Conversational Transcript
Alright, broadcasting live from the GP booth at SHRM 24 in the fishbowl, as they call it Now, I guess today I've got Adam Posner, founder of managing director of NHP Talent Group, a boutique NYC based staffing agency with expertise in marketing, media and advertising. He's also the host of the Pozcast where he interviews top experts, entrepreneurs and thought leaders from the world of entrepreneurship, TA and personal growth and other world-class, amazing humans on their insights into their own career journey. So Adam, great to meet you man.
Chris, thank you so much for having me on. I mean, I feel like I'm in a glass case of emotion. I feel like we have a captive room here and we are the fish in the fishbowl. And thank you to GP for having us here and thanks for having me
On. Definitely, man. Got a chance to meet you last night at the House of Blues there. Did you guys go after that or what'd you guys do?
We did. We went to go to another party, but the Uber delays caused us to get there late. So we got to the party when everything was over and Chris, we were hangry, we were hungry, we needed to eat. And my dude chat over there with the great people of Fountain who brought me out to this event had earmarked one of the best burger places in Chicago and it did not discipline. I'm still thinking, I'm actually go back there today if my flight gets canceled.
Let's talk about recruiting and podcasting, all that stuff. But had you come a recruiter, first of all,
I think that there's very few natural born recruiters that come out of school or whatever and say, when I grow up, I want to be a recruiter. That's really not the way it works. People fall into this profession, they fall into one way or another. And my story make a long story, long born and raised in New Yorker, spent the first 15 years of my career working in marketing, media and advertising. I was an account guy, strategy guy. I worked at internal, at ad agencies. I worked at different brands like American Express at SiriusXM. And about nine years ago I found myself working at VaynerMedia for the great Gary V, for anybody out there who's familiar with him and pretty much a household name. And I ended up losing my job. I thought it was my forever job, Chris, and it wasn't, the grass was not greener on the other side. And that happens. Your expectations are one thing, but reality isn't. And it wasn't the right fit. It wasn't the right place. The company wasn't mature as far as an organizational standpoint. And I'll be honest with you. Were
You were recruiting there?
No, I was a strategist. I was an account lead and I got let go and I was 35 at the time and I didn't know what I wanted to do next. I knew I didn't want to keep doing what I was doing. And on my way out, Gary said to me, stop focusing on the things that you suck at and double down on your strengths. And while I'm there on the day I was getting fired in my kind of debriefing exit interview, we talked about my strengths, what I'm good at, what I'm not so good at. And I talked about him. I'm a good communicator, I actually do know this industry well. And he said, what else do you ever think about doing anything else? And I was like, you know what? My buddy does recruiting and finance. And before I could even finish my sentence, Gary, he goes, you would be a great recruiter.
And I went off on my journey of first saying, wait a minute, I'm really going to change careers at 35. I've been doing this for 15 years. And I thought about the money and I thought about, hey, we just moved to a house, expenses kids and all that kind of fun stuff. And I ate a big piece of humble pie and I said, all right, I'm going to do this. And I didn't just jump into recruiting, I reached out to every recruiter I ever worked with before, some I didn't know, and I asked them for their time, tell me about the industry, tell 'em what I'm getting into. And I went through the process and luckily for me, I got interviewed by a great agency called Onward Search. I didn't want to smile and dial and I got taught by a great mentor, the art and science of recruiting. And here we are nine years later.
Remember your first hire?
I do remember my first hire, but it's actually my first hire was the first fire. This is a good one. Everyone knows in recruiting, especially agency recruiting is guaranteed periods, right? It's a period of a probation period where candy has to stay in and if they get let go, the fee is returned or replacement. So 88 days into a 90 day guarantee, I get a call from the client, they say, listen, unfortunately we're going to have to call him John Doe, let him go. And I say, why is it his performance? They go, no, we suspect he's using drugs in the workplace. So what do you think? My first question was
Which drugs?
