else who is thinking about moving from the UK to California, and we're going to have a person get on, you know, that is inefficient, but it might be what it takes to get that kind of talent.

51:52John Vlastelica: And I hope the TA leaders have a segmented org strategy. That's what we are certainly talking to our clients about is how do you make sure you're differentiating and not getting this kind of how big is your total org? Well, AI can double the productivity. So do the math. If you can double, that means half the org. No, no, no, no, no. We have to rethink kind of the value of the recruiter and we have to be able to demonstrate the value too. We have to show the work, right? But we have to rethink it. And that, there's urgency to get this, to get the business and finance trained on this, educated on this.

52:24John Vlastelica: That is a huge role for recruiting leaders today. Like right now, we gotta be having those, we're coming into budget season. Like I hope people are prepared to talk that way because otherwise I think we cut way too deep too soon. Yeah, really, really good point, John. And almost, you know, the future structure of the TA function, um it's getting defined into into very distinct roles like the person i would say that's very good at the high touch uh the in using your wonderful phrase john the intentional inefficiency i remember reading a blog post that you wrote about that i thought it was wonderful and it's exactly this uh it's about putting the extra human effort in to providing the over service that's what's building the relationship with these people that would otherwise ignore your your messaging and that's what gets you to a point where you can be the person that has the decisive conversation two three years down the pipe now that type of person how do you measure that compared to the measurements that we have either developed ourselves or have accepted over the last 15 years which is all funnel metrics you know so how do we measure someone who basically may not do placements anymore.

53:36You know, this guy.

53:37John Vlastelica: Yeah, it's going to be interesting. I don't know. I mean, ultimately, you know, going back to the company as my customer, I want to make sure that my TA team, if I'm running a team, is in service to the business, right? It's not just in service to how many wrecks we filled or average time to fill targets. I want to make sure we're in service to the business. And so I think one of the things we're going to have to look at is much more kind of org health, you know? And I think you were talking to Adam Gordon about talent density recently and that idea of like, do we have the right people on the team?

54:09John Vlastelica: And I don't know if this is true, Hong, you might actually know, but I was reading something about how healthcare outcomes are measured differently in different countries. And I know that I read at least that years ago, there are some countries where doctors are paid more if people are healthy. Like you're kind of basically to maintain health and preventative, which means heavy rewards for preventative medicine. And culturally, that's what you do. Financially, it's what you do. The incentives are aligned. That is not how health care works in the United States at all. And so you're actually rewarded for booking, taking, prescribing more meds, scheduling more appointments, getting more, using the expensive equipment you bought to make sure you can justify the ROI.

54:53John Vlastelica: I think it's gonna be a little bit like analogous to that. I think we're gonna have to figure out a way to measure org health and see if there's a, it can't just be a hiring manager satisfaction survey, but we're gonna have to figure out a way to connect the dots. And this is out, this is a year, I don't know if we're ever even, we can't even do quality of hire today on a rec level. So who knows if we'll be able to do this, But that's kind of more how I'm thinking about quality of team, quality of org, org health. I think that's going to be the standard that we aim for. And I think we have to be able to demonstrate at the recruiter level with key hires, key internal moves, key retention, key people we retained.

55:30John Vlastelica: I think we have to be able to talk about that differently than just how many wrecks did you fill, right, which has been the primary metric. Yeah, and that's a massive expansion of scope from the concept of talent acquisition. I wonder whether we're overdue like a relabel. And I know people say, look, is this substantive or semantic? But talent acquisition itself may be a constraining term for where we want to go. Because maybe we're not acquiring talent anymore. Or perhaps talent acquisition is a component of what we're doing. But what we really should be doing is organizational capability building.

56:07As you say, organizational health, that does not necessarily mean just hiring more bodies in there. It could be letting a few more people go and streamlining. It could be developing people internally. It could be circulating them internally. It could be making build-by-bot type decisions, which we need to get involved in. Okay, folks, we're coming to the end of this wonderful conversation. Clearly, we need to continue this chat. I am delighted to say we will be doing precisely that because me and John are going to be meeting in Nashville in a couple of weeks. And we're going to be reprising this conversation and taking it to the next level.

56:42It will be a part two on that. So make sure you're attending Nashville RecFest to USA. I'm going to share the link in the chat in a minute. But whilst we still have John for a couple more minutes, why don't you, if you have any questions for John now that you have the same degree of urgency that needs to be answered, go ahead and put the comments in. Actually use the QA feature on the right-hand side of your screen and submit some questions to John there. We're going to go to those and then we'll see whether we still have time to answer. Okay, John, I need to end with the question, I guess your prognosis as to what you see happening with AI and TA over the next 12 months.

