HHH_James Ellis
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Hiring Happy Hour, where we celebrate the human side of hiring. I'm your host, Nicole Hammond, and together we'll pull back the curtain on people shaping the future of work, the innovators, the dreamers, the change makers behind today's hiring experience. These are the real stories behind the dashboards.
From leaders transforming talent acquisition to the everyday moments that remind us why we love hiring in the first place, to connect people with purpose, hiring happy hours. Brought to you by Smartrecruiters, an SAP company, the AI powered software for super human hiring, helping organizations hire faster, smarter, and we're human.
Nicole Hammond: Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Hiring Happy Hour. to say, excited is not the right word, but I have a guest that's not a customer, so this is a totally different perspective. Uh, and he has actually helped me in the world of podcasting as I am new and [00:01:00] he's not. And so we're excited to have an impressive consultant, speaker, author, and podcaster.
Oh yes. He is a natural who specializes in practical employer brand transformation. So candidates, if you're listening, uh, companies, if you need branding, uh, yeah, he's your guy. Um, he has written five books, not four, not six, but five, including one that you may have heard of called Talent Chooses You and Becoming Chewable and Hosts his own podcast called The Talent Cast.
Uh, last year, actually, I can't say that anymore. It's 2026 2024. He earned a Transform Award finalist nod for inspiring resource of the year. And I do find you to be inspiring Owner and chief brand builder at Employer Brand Labs. Please join me in welcoming James Ellis.
James Ellis: Thanks so much. It's been great to [00:02:00] be here. Everybody have a great time. I gotta go. Bye.
Nicole Hammond: You can't do that,
James Ellis: up to that?
Nicole Hammond: James.
James Ellis: Lives up to that? Come on. What you, well here, I feel like I should t translate. What you just said is, Hey, in front of us is someone who, uh, You know, is a total ham and he is a total loud mouth.
And you've probably seen or heard him before and you've probably sat through his garbage, blah, blah, blah before. But he keeps writing books, so we keep inviting him to shows. So why don't you bring, welcome our friend James, like that is Reen like that's in my head what I heard. I'm just saying.
Nicole Hammond: And You know what your advice to me before we started a recording about just say what you're, You know, preempted not to say I, I'm gonna take that going forward. So who knows? This might
James Ellis: go.
Nicole Hammond: sunset in a week.
James Ellis: We'll burn it to the ground. It'll be, it'll be a fantastic finale.
Nicole Hammond: Uh, James, I'm, I am really excited to have you here because I think even in our preparation conversations, you bring a spark, but also a different perspective. And I would love to hear from you around what your hiring happy hour is.
James Ellis: [00:03:00] Man, that's so much like for right now, I'm, I'm. So first off, I am obsessed with employer brand. Anybody who's heard me talk before knows I've been totally obsessed with this. I have no other hobbies really. There's nothing related. I used to play drums a long time ago. That's long since stopped. So if it's not my wife and my kid and it's not employer brand, it's not really on the table for me. I have noticed that as of late because I'm a huge Reddit fan. For some of you are also fans and some of you. Are recruiters and you go to recruiter hell, and you wonder, why am I a fan of Reddit? And I understand that. I appreciate that I get the whole mix of that particular kettle. But I say I love Reddit because. It, it is. There's an unceasing and line of people are coming up to Reddit saying, here's my resume. Why won't anybody call me? fascinating. You wanna see the pain from the other side of the fence. You wanna see what they're going through. You wanna see the layers upon layers upon layers of bullshit, dogma, and bad advice that have codified and calcified into what.
You are [00:04:00] supposed to do the sheer the arguments over the numbers of pages in a resume. Blows my mind. The number of people who present these resumes are like, well, that's all times new Roman and font. Your margin is like this. The width of a hair you've used every single space of it. It is a gray page. It is a completely gray page as far as I can tell, and you're wondering why no one will call you. I have some thoughts. And so I being the idiot that I am, and I will own that title, I weighed in and I start giving responses. And no one likes my responses. No one, and I'm not even being mean. I'm trying to be super nice. I'm trying to say things like, Hey. I'm sure you're really qualified, but there are a hundred other people just as qualified as you are, in the odds of one to a hundred, guess what you lose.
So your job is not to be one of the hundred. Your job is to be not one of the hundred, because recruiters and I, I use this line all the time. Everybody says recruiters take 30 seconds to review a resume. That's a lie. They take [00:05:00] six. They take six seconds to decide if they should spend the other 24 seconds wasted on you, or if this is a waste of time and you have six seconds to make them say, not only am I qualified, but I'm different and you should put the computer down now, your coffee down now, and immediately pick up the phone and call me because You know you have the sense that perhaps I might be exactly.
Who your hiring manager has been waiting patiently to see. And that is where the bar for recruiting and hiring is. And if you don't embrace that, I don't care how many power words you have, I don't care how many times you read what color is my parachute, I don't care about whether it's one page or 27 pages.
It don't matter. Until you get the threshold of this is the value I'm providing, you aren't gonna get the call and no one wants to hear it.
Nicole Hammond: Yep.
James Ellis: I'm just, I'm just leaning
Nicole Hammond: You're honest.
James Ellis: Is what I
Nicole Hammond: You're honest and here is his hiring app. Happy hour slash guilty Pleasure. Reddit, R-E-D-D-I. For those of you that have never heard of it, please go.
James Ellis: Please,
Nicole Hammond: can go down rabbit holes on any topic.
James Ellis: [00:06:00] Rabbit Holes of rabbit holes on rabbit holes. I mean this, look here, here. Here's how Rabbit Hole gets, there is a re a Reddit thread. There's, I'm sorry, there's a subreddit, which is what the comm sub communities are about. A particular. A coffee espresso maker that I own, and there's hundreds of people who talk about, well, have you tried pressing down and have you gotten an adapter that does that?
Like we go nerd bombers on a particular
Nicole Hammond: it.
James Ellis: Coffee maker from Britain for that was, You know, 200 bucks. is a thread in a subreddit for everything you've ever, ever thought of.
