Ep 4 Building from Scratch | Brendan Orf - Reylance AI

Brendan Orf is the VP of Talent and People at Relyance AI, which is a platform reimagining what data protection means in a globalized, technology-driven world. Relyance is shifting the entire landscape of data protection technology through automation and machine learning. 

Before his work at Relyance, Brendan held various Talent Acquisition leadership roles at leading tech companies. 

Brendan has built a TA team from the ground up several times and has learned some valuable lessons. In this episode, we cover everything from building custom reporting to normalizing recruiter effectiveness across various requisition loads to how to position yourself for further career growth. We also cover how Brendan recommends TA teams leverage AI to achieve their goals.

We cover the following:

• How to build a Recruiter Efficiency score.
• The perils of focusing on InMail acceptance rate.
• How to leverage AI in recruiting.

Allison then joins the show to discuss how she approaches managing different recruiting targets across an organization and offers her advice on climbing the career ladder in talent acquisition.

Links

Brendan Orf on LinkedIn
Relyance AI
Work Rules by Laszlo Bock

Largely Links
Largely.com
Largely on LinkedIn
Allison McCutcheon Barcz

Transcript

Ep 4 of Largely Speaking | Brendan Orf - Reylance AI

Justin: Welcome to Largely Speaking a podcast presented by Largely. Join us as we explore the metrics, strategies, and trends that matter in talent, acquisition, candidate, experience, employer branding, and internal communications. I'm your host Justin Schmidt

Justin: Hey, Justin here is just a quick producers note. The audio for Alison when we recorded this episode. Is pretty rough because of an air conditioner that was going extra speed behind her. That day in our office, the air conditioning had an issue and one of the units failed and the other two had to kick on extra hard to compensate. And unfortunately, she's sitting pretty close to one of the vents. I did the best I could to minimize it, but in an effort to preserve the full diction of what she was saying, it meant I had to leave in some of that extra noise. So I apologize. And going forward, we'll make sure we record and. Less interesting conditions, but just wanted to give you a heads-up. Enjoy the episode.

Justin: Brendan Orf. Welcome to Hired and Inspired. How does this podcast find you?

Brendan: Hey, it's going well. Thanks, Justin. Good to be here.

Justin: Yeah, I'm excited for our conversation. Should be a good one. Brendan, you are the. , VP of Talent and People at Relyance AI. Why don't you tell us a little bit about Relyance and what they do?

Brendan: Awesome. Yeah, so Relyance AI, we're a data privacy software company, so we are very much in startup mode. We were founded in 2020, really on what I perceive to be the precipice of industry breakthrough. Lots of opportunity in the space. With all of the advancements in tech and in AI, we are a foundational AI tool that does something really unique in the market in terms of having continuous data, and continuous information flows for privacy managers, Chief Legal Officers to help drive privacy outcomes that are, are best for the organization.

Justin: Very cool. And you were brought on to build out and run the recruiting and people operations there. This isn't the first time you have led talent acquisition teams. Before we get started, give us a little bit of your background and kind of how you got into the talent space.

Brendan: I found talent space, like a lot of people kind of by accident. I came out of, of college with a marketing degree, with, aspirations of being in sales. And I started out in sales at a, actually a Budweiser distributor, which, you know, here in St. Louis, Budweiser distributors, the, the premier job, uh, not that great And so the next step for me was a, a staffing firm with the intention of, of being mostly an account manager, a little bit of a recruiter. That's kind of how it was positioned to me, really not understanding the industry at all, but. Everyone's a recruiter always. Um, but really got into that space and enjoyed it.

Brendan: Uh, liked, liked the recruiting aspect of it, but pretty quickly realized that staffing recruiting wasn't for me 

Brendan: but wanted to just kinda start making my way into the corporate recruiting world And so after a couple years doing the, the agency recruiting, I had the opportunity to join a corporate environment.

Brendan: Scottrade was the organization. I joined as a, a technical recruiter there. And so that was me kinda getting my feet wet in the corporate environment. Uh, I had really great opportunity to. Try things. Uh, a great level of support by the team there.