57:29So this is, we've all been alarmed at the speed at which AI innovation is occurring. So no one can keep up with the modern releases. No one can keep up with the latest things that are happening. I'm constantly surprised stroke shocked. So there's a spectrum, surprised stroke shocked as to what can be done with technology going forward. Can you describe the sort of things that recruiters should not be spending time on today because you think AI will do it better? And where should we be expanding our sort of footprint because AI can't do it better or should not do it?

58:08John Vlastelica: I think, yeah, I mean, I think an obvious one is, you know, candidate fraud, candidate identity, verification, misrepresentation of skills and experience. I think that's an obvious area where I'd like to see AI do a lot more. I think the expectation from the business is going to be that you're, when you're sharing candidates with me, they've already gone through some kind of gate to make sure this is a real person and can do stuff. I think that we are going to see, even though I think interviews are very imperfect, I think we're going to see TA really expand its role around assessment, not just doing like interviews, but playing a much bigger role in assessment strategy, assessment process, playing a much bigger, I'll say louder role in hiring decision meetings.

58:51John Vlastelica: So not just being a fly on the wall or there to take notes or just to facilitate, but bringing a point of view, I think that's going to be really important, not just because of the inspection accountability stuff I talked about, but because I got to say, I think generally interviewers and hiring managers are average to below average at predicting success. And I think this is an area that we as a profession need to get a lot smarter and more capable around. And I think the business, if they can sniff our expertise around that, or we can add real value, I think we're going to get pulled into more conversations.

59:22John Vlastelica: I would love to live in a world Hung where someone says, I don't want to make a decision on this candidate until I get Hung's opinion. So we need to get, so hold off. We're not doing this. We're not moving ahead. I want to hear what Hung thinks of this person because I trust his opinion because he talks to hundreds of candidates. He knows what's out there. He's good at helping us think through what's trainable, what's not trainable. He knows the generalist specialist mix we're looking for on the team. He's good at understanding potential. He's better at the soft skill evaluation than we are. We're better at the technical stuff.

59:51John Vlastelica: Like I want to live in that world. And I think that's going to be what has been maybe 10 % of our job is going to expand to 30, 40, 50 % of our job. And I don't know, it's not that AI can't help us with that. As I mentioned in the kind of maturity of level one to five, I think AI can help us get insights and bring credibility, but I still think that's a human intervention and a human value add. So I mean, given that we're wrapping up, we only have a minute or two. I mean, that's where I'd say I see big opportunity is AI to help more with candidate fraud and then recruiter to play a much bigger role around candidate assessment.

1:00:24Yeah, fantastic stuff. John Vlastelika, what a wonderful chat this is. You've got so much energy, John. I think that's also something that's underrated. I wonder whether that's also going to be a component to the future success of TA, like someone who's just got like booming energy and not be a passive person. That's part of the problem, I think. So great to have a chat with you, John, brilliant stuff. What's happening for you next couple of weeks before we catch up in Nashville?

1:00:54John Vlastelica: I am, yeah, I'm getting ready. I'm prepping my decks for Wreckfest. I've been working on it this morning, actually. And yeah, I've got my own podcast I launched recently. So I've got some podcast stuff going on called Try Harder is Not a Strategy. I've got a whole bunch of writing queued up. I have another article coming out, I think, on Tuesday on my new LinkedIn newsletter. I've been tackling this idea of like, should you be building a recruiting machine? It kind of goes to that inefficiency by design kind of stuff and thinking a lot more around this idea of kind of how we see ourselves as kind of contractor versus consultant versus something else and how the math needs to change on that.

1:01:33John Vlastelica: So just thinking a lot lately and just feeling that urgency to get all the stuff out of my active brain that wakes up sometimes at five in the morning with a complete blog post like pre-written in my head is just trying to trying to get some of that stuff out before we go into conference season here so that's that's my plan so and wrapping up summer and rain is on the forecast for like the next seven days so i feel like i feel like summer ended for me prematurely but um wrapping up summertime as well yeah fantastic stuff good luck with all that john brilliant to have you on the show and i look forward to seeing you in nashville in a couple of weeks okay that's it folks john in conversation um we'll see you all Nashville.

1:02:11See you later.

1:02:11John Vlastelica: Thank you. Thank you.