Nicole Hammond: Love it. But I love our topic even more because you're taking advice for candidates. So if you are listening recruiters, hiring managers. Think about what James is sharing because he's giving the advice to candidates. But this is something that, again, he's being very honest, whether people like it or not, um, around the truth.
Right? It is true. It is true. We barely spend time going through these things because we are busy. So I [00:07:00] wanna get into some of the advice that you have given to candidates, right? The interesting stat for you on this topic. Uh, 32 to 200. Is what an average candidate applies to, and it usually comes around the average of 163 applications to where they get a job that is defeating,
James Ellis: That's the average, that's the worst part. There's so many people for whom it's like that is the, the that's day. That's day one. That's easy. And the tools that make it easy to just
Nicole Hammond: Oh.
James Ellis: Your jobs everywhere, inflate those numbers artificially because you're not doing what it takes to make your value clear to that company.
So consequently, you're just flooding the market with and then it just makes your numbers look bad. And then the worst part of that is it just makes you feel. Bad. I mean, there's enough bad news out in the world as it is. I mean, there's no need to be piling on. There's no need to go making more. But for you to decide, I'm gonna send my resume to a thousand companies and a thousand jobs and not get any responses, I must suck. Can we interrupt the pattern just a little bit [00:08:00] before we get to that stage?
Nicole Hammond: You don't suck. You don't suck. It's just you have to change something. Right? Or a few things. So tell us, James, what would be the honest, true advice that we would read on Reddit around what candidates can do to improve this?
James Ellis: I am a big fan of thinking about, of taking things, so I'm a strategist, so I think that means taking things to the nth degree, small and big. You say what happens when no one applies? What happens when the world applies? Like how do you really just kind of push yourself to put yourself in a box or say, okay, now I know where the constraints are and I once did a, 'cause I am a resume nerd myself.
I like editing my friend's resumes there. There are people like that.
Nicole Hammond: I counting
James Ellis: there are
Nicole Hammond: how many times you say geek and nerd. Okay. Just, just so we know.
James Ellis: Uh, just feel, feel free. It's a drinking game. Some people are gonna die. Um,
Nicole Hammond: Hiring happy hour.
James Ellis: Exactly, exactly. Brought to you by not Alcoholics Anonymous. Anyway, so see, this is the saltiness. So the thing I think about is what would a perfect resume look like?
Like what would a [00:09:00] mind-bending resume look like? And I thought, who would have an amazing resume? You know, who would have an amazing, perfect resume, Oprah. Oprah, Oprah's gotta have the world's greatest resume. Hi. You know, I only had the number one talk show for bajillion years. I only had the number one magazine for bajillion years.
I only had, I started schools in Africa. I'm, I'm an Oscar nominee. I let, let's be fair, because of Oprah, there's a whole audience who read more books for 10 years than be if than without her. Right? So what would Oprah's resume be? Would Oprah's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. Let's not even tell you how much, how much shit she sold, and a couple of individuals who might be in politics these days who we, I kind of wish weren't.
But anyway, separate conversation. My politics are pretty clear anyway. What would op Oprah's resume be? Would it be professional summary? am seeking an employment role in which I can leverage my 32 years of public speaking and connection experience to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I've already fallen asleep. No. Oprah's resume is real simple. One. Had the world [00:10:00] had the number one TV talk show for 27 years. Two Had a number one magazine for 13 years. Three. Sold Alon of books. Four. Oscar nominated, five. I'm Oprah. Call me. End of resume.
Nicole Hammond: So we should all change our name to Oprah.
James Ellis: I think, I think that's, You know, honestly, You know, from an SEO standpoint, it wouldn't hurt anyway.
The, the thing is, is we forget that resumes are commercials. We have been tricked into thinking there's a structure and there's a way you're supposed to do things that HR has tricked us into saying, Hey, we don't like dealing with your. Sloppy messy experience and skillset that we don't even understand.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna put you in a series of boxes, and all the boxes are gonna look exactly the same, and we get to have all the power of choosing which box we decide to leverage. And that's bad. You don't wanna play that game. That is a game where you're waiting to be chosen, and that is a game you are going to lose way more than you're ever gonna win.
Nicole Hammond: Get outside.
James Ellis: your I know, right? You gotta get outta, you gotta break the box. You gotta say what is outside the box. Because the truth is, if you, and [00:11:00] here's the thing, there's so much bad information around recruiting and hiring from the candidate side, right? We've all heard the tricks about, well, the ATS is rejecting people.
And so what are the four tricks on how you trick the ATS into doing the AI bots? You're going, and Amy and Miller are banging her head against the wall going, you people have no idea what you're talking about. And the rest of the recruiting world's going, I can't believe we still have to have these conversations. There's so much bad knowledge out there. The truth is HR wants you to do this simply because HR doesn't understand who they're hiring for. If they're trying to hire, if the company's trying to hire a data scientist, what does HR know about data science? Nothing. Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that.
They're not supposed to know that, but somehow they're in charge of driving what the shape of that box looks like, and then they pass that box over. Recruiters who've gotta fill that box with as many bodies. Possible so the hiring manager can pick from that box to figure what, none of this makes any sense at all in any other, You know, supply chain methodology.
You'd all go, what is going on? Who was drunk when they set this up? you understand that model, you understand, oh, there's Alon in that [00:12:00] process, I can actually ignore. Because while HR has Alon of power at the beginning of that process of defining that box, they don't actually select from the box.
They don't actually look in the box. They don't only actually care about the box once it's. Pass to the recruiter. They don't care.
Nicole Hammond: it's true.
James Ellis: if we, if we ignore that, okay, we have two people we have to serve the recruiter whose job is to bring the smart people to the hiring manager. So they, and they wanna do that as fast and quickly and simply and smoothly as humanly possible.
They do. They don't wanna look at 400 resumes, they wanna look at two and call it a day. So you have to be so obviously not qualified. amazing for this role, which is really hard. 'cause recruiters don't know much about data science either, or computational biology or nursing or whatever it is they're hiring for. Right?
Nicole Hammond: So how do they do that?