Brendan: Uh, the recruitment leadership at that time, and so had a really good experience in my, my time there, but really have always been a technical person. So the goal, even when I wanted to be in sales, I wanted to be in software sales like I always wanted to be in a technical environment. Um, and a recruiter reached out to me about an opportunity at Bullhorn. uh, at that time it was a, I believe it was a senior recruiter role that I was kind of afforded the opportunity. And really, Bullhorn is a Boston-based tech company. You know, there's not a ton of opportunity like that. Uh, there's an increasing amount, but at that time, uh, I, I perceived it to be a high risk startup, uh, kind of chuckle now in kinda my current state, they were about 450 or 500 people. Uh, when I joined, uh, ironically it was. Probably two months after I joined when Scottrade got acquired. So really at evaluating what, uh, what the next step holds, but went to to Bullhorn and really had a wonderful opportunity to work for a great, uh, recruiting leader. Found, learned a lot in a very short amount of time. Then it really timing worked out well. 'cause that recruitment leader went off to start her own staffing firm and just vacated an opportunity to run a global talent organization. And so that's, uh, that was my first kind of foray into, to leadership. I guess I was a manager there before she left. But really, in terms of really grabbing a hold, uh, we, we scaled that organization. Like I said, they're about four 50 when I joined, probably 1300 or 1400 when I left. So I saw a decent amount of growth over a four year timeframe. Um, there was a VP on the people side there that went to be the chief people officer of a company called Nolo. Uh, they were about 175 people at that time with Never having any talent function at all.

Brendan: And yeah, so really kind of unique opportunity to build from scratch and get to where you want to grow and accelerate to kind of all at once um, with

Brendan: the the paces that we need. So, joined there as the, the director of talent acquisition, uh, built that talent acquisition team.

Brendan: I think at the most we had was maybe nine or 10 recruiters globally, including It's a couple in Bulgaria, a couple in India, team across the us so a, a global team. Um, But the economy got us Um, so we, we grew, I think we maxed out about 490 people there. Um, and then had to go backwards. We went through some layoffs, um, including the majority of my team, and as, as a leader there as.

Brendan: Uh, I, I couldn't stick around. I laid off my entire team and my job was still, quote unquote safe. But the idea of getting on the phone and talking to someone about joining a team or an organization after you're looking through the eyes of someone you care about and tell 'em they don't have a job, it's, it wasn't the best.

Brendan: So, um, I knew I was going to leave, started putting some feelers out, really not aggressively. I actually thought it was gonna be an opportunity to slow play things for a couple months and enjoy some not grinding. Um, my MO is, uh, putting in some time and effort and so I was gonna have a summer of, of not heavy, heavy work demands, but the Relyance opportunity or Relyance AI opportunity presented itself. It was a, it was a VP of Talent, uh, role. So it was, I was brought in here to just build out our talent organization. Uh, obviously everything in the macroeconomic world is changing quickly now. So some of the parameters that I joined with, with growth responsibilities changed very quickly, uh, in terms of our headcount planning as, as we projected forward. Uh, Things change fast. Like I said, uh, what we expect to be coming in and building a team of a few talent folks right away, uh, turned into really bringing in one talent, one recruiter to help me with some of the recruiting here. And then as things evolved, there was a need to lead the people side too. And so I was here for about five months probably, uh, when, when that opportunity came up. Really something that I, I planned on doing in my career. Uh, didn't know I was gonna be doing it quite yet, uh, but the opportunity presented itself. Now it's been about a year, kind of running both, both sides of the, the fence there. Really, really enjoy it. Um, kinda it helps to have that single point leader with some of the fluidity of decisions that can be made from a overall people team and talent team perspective. So, uh, as a long-winded answer that brings us to today,

Justin: You touched on some things that have become common in my interviews with talent acquisition leaders over the past couple months. One is oftentimes people do sort of quote unquote fall into the role, and then two, the. Growth that you've experienced both at the organizations you're at plus on your career in general, you start kinda getting more of a 360 degree picture of the entire sort of employee lifecycle.