Exactly we're in the ad industry. Everyone's smoking weed. It's a creative industry, so they wouldn't tell me that. So I thought it was kind of a BS excuse, but what I did learn is an early lesson, the hard way that these deals are not done until the guarantee period's over and the money clears and it's at the bank. And I'm glad I got that first lesson right? I'm glad I got that first punch in the face early because that set me up to manage expectations with the client, with the candidate and myself moving forward for future deals.
Let's go on to the podcast for a second. How long have you been doing that?
Five and a half years. I think we've recorded almost close to 400 episodes. We get into that 400 point new episode every Friday, having missed a week something I really, you know how it's with podcast man, you have milestones and goals and things. For me, that's the biggest one. It's not the number of downloads because I think that's relative on your industry. And listen, we're not the Kelsey Brothers, we're not the Kardashians, we're not Barstool Sports. That's not our show. But for me, my metric is audience engagement. Yes, downloads to a certain point, but within my niche. But for me it's consistency. The fact that I have not missed a new episode every Friday since November 19th, 2017 is like, it's kind like my, alright, good job me. And that's only important to me.
How do you think podcasting has helped you become be a recruiter in that aspect?
Well, I think that because we're recruiters, we're natural conversational. This is what we do all day long. And I think you take that any good recruiter, their number one characteristic is curiosity. And that applies to podcasting as well. I'm curious in what you're going to say next. I'm curious about learning your story. I'm curious about hearing your why and your mission and my job as a recruiter and a podcast is to pull that out and then frame it up to the right audience. Am I framing it up to the hiring manager and I framing that up to my audiences listening on a podcast?
So you recruiting media, advertising, marketing and NYC, what's that right now? How's the market there?
Well, it's been interesting. It's been a crazy couple of years. We saw early in the beginning of the pandemic, there's a lot of companies that had a huge influx of government funding and they binge hired, that's what they did. It's great for their numbers. There's business coming in and then the economy kind of recalibrated, right? Loans started to become due, interest rates went up. All these economic conditions caused last in first out, and a lot of people got let go. A lot of people got let go. And the first people to let go in any organization during a downturn are recruiters. So if a company doesn't need internal recruiters, they don't need external recruiters. But there is a little bit of a silver lining there that happens on these cycles where companies let go of their internal recruiters and they're not ready to make a full-time hire. And that's as an opportunity for an external recruiter to come in on a contract basis. And that's where we're seeing a lot of these opportunities now where it's a lower risk, it's a lower commitment, and they could bring in an external recruiter for a lower overhead.
You got any sourcing stories over the years?
Yeah, I mean there's always kind of interesting ones there and I think it comes down to sourcing and being creative with your sourcing. I loved tapping into my network. It's so funny. My wife says all the time, she's like, I could tell you four things I need from the grocery store. Two minutes before you're going and you won't remember any of them by the time you get to the grocery store. But in your crazy recruiter brain of yours, you could remember somebody that you met six years ago at a conference who said, you should meet somebody and then you go find that candidate one way or another. You figure out who that person was and you're a crazy investigator. So I think that's a skillset that you have. But as far as stories, I think that it's kind of those boomerang moments where I spoke to a candidate six or seven years ago and somehow they come up in your memory, they come up on your LinkedIn and you see them and you think about it. I think Chris would be great for that job. And it's just because you made that relationship and that connection and you remembered it, you have the ability to kind of go back. I mean, I met a candidate came up to me once at a Mets game and he goes, do you remember you placed me, I had a candidate.
I remember my first thank you, like a written thank you letter for a candidate. And that kind of made me feel kind of, that was cool. She sent me a thank you card. That's why we do what we do in recruiting. Yes, there's money on the table to be made, but we wouldn't be in this business. We didn't care about people.
How about the most creative subject line you ever used to reach out to somebody that's with that do?