James Ellis: how do they do that? They have to stand out. They have to show I am qualified. So one, Hey recruiter, you're not gonna feel like an idiot if you bring me to your boss, your hiring manager, because at least I'm
Nicole Hammond: [00:13:00] Mm-hmm.
James Ellis: You can say, Hey, this is a crazy one, but it might be worth a look. That's fine.
'cause I'm still qualified. I'm not. I'm just not like the other 99 very qualified people. I'm different somehow. The best way to do that is to connect what you do to the value that the company values. Which might be, oh, you're a data scientist. Yeah, but I also code. Oh, but I also actually understand the industry you work in all day long.
And I've actually built a solution that solves X and Y and Z inside that solution. Oh. But actually, I developed an app that leverages data science to get more people to do X, y, and Z. Oh. Oh, that's interesting. That's different. That is not what's on the job posting. Now, I'm not saying stick your mountaineering and I like to kayak and take long walks on the beach in personal interests and stick 'em on the thing I'm saying. If it shows not only that you're valuable, but that your value is specific to you, of the resume and everything else.
Nicole Hammond: So.
I love this. I love this because superhero is a theme word I use for many of [00:14:00] my directs. Um, I mean our, our channel's called superhero, COE, center of Excellence. Uh, so I'm not kidding, but also too. There are a number of ways to get through that initial right, the hundreds of thousands. You still have to have some of those skill sets to that data scientist, like get past the match we call it.
Uh,
James Ellis: Yeah.
Nicole Hammond: You do that all well, while also sharing your super heroic amazingness, uh, cover letter, letter to manager? Like how do you do that?
James Ellis: I'd like to avoid cover letters. There is so much dog about around that, and I'm old enough to remember having to write a bunch of cover letters, but cover letters existed in a day in which your resume was. Laid out and someone you printed 20 or a hundred copies at the printer on the linen paper with a little bit of finish. You couldn't change it. It was, yeah, it was baked. It was locked in. You could not change it, and the cover letter was there to say, let me put a wrap around this to explain what the heck this resume
Nicole Hammond: Yes.
James Ellis: Well, we don't live in that world anymore. Your resume is A PDF, which means you got it in Google Docs, [00:15:00] which means you have 4,000 different versions of it depending on who you're talking to, as you should, because if your resume clearly in the first two inches. Of the top says, this is who I am. This is my value. This is how I'm different. That is what a recruiter is going to look at to just say, should I bother reading the rest? Now, you do have to get past that match,
Nicole Hammond: Yes.
James Ellis: But the best part is the match is not the match. Right? Remember, HR drove this bus for a while and they decided to fill that job posting with 14 trillion bullet points because apparently they're paid in bullet points. Not all bullet points are created equally. I'm gonna guess that the first two. Maybe three. And sometimes just the first bullet point is actually the job and everything else is, well, they look really lonely. Let me put some more stuff in there. Right, right. Saying you must have, You know, You know, good, uh, written and written and spoken communication skills. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Assumed, assumed, assumed. Hey, you should know how to communicate with those. Yeah. Hey, you should know [00:16:00] how to work within an office. Hey, you should know how to use the Microsoft Office suite. What year is this? I mean, come on. Like the stuff like that, you're like, that is not the critical stuff.
The hiring manager's not gonna say, this person, the hiring manager is not gonna say, mark Zuckerberg. What an amazing coder, but doesn't know Microsoft Office that well. So I guess we have to pass. No, no know what's critical and it's based on what the order those bullets are, and those top ones are critical.
So if you can up in a breath, kind of say, yes, I can do that and have done that. And here's the thing we add to it, the flavor twist, that kind of gives it a little punch, right? Are you putting mustard on that burger? You putting ketchup, you put barbecue sauce, you put in a thousand islands. What's gonna give it the spin that goes, oh, this is different. That is very often enough to get you out of the pile of qualifieds, but looks all the same pile. And that's 'cause that's what the game is.
Nicole Hammond: And that it is a game. It is a game, and I like the way that you, uh, beat this game. I do feel like I'm playing a video game where like match the, matches the vaults that you have to jump past to get by, to get to the big bad guy that you [00:17:00] need to pass and tell him you're a superhero. Uh, but I think too.
LinkedIn profiles, career sites, like all that stuff. Is it fluff or is it just adding to your amazingness?
James Ellis: It depends. So if you are a candidate, and I'm a LinkedIn fan, so I use it all the time. I have challenges. I have issues with it. I could complain about it all day long. Lord knows we all could, and I'm on it all day. So I guess it must be something.
Nicole Hammond: Ooh.
James Ellis: The thing is, is that you have to understand there's two ways to come to a candidate. The candidate applies and the resume is the doorway or. The candidate is waiting for the recruiter to find them on LinkedIn, in which case LinkedIn is the doorway. Those doorways should be similar because your unique, special, magical value, your particular superpower is your superpower and should be communicated at the top of both,
Nicole Hammond: Okay.
James Ellis: But you should not assume that one leads directly to the other.
Nicole Hammond: Okay.
James Ellis: So if you say, have a superpower and I'm gonna put it on my resume, your superpower is about get me outta that pile.
Nicole Hammond: Yeah.
James Ellis: I'm different. I'm qualified, but get me outta the power pile. LinkedIn's [00:18:00] different because LinkedIn, you get found via searches, and those searches are Alon more complicated than reading the first three sentences of your resume.
Nicole Hammond: Okay.
James Ellis: So you can and should list the skills and experience inside each of those jobs and inside your kind of about me page, because that is how someone using a Boolean query, feel free to Google that if you don't know what that is.
Nicole Hammond: Or spell it.
James Ellis: they go. Um, to find you, they're going to list all these criteria, and you have to meet those criteria in order to be found in the search results.
But once you're found in the search results, your headline tells them who you are and why you're not like everybody else. So the rules are similar, but you gotta adjust the
Nicole Hammond: Okay. Okay. Noted. You know, this makes me happy because I, I think my LinkedIn profile's pretty cool. I like it. Whiskey man's wife. I've got three kids on my back. It tells a story. I am a superhero. I'll pat myself on my back. I have 140 year old grandma downstairs that I also take care of. So, so here we are.