Justin: And I too have been in management when you have to do reductions in force. As great as building awesome teams are and bringing cool people into an organization, developing those relationships. The downswing of that is equally impactful. Those lessons that you learn in those situations are really kind of what forge a lot of the worldview and approaches you take as a leader going forward.

Justin: And the other thing that's a good through line in your career, which is going to make for a fun transition into my first question for you is entrepreneurship and getting in and getting things started and kinda being at the ground level of things.

Justin: The intake for this podcast, one of the questions I ask people is, what's a metric that you feel is valuable in the talent acquisition and employee lifecycle space?

Justin: That's a, it's a good one to dive into and really think about, and what you mentioned, which I thought was really interesting, is this what you call the recruiter efficiency, which is an algorithm that you've developed that uses variety of things, number of openings, level of openings, time to fill, et cetera, to score and understand where recruiters are, being efficient, where they are, and et cetera.

Justin: I would love to double click on this and go through the process of why you took it upon yourself to kinda amalgamate some things into a single metric.

Brendan: Yeah. And it's really been something that's evolved over time because the first iteration of what I call my recruiter, efficiency scoring came out of necessity from, uh, really trying to get a, a good grasp on capacity planning. And so, uh, it was actually when I was leading at Bullhorn, we had very high hiring demands and I had to ask for, Increased my staff and the chief people officer at the time, very good leader in my career, but her, her challenge to me was, show me the numbers. I'm like, well, I, it's hard to show numbers for this because of all these variables. And she's like, well, you gotta figure out some number to show me, or I'm the answer's no. And so I went to work figuring out the numbers and, and you know, one of the challenging perspectives from a talent perspective, and when you do capacity planning is that, It not every role is equal. So there's different challenges to filling different roles, um, really what, even within a geographic location. But at that stage of my career, it was a global team. And so even different level roles, different teams in different locations all have different parameters. And so trying to boil that all down into one bucket, uh, really the outcome of it is, is assigning a weight based on leveling per role. Then assigning a total point that any recruiter could carry at one time. Um, and then backing that into an, an agreed upon s l a number again based on level. So the idea basically, uh, it boiled down, it's like it's the same to fill 20 level entry level roles as it is four VP roles or whatever that exact. Break kind of backs into, uh, really under, I, I don't think there's one blanket number across all organizations. That is the right answer. Uh, but for me it was for that organization with that information and then the idea that it's easier to do two of the same role than two different roles. And so then it was a stacked. And then, so let's say I have a, a manager role that's weighted three points for a recruiter, but if you have two of the same roles, the second one's only weighted one point over that time. And so that was the origin of the recruiting efficiency scoring. And then where that evolved into was it gave me a really clean number on a quarterly basis to say, This was the point expectation that we had for you and this is what you failed. And, um, that was kind of the first iteration. 'cause then it's much easier to compare apples to apples, especially in a, a startup world where you might have a, a, a senior experience recruiter that has to fill a x, y, Z entry level role. And, and just that not all roles are created equally. But then where that went from there, um, as you see is kind of building on itself and compounding. We, I combined those two things together and so it became a capacity planning and anytime that you were over capacity, it was a 1.01% multiplier to your total number. So rewarding recruiters that maybe have a lot of recs at one time. Um, and then there's also a diminished, if you go past your ss l a, there was a, a 0.98 multiplier to, to it as well.

Brendan: For every three weeks that Went past that. Um, and so like really balancing it out to give us a whole number at the end of each quarter that says this, this is that recruiter score while still having the original gains from a capacity planning model that's, that's more robust. Um, and it's, it's, it's, like I said, it's evolved.

Brendan: It's, it's been a spreadsheet that's been like 18 different spreadsheets at the time and some of the new generative AI has helped me reform that even more completely into a, a little nice little package spreadsheet, but It'll look different two years from now than it looks today.