I mean, I have a 15 year experience in marketing and media. I literally ran email marketing for SiriusXM and I AB test subject lines a bit. And I think you have to be careful too, depending on the role, depending on the title which you're going for. Sometimes I will try a money motivator in there. Sometimes I'll try an opportunity motivator and I always personalize. That's kind of it. But from a creative subject, my partner Kevin, who I work with a lot, he's kind of the king of the creative one. So I pick up some fun things from him. I don't know him off the top of my head, but he's got some creative ones there that are, it's the hook, it's get your attention. You just want to get their attention to open the email. Same thing with the interview process. The resume's job is to get you the interview, the email subject line's job is to get you to open the email, to click on the job description to reach out to me. And once you start to think about that from a process standpoint and focus on the desired action of each step in the process, you'll become a better recruiter. That's a good question.
Do you use any tools for sourcing beyond LinkedIn or the usuals or any particular
Yeah, yeah. I use, so we'll talk about tools two different ways. A CRM tool, I use a platform called Inters Celler. It's fantastic. How is that? I've heard of it. Yeah. Inters Seller is great. They're owned by Greenhouse. I got acquired by Greenhouse. They're our sponsor. They're our core sponsor. And I'm not just saying that because I used them first before they were a sponsor
For my recruiting practice. I use them for my recruiting practice and they're an email scraping tool. They script the email from the LinkedIn, they pull it into a CRM and then I have a multi-stage drip campaigns, which I use for the outreach. It's a fantastic tool. On the other side of the house, I use chat GPTA lot in a few different ways. I've used this from a sourcing perspective where I take a client's job description and I use it to synthesize talking points when I'm talking to a candidate. And I'll also use it for bullying searches.
Explain that more.
Yeah, absolutely. So I have a few prompts that I use that I've worked on and honed and I keep them in a save draft or I'll take a job description that comes in. And generally speaking, the prompts are either from this job description, what are 10 questions I should ask a candidate on a screening call. I will also ask Chad GBT to take that job description and synthesize it down to a one paragraph add and use a certain tone of who I'm looking for. And I'll customize it a bit with different characteristics and tone and definitions within the chat. GPT prompt. There's a lot you could do, and I urge every recruiter out there to experiment because this tool is here. It's fantastic. And if you don't at least embrace it a little bit, you're going to get left behind.
Do you worry about AI taking away recruiter jobs? What's your stance on that?
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it comes down to using AI as a tool and not a crutch. And I think there's going to be a lot of functions that AI is certainly going to take over from our day-to-day job. So the trick is either if you're working within an organization, how do you make yourself invaluable where you are the one that's pushing AI forward to make your job faster, more efficient, and the processes that can be automated so you have more time to focus on the human part, whether it be with the candidates, whether it be with the hiring managers, for example. There are some great video tools out there and audio recording tools where you're able to record a candidate screening call, isolate those key points and either put it into text or clip it up. So that goes to the hiring manager and now you're not playing the telephone game. Now you're hearing directly what Chris said to Adam on that call, and here's what my notes are on top of that, or example Chris said this, this is spot on what we're looking for. You gave me a great example here and here's why I think he'd be great for it. And then the hiring manager could listen to that clip directly
Got any advice for somebody who wants to be a new recruiter?
Yeah, and I say don't. It's a rough industry and I think there's two sides of it. One, embrace the tech, know how to use it, understand that this is a rollercoaster of an industry and mind your mental health. This is one of the toughest positions because if you're an agency recruiter like I am, we are selling on all fronts. I'm selling the candidate, I'm selling the client, I'm selling the company I'm selling all the time. And with sales comes rejections. And if you can't handle rejections, you're in the wrong industry.
Ttell us where to go Learn more, man.
Yes, you can check out the recruiting practice at NHP Talent Group and you can also check out our Web3 practice, probably nothing talent. I have a new job board up there on NHP Talent Group. Check out thepozcast.com
There you go, folks.
That's how we do it.