Um, and I am not selling myself on this [00:19:00] show. I am not, uh. I wanna switch gears because I think you have done an amazing job helping candidates to truly focus on how to become a superhero and get past, match the match and truly have a chance out there. So hopefully everyone that's listening that's a candidate, um, will not have to go through 163 applications to get that job.
And you've taken some keen advice from James. I wanna talk about something else. I read one of your articles and pipeline versus job posting job boards. I think in today's world, we as companies are all as always really fighting for that top talent, but it's also now a timing game of getting to them quickly and I think.
I wanna hear more around CRM, right? We talked about this. People buy it, they don't use it. Um, maybe because it's not that easy to set up or they don't have the strategist to do it. I wanna hear your perspective on pipeline.
James Ellis: [00:20:00] Okay, so we first have to kind of take a half a step back and say the reason we're very much in the mess we're in. The reason why Alon of recruiting is expensive is because we have gotten addicted to the sugar fix that is added. We have gotten addicted to saying, well, we don't have any candidates for that thing.
Post some ads and an hour or two later we get some ar, we get some applications.
Nicole Hammond: Pray.
James Ellis: Are they good? they good? Ah, separate conversation, isn't it? But you feel good. You feel like there's activity. And when the hiring manager goes, Hey, is anybody, I don't know why it's a dude in my head, but there you are. Hey, why do we have any, have we have any applicants for my job?
And you can say, oh, we have 20. And you don't have to say that they all suck, but you can say that there's no movement and the hiring manager will go, okay, cool. Let me know when you got somebody good and they walk away for a week and you have time to kind of do the rest of the job. We've gotten addicted to that sugar fix of just, just get me some candidates quick and ads and uh, job po uh, boosting and promoting job posts on job boards are the sugar fix for this. Here's the thing, there's Alon of research that shows. you think about the perfect [00:21:00] candidates for your particular job, let's keep this in the micro. Let's keep it as individual as much as possible. 'cause it's very easy to get lost in the weeds here. You're hiring for a job. Now, assuming you're not focused on transactional hiring, meaning put the butt in the seat as fast as possible, qualified is good enough.
Next conversation. You are trying to hire someone who is there to grow the business, who is going to be a game changer, who's going to add significant creative, strategic value to your company?
Nicole Hammond: Yes.
James Ellis: That person of all those people who meet that qualification, 5% of those people are actually looking for jobs right now.
Nicole Hammond: Hmm.
James Ellis: 5% now. That is okay. You're like, oh, that makes sense. Plenty of people have jobs. They're not looking for jobs. That makes sense. That's fine. And that split makes perfect sense, except that they don't see the real danger in that. And that is of all recruiting tech tools, tactics, what have you, are geared towards that 5%, means, yeah, they're the ones with the, I'm looking for [00:22:00] work, I'm open to work banners, and they're the ones on job boards.
And they're the ones in your career site, but they're also. everybody else's career
Nicole Hammond: Yeah.
James Ellis: Also looking at everybody else's jobs and 'cause everybody else is targeting the exact same audience. So it's like saying, Hey, this fishing hole has the most fish. Yes, but everybody in the known universe is at that fishing hole too, it kind of negates any value.
The worst part is, is that because it's such a well fished space, the prices to stand there keep going up. Like you ever see ad prices go down, ever? No, I didn't think so. Me neither. So. I don't wanna get, I don't wanna stick my nose into a particularly messy business, but that is that that is the reality, which means that 95% of the people who you could be hiring, who your hiring manager would be thrilled to, bits to talk to, not on job boards and they are not looking at ads and they are not on your career site.
And they have zero interest in looking at your day in the life video, which looks Alon like everybody else's day in the life video, separate conversation,
Nicole Hammond: Yeah.
James Ellis: wanna get to them, which means, one, you can't use the methodology you do to talk to in market [00:23:00] candidates, to out market
Nicole Hammond: Okay.
James Ellis: One of the fights I have on LinkedIn on a regular basis is posting. We are hiring, doesn't work. Except to attract the people who have already applied for your jobs and are already looking for a job and were just, they were, that is not useful information to someone, not looking for a job that is akin to saying, Hey James, you wanna try this?
Amazing shampoo conditioner com? Uh uh, uh, compound. No. No, I do not. That is not valuable, useful information or product for me. For someone not in market saying you're hiring is not information, but we don't know and we're not good at talking about ourselves and talking about these jobs in ways that aren't transactional.
We've been trained to be completely transactional. Our metrics are conversion based. Our focus is about how do we get as many applicants in there and convert them as quickly and soonly as possible. But that's not necessarily the only way to do it. You could. You could say there's Alon of people out there who are really good, who aren't being talked to by Alon of, uh, recruiters.
And if they are, it's Alon of, Hey, do you want this job? To which the answer is [00:24:00] no or ignore. if you said something different to them? if you said something inspiring, educational, informative, something, engaging, something useful, something that serves not you. You wanna, you're trying to hire a data scientist.
You don't say, Hey, I have a data science job. Do you want a data science job? He knows where the data, she knows where the data science jobs are. There's, you're not, no one's hiding the data science jobs, right? if you said, Hey, based on our work, here's our predictions for what 2026 data science looks like.
Would you be interested in seeing a quick two page report? Yeah. Yeah, I would. Now, is it gonna get everybody to say
Nicole Hammond: No.
James Ellis: No. Is it gonna get a point a much higher than a 0.01% conversion rate? Yes. Because you're talking to someone about stuff they care
Nicole Hammond: Thoughtful.
James Ellis: Begins the con Yeah. It begins the conversation of saying, look. I can't sell you a job, which by the way is life changing and therefore should not be something you make a decision on neatly. I can't sell you a job in a day or an
Nicole Hammond: Yeah.
James Ellis: Do it an email. What I can do [00:25:00] is talk about how we're not like every other company, how we're different, how we have something different to offer, whether it's our mission, whether it's our work experience, whether it's our reward systems.