Justin: That is really interesting. Have you introduced this model to a peer somewhere else and have they incorporated it and had similar success with it?

Brendan: Yeah, it's, uh, it's kinda spread throughout a few startups, kind of specifically in the Northeast with just the way that networks happen and my teams go and ideally they're leading teams somewhere else. So yeah, there's a few other organizations that do different versions of it. I think that that's, that's the reality.

Brendan: It. My ver it is pretty complex. I don't know if it came through well articulated and really an understanding of, I'm trying to, to give it so I can, I dunno. Often when I show people, it's literally showing people and not talking through it. So, um, there's different levels of complexities that see it from organization to organization, uh, with some of the fluidity of my career between like The leadership at Bullhorn became the same leadership at Nolo, who now I'm the leadership and like I've been able to have a pretty consistent view into it through like that very linear, progressive nature of the, the scoring. Um, but yeah, it's, it's around

Justin: I love it. And gets to the heart of what I, I'm going to guess is going to be part of the reason you chose InMail acceptance rate as the metric in TA that you want to go away. I would love it if you could maybe double click on that a little bit, because I'm sure there's a, story why InMail specifically was the one that got called out here.

Brendan: it was one that I picked, but you could interchange it for a lot of top the funnel metrics. Um, I'm a. It's pretty interesting that I chose like top the funnel metrics as a blanket because the actual funnel metrics I am hyper-focused on. So that tier down from the top of the funnel when you're looking at progression of candidates through a, a pipeline in the flow, I am, I have a very good understanding of what's happening that, and I use that to guide different conversations.

Brendan: Um, really Kind of as, as my signifier to them, we can dive into really why, um, what that means. The reason I chose the InMail acceptance rate, I, it's one that even when I've interviewed recruiters in the past, they like brag about acceptance rates and I don't care. You know, like I don't care if a hundred percent of the people you reach out to acknowledge your message, if none of them are the right fit. Or like the way that I was actually recently talking to the rep at LinkedIn about this, uh, when we were looking at acceptance rates, because my mine stay pretty consistently what they should be and what you see as industry standard. So I don't wanna overanalyze this from like, but with that being said, uh, when we're looking at the response rates, I was telling them like, I don't care if someone says, Thanks for reaching out.

Brendan: I'm not interested. Cool. You click the random button and if, if I'm typing a whole message from scratch for customization to be able to drive that rate up and I'm only getting just for the sake, let's say 10 messages out in a day and two people are interested, but eight respond like there's an 80% acceptance rate and by all accounts like that should be good. Or if I do, I still still customize messages. I'm not saying we, we do the blind throw over the fence, but if I do minimum customization, I get a hundred messages in a day, and let's just say I have a, we'll go super low, say I have a 10% response rate, but eight of those are interested. I have put eight people who are interested into the funnel as opposed to two. That's kind of that tier down metric of the, the funnel analytics. 'cause I do like from there you have to look at every company's a little bit different, but that breakdown than how may I getting moved through to each level. Um, but that starts at really any of those top of the funnel analytics. There's something to be said for employer branding and, and filling the pipe, kind of same as marketing from a demand gen perspective. Acknowledge that I think they're valuable, but the way they get treated and talked about in our space, it's irrelevant.

Justin: Do you feel in recruiting and talent, we're appropriately embracing automation? Do you think we're swinging a little too far into chatbots, answer every single recruiter or candidate question and therefore maybe hurting the candidate experience and employer brand a little bit and that we're due for a bit of a pullback?

Justin: Do you think we're kind of on the right track and like it'll settle somewhere near where it is? Is AI and talent. On the right track, and if not, what needs to change? If it is, what do we need to double down on?