We have something different to offer you, and there will come a time in which you want that thing. And when you do, hi, how you doing? We should be the first place you step.
Nicole Hammond: This is great.
James Ellis: And what happens is this is, this is how you think about pipelines. It's not about how do you stuff it full like a Christmas goose like, or You know, like a Turkey you're trying to make for Thanksgiving.
You're trying to figure out what is something you can say that no one else can talk about, that they assign a very specific understanding in what you offer in their mind, so that you are now on there. These are the magic words. Consideration set well before they look for a job because the best people you wanna hire do not go to job boards.
They go to their consideration set, they go to their 5, 10, 15 companies. They go, I'd like to work there one day. They seem pretty cool and when they're ready to look for a job, they reach out. If you're thinking pipeline, you can build that relationship and feed [00:26:00] and nurture that relationship with more information so that when the time comes to your original point about speed, which I did not ignore and I did not disagree with, but what's faster? a job to a job board, getting a thousand applicants, some of whom may ha you hope might be qualified in a week, and then the week you have to spend going through 'em all like You know, panning for gold. Or you go to your CRM and your pipeline and you say. Who are the four people who'd be perfect for this job?
Who I have a relationship with? I'm gonna ping 'em right now. Hey, would you like to talk about this job? I know we haven't done this before, but I think this would be amazing for you. Can we talk about this now? You're gonna get two people to say yes, and that's way faster than waiting the week for the applicants to show up.
Nicole Hammond: This is great, and it's fascinating because you are just doubling down on thoughtfulness strategy, hiring plan, and truly taking the time to. Hunt and nurture, right? You think about posting a job out there, especially for, You know, let's just say mid-level and above, right? High volume hiring, yes, go do your thing.
[00:27:00] But for these types of roles, you should know that they're coming and also continuously engage with these individuals. And even if you don't get your top candidate, you have a few more in that consideration Pipeline. I love the word consideration. Uh. To truly talk with and engage with, possibly see at conferences, possibly have a human conversation, coming back to that combination and getting to know them.
And I think this is fascinating because we don't invest enough in this. Yes, recruiters, we know you're busy, but at the same time, but the long play gets you something the right way.
James Ellis: Uh, yeah, that's, this is where my thinking around employer branding kind of puts you at the right spot, because I don't think about employer branding as, how do I make you look good? how do I make this company look good? How do I make this job look good? When things look good, they look the same. If everybody looked, if everybody used the glam Bold glam filter from, from, uh, TikTok, we'd all look like Kardashians.
Okay, now. [00:28:00] fine if there are no other Kash Kardashians, but since it just made all of us look like Kardashians, what's the value of looking like a Kardashian?
Nicole Hammond: I'm good. Not looking like
James Ellis: value in it whatsoever.
Nicole Hammond: I'm good.
James Ellis: Yes. Again, whole, whole again for the, for those of you on Reddit, that's this whole separate rabbit hole.
Anyway. The thing about that is I build, I wanna think about brands, and I want you to think about brands not as looking good, but as being different, showing how you are not like other companies. And when You know how you're different, it's like this aperture that says of the 'cause. The challenge you're gonna get is, to your point, recruiters have no time.
How are they gonna nurture these things? I gotta have 50 relationships with individuals and I gotta write all this content. Like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Understand what makes the company unique and different and special. narrows the aperture to the two or three things you wanna talk about over and over in different ways.
If you're all about autonomy and how you offer autonomy, tell stories of autonomy. may or may not apply to the person you're talking to directly, but the more they keep seeing, wow, you really care about autonomy. I want autonomy one day and one day [00:29:00] they want it and they call you because you are the company that talks about and focuses on autonomy and they've been missing that. The other part of it is. gotta think of this as not as a spam list. Yeah, I said it. It's not a spam list. You don't just shoot emails to them because it's fun. You will burn them out. You will make them hate you. I promise. you pick a smaller group and nurture them, you can also use them as your recruiting advocates.
You can say, Hey, I've got this job that you're not gonna be great suited for, but You know what we're all about. Do You know anybody who'd be good at this? And not only are you not having to cold email, cold InMail, cold outreach, these people, and we all know what the conversion rates on that is. You're letting them speak for you because now they get what you're about, what makes you different, and they've got a relationship with lots more people than you do.
And suddenly you can expand your network to those people. And if you don't buy that person a $50 coffee down the road, you, ah, what are you doing? Come on. That should be a natural thing. But [00:30:00] this is how relationships work. And I feel like. To 98% of recruiters. This sounds like too much work and too hard, and I'm making, I'm talking crazy talk, but to 2% of recruiters, they're going, dude, we figured that out 20 years ago.
What? This is what and how the best recruiters work. I am not inventing the wheel here. I'm simply distilling great practices from the top one and 2% recruiters and saying, if you had all the time in the world, what you'd do is you'd figure out how you're special and talk about that. That's what I'm here to help with, but I'm just stealing good thinking from recruiters because I'm just there.
They're trying to serve them.
Nicole Hammond: I love it. So now here we are. Uh, we've talked about how to help candidates. We've talked to how to make recruiters increase that percent from two to more. Um, this is a great strategy I've learned, right? I think I didn't think about that ambassador component, and I'm just seeing the exponential of how five can go to 25 and more.
James Ellis: [00:31:00] Exponential
Nicole Hammond: tell you, I'm sure we could look up the stats on referrals, but quality candidates from a referral are there. So lovely. Lovely, James. All right, we're gonna switch gears. We're gonna switch gears to a fun one that I am curious about, and this is outside of work, so whether it's family or those hobbies, you can't get to, whatever it may be.
Maybe we go back to Reddit. I wanna hear what your happy hour is outside of work.
James Ellis: I look, I am a solopreneur. God, I hate that term. It's true though. It's just me in my dining room here in Chicago. Hey everybody, good to see you. Uh, these are, You know, my notes on my whiteboard. I'm surrounded by this. I am my own boss, and I'm gonna tell you right now. My boss is a jerk. My boss does not give me a day off.
My boss is always asking if I thought about that report, my boss is always asking, is there a faster way to do that? Have we invented a way to build that? How do we stop doing that? How do we save money? My boss is just brutal, so I don't have a whole hour. I do get. Is coffee and [00:32:00] I do really dig coffee.
I am I, for anybody who listen to my podcast, I've once joked it's the world's most po uh, caffeinated recruiting podcast in the world. And based purely on, I mean, honestly, if you listen to me at 1.2 speed, I'd blow up your, I I'd void your warranty. It's just that simple. Uh, there's just too much. I just, I just can't, and you can already feel it.
It's just, I, I, I'm held back. It's just too
Nicole Hammond: Are, are you trying to go for the micro machines commercial at the Super Bowl or something?
James Ellis: Anyone under the age of 35, you have no idea what we're talking about, but. I, this is my whole brain, and I think coffee is one of those things where for five minutes I can kind of stop. I've switched from coffee to espresso. My daily driver is a small, flat white in a six ounce cup, which is tiny. You ever drink? I, I drink from a six ounce cup. It feels like I'm drinking from a tiny little teacup.
I'm like a
Nicole Hammond: Just teasing yourself.
James Ellis: Teacup. It's tea. It's, it's horrible, but it's enough to kind of say [00:33:00] focus in. the drug you need, which let's be fair, my A DHD loves caffeine. So it's my daily driver, and it allows me to take a minute and just say, okay, this is, this is, this is what's going on.
What am I doing today? What do I wanna do next? What matters most? And that is as close to I get to a hour.
Nicole Hammond: Okay, so. I love coffee too. Are you a coffee and I'm gonna say a snob in like, like a certain type that you have because I've gone down this path. I have some firefighter parents, and let's be honest, firefighters have some time and they became coffee connoisseurs And so I just followed and jumped on their bandwagon.
But they started to get coffee from the Midwest from Redbird Coffee. It. He was a bird watcher slash coffee maker. Phenomenal. He would send you little chocolates. Now we've gone on like a world tour of all these different coffees. Is this part of your jam?
James Ellis: I am not quite
Nicole Hammond: Okay.
James Ellis: I'm not quite there. I, I will admit two things. One, if you don't know who James [00:34:00] Hoffman with two Ns is, he is the world's greatest coffee YouTuber. He has the greatest hair ever. He has the most ridiculous cartoon, perfect hair. I lust after the hair. I'm not afraid to admit it. It is fantastic.
White, gray hair. It's thick. It's just the shock of hair. It's just
Nicole Hammond: Might
James Ellis: he is the best.
Nicole Hammond: we talked about earlier.
James Ellis: Yeah. He's got, he's, he's, he's doing something right. I don't know what it is. Um, but his, he is regarded as the number one coffee YouTuber. And there's a reason his stuff is just phenomenal. Whether it's reviews, whether it's the science of why when you drink a cup of coffee, you suddenly feel the need to go to the bathroom, whether it's the, You know, everything in anything, the science of particle size analysis.
This and the coffee and the measuring, the amount of caffeine and the way you, all fantastic. And my wife will laugh because if I've got 10 minutes, I'm just sitting there, I'll turn him on. And having seen a video three times already, I'll just, yeah. Tell me about that $4,000 coffee grinder.
Nicole Hammond: Oh my.
James Ellis: Love to hear more. And I'm, yeah. And some of these things are insane [00:35:00] and you're just like, he, it's the British accent, the whole thing. And Rory Sutherland jokes about you'd be better off getting into heroin than listening to his videos. Because once you start to watch his videos, you're like. I just need to buy this. It's called Grindr.
I just need to buy this machine. I just need to buy. Oh, I have specialized porta filter, uh, uh, baskets just for this kind of coffee, and then I gotta dial in. You're like, oh, my, it is, it is a gateway drug to something
Nicole Hammond: Oh my gosh.
James Ellis: I like that.
Nicole Hammond: Okay.
James Ellis: I'm also, I'm also lucky enough to live in Chicago, one block away from my local coffee roaster, coffee and tea exchange, and they get stuff from all over the world and they do great job sourcing.
Nicole Hammond: Oh, nice.
James Ellis: Don't need to live that FedEx deliver a 12 ounce, 16 ounce package to my door life. I just walk around the
Nicole Hammond: Okay. So we do a French press every morning. My husband and I split it,
James Ellis: Good.
Nicole Hammond: And it is enough to put in the veins. Um.
James Ellis: Yeah.
Nicole Hammond: When I go and travel for work or what, and I have a cappuccino, I'm like, it's not enough. It's not enough.
James Ellis: No.
Nicole Hammond: And now we're into all the supplements, right? Like adding the, um, functional [00:36:00] mushrooms as our creamers and all these things.
So there's another rabbit hole you could go down to from the health and wellness perspective to put with your crack cocaine coffee.
James Ellis: Delicious. No, don't mind if I will. Thank you so much.
Nicole Hammond: Cheers. Cheers. Well, we know what our happy hour is here. It's coffee today. Um, alright, we're gonna go into my favorite part, uh, this or that. Uh, you have played this before?
Yes.
James Ellis: A little bit.
Nicole Hammond: Okay. Okay.
James Ellis: I'm not an expert. I have, I, I haven't, I'm not ready to go pro, but I'll, I'll, I'll
Nicole Hammond: You know what, you are allowed to be a superhero in this regard too, and you don't have to decide, or it can be, and you can do, choose your own adventure in this world, but we are going to provide the guidance of this or that you can choose one or go rogue, whatever works for you. I, I'm expecting nothing else.
James Ellis: my favorite. you
Nicole Hammond: here we go. Uh, resume or LinkedIn profile.
James Ellis: They're so different and I, I don't believe they should be the same, but I think she should be connected. Personally. I think we are still, for [00:37:00] lack of a better way of thinking about it, we still live in a resume centric world, of people who have reached out to me in the past couple years said, Hey, I'd love to hear about you.