Brendan: Yeah, so I, I think it is on the right track. I, I think there, there is some nuance to the answer. Um, and the, the recruiting that I do, you kinda referenced warehouse work, recruiting like two very different worlds. Uh, you know, hiring a, right now we have senior backend N l P engineer that's working hybrid in Silicon Valley. Is different than a warehouse. And so I think that the, the way that we can leverage AI varies dramatically based on the types of hiring that you're doing. Um, so I think a lot of what you're talking about around the, the chat bots and some of that, uh, that type of AI and recruiting to me is, um, not to the place that we need it in my world, but immensely helpful in worlds where it's the, the high volume recruiting, um, But with that being said, the advances in generative ai, even through something like Chat, G P T, it, it's allowed recruiters to, if leveraging it appropriately, become infinitely more effective. For the first 80% of what we are required to do, there's still that need for that last 20%, which is perfect, like that's gonna save you 80% of your time to do some more administrative tasks.

Brendan: But for me, like that's how me and my team use it is primarily even strategic things that you don't traditionally attach as like automation opportunities within ai, we are leveraging AI to drive us for the first. 80% might be across like 60 to 80% to get a, a headstart on things and a framework for things that then we can still put and implement into what we need it to do right now. And so, uh, it's gonna continue to get better. I, I, I haven't been great at predicting the usage of ai, honestly. And the, it's even when chat G P T came a thing, I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. And then it was, I very quickly started to like, play with it a little bit in, from a professional perspective and it starting to see more and more prompt opportunities. And that's gonna continue to evolve. I mean, I mentioned my recruiter efficiency scoring and leveraging chat. G P T I don't think I called it by name, but that's the way I leveraged by name with the generative AI to help me optimize the formulas built into, um, uh, Google Sheet. So even things like, as simple as that where I'm not, I, I, I can navigate Excel.

Brendan: I can't write formulas, um, at least not complex formulas. And there were formulas. I would've never even. Towed, um, that are now part of what I use.

Justin: Pivoting a little bit here to the best piece of advice.

Justin: And you said the most important intangible trait is being someone who cares. You should care that there is a life being impacted on the other side of the candidate experience. You should care that your contribution to business drives growth, and you should care about the brand that you are creating and representing.

Justin: I love this because at the end of the day, when a recruiter reaches out to somebody or someone fills out an application for a job, there's this. Potential in that moment to change the trajectory of somebody's like financial wellbeing. It could start new relationships that carry that person well into the future.

Justin: love that you called this out because I think this is the reason we all get out of bed in the morning and went to build great teams. But two, if there's any additional detail to give there, or an anecdote that's, that made that the thought that you had when you filled out the form.

Brendan: No. Well, the person who gave me his advice, I don't know if she remembers giving it to me, um, or like the, or, it was my, my manager when I first became a manager of recruiting, so she was the director of talent at Bullhorn. And, uh, it, it came about when She asked me to boil down like what we are looking for when building out my team. And I had, I don't remember what I had it. Probably not great in hindsight, but I don't, but what she would said, very plain and simple is what she's found in her career that makes a recruiter successful as someone who caress. That was her advice at that time. And it evolved through our relationship of working together for a few years. Um, to your point, still someone I talked to regularly very, very much in touch with, um, but it became like, we need people on our team and we want to be that person, um, that cares. And there's even, I think the reality is there can be a selfish element, and it's funny, like if you care about how hiring managers think about you or if you care about your work, Cool.

Brendan: You're gonna perform very well. We need you to care about the those around you as well as a part of that too. And so, um, yeah, I, I think you, you summarized it pretty well. Really need someone, you with what, what caring means is different to everybody, but at the core, if you genuinely care about people, you genuinely care about your work.

Brendan: Those two things, blanket most of what we do on a, on a daily basis. Um, everything else is a small learnable task. I can teach it.

Justin: Yep. Love it. Brendan, this has been an incredible conversation. Let's wrap it up with our, as yet to be branded, um, rapid fire around at the end here. Um, what's your favorite interview question to ask people and why?

Brendan: So if I'm. Pick a role. So if I'm hiring you or interviewing you for a C M O role,

Brendan: I. 