Send me a resume, like the resume still is the thing. And so. Yeah, LinkedIn will get you some attention, but no one's gonna print your LinkedIn profile and say that's enough of a resume. So it's still a resume that moves the needle and less so LinkedIn. And I hate having to say that
Nicole Hammond: Okay. Okay. Well maybe, hey, maybe these are the transformative years. I dunno. Maybe something new.
James Ellis: a digital boy. I want it to be LinkedIn. I want us to
Nicole Hammond: Yeah.
James Ellis: Out like that, that work and do it that way, but we're just not there.
Nicole Hammond: Okay. AI or no ai.
James Ellis: Oh, absolutely. I, I, what? Are you kidding me? Oh my goodness. That's like saying I grew a third arm, stupid third arm. Why? I mean, come on. It's amazing. Are we using it right? Not really,
Nicole Hammond: Yeah.
James Ellis: But we're still learning. It's still year three from chat GPT showed up. We are. Babies compared to what's happening and [00:38:00] I'm, I am very aware of what Claude Code is doing, what the Claude Mott Bott is doing.
If you don't, don't, that's a rabbit hole you don't need to be in. But chat g, PT, and perplexity and all these other stuff, I am very involved in these tools for my own work because they allow me to really maximize my ability to see perspectives from multiple angles, to think from different points of view. Should it ever be used to select a candidate. No,
Nicole Hammond: Help
James Ellis: do that.
Nicole Hammond: Do it.
James Ellis: To do that. That's a horrible idea. Enjoy your lawsuits. I mean, it's just bad news all around, but the stuff that, You know, the, the, the, I just got access to Google's workplace studio to start to do some integrations on the back end of my Google stuff. Super excited about that. Right now, I just last this week, I made Claude. Interact with Fire Crawl, which scrapes websites and appify, which I can get to scrape LinkedIn profiles and I can say, here's the name of a [00:39:00] company. Go grab all of their web content about their career site and their culture. Go grab their last 40 LinkedIn posts, stick it on a flat file in my Google Drive and name it, company name, and I can do that to 10 companies in the same industry, and I can immediately go, now I know what this industry's all about.
It took. Almost more time to type those in info that, those, those requests in than actually the, the, and then once you have that, 'cause the, the challenge everybody has with the AI is that, oh, it hallucinates, it hallucinates if you don't give it enough stuff. But if you give it all these flat files and say, looking just at what I've just given you, compare and contrast.
Find anomalies, find baselines, find interesting ideas, find different angles. Why this, why that? Glorious analyst. It is a glorious analyst and will jumpstart your thinking so fast. And that's just one way of using it.
Nicole Hammond: Yep. Good input, good output. I'm with you. Alright.
James Ellis: Absolutely.
Nicole Hammond: Me or find you.
James Ellis: I want it to be fine. Me. really do as a marketer, should be enough, [00:40:00] right? That should be the, the church I worship at. If I'm a strong enough marketer and I've presented myself and positioned myself and made that brand and position clear, you should find me and.
Nicole Hammond: Okay.
James Ellis: LinkedIn search sucks. I'm sorry. It is still just not very good.
~ I know,~ I, I'm, You know, the job board search is horrible. Like this stuff is like, they're using search engine circa 1997, kind of thinking like, it's just such bad technology. I don't know what they're doing really, but it's just, it doesn't really work. And so consequently. Are if you're, if you, if you are putting all your chips in on one bet, and that bet has to involve that LinkedIn and all these search engines, all these search engines work, that's, that's a faulty bet.
That's not a good idea. So it's still find you, even though I want it to be, find me.
Nicole Hammond: Okay. All right. We'll get again, we're gonna do this in a few years again, and it'd be different answers, right? We'll be so much further along. Everyone will have listened [00:41:00] to the wise word of James, and that 2% will be 10%. We're, we're getting there. We're there,
James Ellis: step,
Nicole Hammond: career side or job board?
James Ellis: oh God. Not even close. What? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?
Nicole Hammond: I just wanted a fast, easy one for you.
James Ellis: Oh my God. Career sites, of course. Like I, look, here's the, the best part and the, and the answer to that is there's manyfold, but my favorite is this. You actually own your flipping career
Nicole Hammond: Yes.
James Ellis: Get to decide what is on that stupid thing instead of the three fields that the job board told you you had to fill out and you didn't know how to fill out, and you had a junior recruiter do it once three years ago and you forgot that they did it.
And all the data's way outta sync. Sorry. No, it's not even a question, honestly. It's like saying, do you want to eat just these three ingredients or do you want to go to the grocery store? I mean, I wanna go to the grocery store where I can make something amazing based on. possibility, not just these, these are the two things we found in the convenience store.
Nicole Hammond: Um, all right. Topic. We have not covered reward or recognition.
James Ellis: There's no right answer for [00:42:00] that. 'cause everybody's different. Everybody, everybody drives by different motivators. One of the, one of the things that drives me up the wall is. all candidates like this, all recruiters like this, all companies like this, and there's no right one right way to job search and there's no one right way to to recruit.
Nicole Hammond: Yeah.
James Ellis: Does it a little
Nicole Hammond: Yeah.
James Ellis: ~Yeah.~ And so consequently it, you follow that through. Some people want the cash and those people are motivated by cash and there's nothing wrong with that. Goldman Sachs gotta hire people too, right? Like that's just life. But some people are okay saying, okay, that is enough money for me.
I don't feel the need to. Eek out that extra nickel. But man, having someone see me and see that I've done this and put my heart and soul in this thing, that's nice too. And those are different people And so you kind of have to just embrace it. That's, those are two different of ways of being and that's just how it is.
Nicole Hammond: Make sure your boss knows this, okay.
James Ellis: Yeah,
Nicole Hammond: You tell him. Um, referral or internal mobility.
James Ellis: That [00:43:00] is a good question. 'cause I have not. I feel like I know my referral thinking and thought process really well. I do not know my MO mobility thinking very well. I will say the greatest brand strategies, employer brand strategies, talent strategies out there is Enterprise. Enterprise, uh, uh, mobility. are mobility mobile. Rent a car. They used to do, they, they do rent a cars, they keep changing their names to get enterprise holdings for a while, whatever all hire or they hire specifically entry level and everybody's gotta go through their program
Nicole Hammond: Huh,
James Ellis: and everybody's gotta work a desk and everybody's gotta check in the cars and vacuum the back seats and go find the thing that you've left and say, oh, madam, sir, you forgot the right.
Everybody's gotta get on the phone, customer service phone and get yelled at. Everybody's gotta go through it before you can do other
Nicole Hammond: huh.
James Ellis: And because of that strategy, there's so many values that, and, and what I love about it is it says they can focus all their energy on a very, very tiny demographic market that they care about.
They're not interested in hiring data scientists, they're looking for [00:44:00] making data scientists for the most part. They're not looking at having to be on every place to kind of attract all these people. They're building those, those skill sets, they're from inside and they get to focus their message and they get to focus their audience so, so well, and they do amazing work and I love that. It is a particular strategy and I think the problem is Alon of companies go, Ooh, internal mobility, that's a hot topic. Let's get a sum. And they sprinkle it around like, You know, pixie dust, like it's magically better and it's not. You have to have so much infrastructure around it to
It, and here is the number one reason for that. You want that person to go from that team where they succeeded to get leveled up to that team over there where they could succeed. You know who's against it? The boss, where they're working right
You have just pulled resources from them, and if they don't trust recruiting to backfill properly and quickly and effectively and predictably, they're not gonna let 'em go.
And suddenly is dictating the ability to do internal mobility, and that's just one way that happens. Internal mobility is a system [00:45:00] and the truest sense of the word, we cannot treat it like a program or a project.
Nicole Hammond: I will tell you, internal mobility is one of my favorites. So is referrals, because I think they both bring quality candidates. Uh, working with some of the customers that I have. Visa does an amazing job of this. Um, promoting and having rules of engagement. Make sure your manager is aware, right? But I also think, to your point, being a manager that has had internal mobility as well as had it taken from me, um, you have to be a good manager and be okay letting this person shine and go on with their career total trust and also good relationship, right?
They're not gonna leave you high and dry tomorrow. So you work on a plan. It's all about planning, but I love that.
James Ellis: Yeah.
Nicole Hammond: Love that. Okay. Ooh, this one, Reddit or LinkedIn.
James Ellis: Oh
Nicole Hammond: I'm making you choose
James Ellis: you really are.
Nicole Hammond: This.
James Ellis: choice. Um.~ I know.~ say in terms of time, it's LinkedIn. In terms of love, it's Reddit. There's just, I look, first of all, 'cause I have a great network of people, of [00:46:00] human beings who I adore, who I'm fascinated wondrous by. There are people who I engage with all the time. My LinkedIn messaging is more active than my, uh, text messaging.
Nicole Hammond: Wow.
James Ellis: That says
Nicole Hammond: Wow.
James Ellis: Um, I kind of live on LinkedIn and I'm bored. I wanna go to Reddit. I actually wanna go to Blue Sky too, but I also really wanna go to Reddit, because that is where all the rabbit holes are. I didn't just get lost.
Nicole Hammond: hope Reddit appreciates how many people after this go and explore it. I, I really hope they appreciate it. I mean, sponsor over here. Hello? Um, alright, ~last,~ last one, James. And this is related to happy hour because, um, yeah, we've got to, aside from coffee. Okay, coffee on the side burner, whiskey or rum.
James Ellis: It is gonna be whiskey because whiskey is more versatile. if You know I'm in the right spot, there's nothing better than rum.
Nicole Hammond: I mean, I'm a whiskey man's wife, so I love hearing that. We're gonna have to get you some of the blue corn and, and try it, but, um,
James Ellis: Oh no, no, don't do that. [00:47:00] I would hate that. That would be horrible.
Nicole Hammond: your coffee too. I mean, just.
James Ellis: Ooh, there's that. Olay.
Nicole Hammond: Love it. Love it. Uh, this has been so fun, James. I'm telling you. So fun. I've learned from you. I
James Ellis: Wait, I gotta get back to work. man. I gotta go back to work. Why?
Nicole Hammond: said you need to go get another flat white,
James Ellis: Ooh. Okay. Okay.
Nicole Hammond: uh, tell people where they can find.
James Ellis: Uh, LinkedIn, obviously. Uh, beyond that I am employer brand labs. Employer brand labs is me. So if you go to employer brand lab.com, uh, all my content, all my stuff is there. Links to books, all that stuff. But ultimately, feel free to be a buddy and find me on LinkedIn and connect with me. I, unless you're so obviously selling me something, I say yes to everybody.
'cause I don't know who's gonna be amazing until they're amazing. So I love getting semi-random LinkedIn requests. I'm like, cool. Okay, sure. Cool. Wow. Me, let's go, let's figure it out. So LinkedIn, it's James Ellis and I'm, uh, the, it's listed as the War for [00:48:00] Talent, which I'm told is not supposed to be as fun as it used to be, but here we are.
Nicole Hammond: Oh, so fun. So fun. Um, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you. You have made this so enjoyable. So enjoyable.
James Ellis: a blast.
Nicole Hammond: Oh.
James Ellis: I'm so thrilled you invited me. This has been great.
Nicole Hammond: For those of you listening or watching, first of all, you're gonna see Alon of facial expression if you are watching. If you're not, and you're listening, you're going to hear it in our voices too.
We have had fun today, and it is because of you, James, and this was different, right? We talked about a candidate perspective, which I think. It's so helpful for those that are struggling. So please take some of this. Use it recruiters. If you are not using pipelines or talent pooling or have thought about taking maybe an hour out of your week to do so, think about the return on investment and think about James's book.
Think about his book to help you. All right. Um, thank you again all, and we will see you next time.
And that wraps another episode of Hiring Happy Hour. [00:49:00] Thanks for tuning in and for believing like we do that hiring isn't just about filling jobs. It's about the impact we make. To catch more stories and show notes, visit hiring happy hour.com. This episode was brought to you by Smartrecruiters, an SAP company, an AI powered platform for superhuman hiring.
Until next time, stay curious, stay kind, and keep humanizing hiring. Cheers.