Brendan: would say, all right, Justin, I'm hiring a new C M O. What is a skill or attribute that you have that you think I should look for in someone for this role? It's pretty revealing on a multiple level of things. For one, to show some level of self-awareness. It also then shows what they view as important for the role and you're able to, to connect dots in like is what you view as important, the same as what they view as important and generally opens up some secondary conversation around that as well. Specifically for leaders. It's how do you build that out within your team and like those types of things, like that's a core question that is, I don't think is a regular question, but it shows up in most of my interviews.

Justin: Love it. It's a good one.

Justin: what book do you most recommend to people?

Brendan: So, uh, Lizzo Box book work rules. It's becoming a little bit dated, but it's about 10 years ago and he was the head of people at Google. Um, it to me is the most comprehensive data points for talent and people organizations. Um, whether it's when you look at, um, really ability for interview panels to predict success and your ability to optimize that, um, whether it's number of interviewers, lengths of interviews, structured versus unstructured interview.

Brendan: Questions like that to me is the. The one a of what we do. Um, I could go on for a while around, around the reading and, and the content, but that, that was really the first book designed for talented people that, that really resonated with me. Um, since then, I, I've multiple, multiple of, uh, Adam Grant's books, or even his podcast.

Brendan: The Work Rules

Brendan: podcast to me is one. 

Brendan: a very impactful thing on my leadership style and building teams as well.

Justin: Yeah, that's a good one. All right, last question. If you could take somebody in your profession out for a cocktail or a coffee, depending on the time of day, although I guess it's five o'clock every, any, you know, it's always five o'clock somewhere. But if you could take someone out for a coffee and pick their brain, who would it be?

Brendan: I just referenced him, but it might be Lalo Bach, uh, someone who he really changed, in my opinion, what. I mean, he rebranded HR at Google as people operations, and it's been rebranded since then. But like that, the notion that we can quantify and analyze what we do in our function has been incredibly meaningful for me, um, in terms of how I approach talent and people in trying to project that out.

Brendan: And so, uh, it would be back,

Justin: Excellent. So before we go here, um, if people wanna find out more about Relyance or yourself, where could they go to get that?

Brendan: Follow us on LinkedIn. So whether it's myself, um, standard, the, I was early to LinkedIn, so the linkedin.com/sprint and, or I was able to to grab that one. Um, so it's there. Uh, but yeah, check us out on LinkedIn. Relyance.ai is our website, so all of our information about the product and the team leadership team, you see my. A nice little headshot there on the leadership page as well. Um, but that, that's, that's where to check us out. I post regularly on LinkedIn, so feel free to engage, comment, ask questions, or reach out directly.

Justin: Brendan, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for coming on Hired and inspired, and I want you to have a wonderful afternoon.

Justin: So I just finished a conversation with Brendan Orff and it was really interesting talking to him 'cause he's a very, quantitatively driven qualitative talent leader, and one of the things he talked about was a concept that he uses called Recruiter efficiency Ratio, where He does some degree of normalization across different types of recruiting roles. Executive recruiter versus frontline recruiter have very different economics and pipelines they're dealing with. And I thought it was an interesting concept. And I know that you have led recruiter functions of all types, and I'm just curious your take on how A manager or leader in talent acquisition can look at a team of recruiters with very different responsibilities and markets that they're dealing with and how you manage them all fairly, and what you would encourage a talent leader to do to ensure that everyone on their team, regardless of their market or pipeline, is on the same.

Justin: Sort of grading scale, if you will.

Allison McCutcheon Barcz: Yeah, I mean, recruitment metrics are always great topic to. You know, I applaud Brendan for putting together a fair and equitable to his team. 'cause it's, it's important, right? really important hard to do. I think when I about metrics, I've, a Um, Um, some metrics that the uh, from, from some different organizations. There's one organization that was folks on offer acceptance rates and post offer offer acceptance rate. There, there was no kind of performance measure on whether the person actually started, whether they were retained for of time.

Allison McCutcheon Barcz: So I think the first thing understand how does your organization measure success recruitment in general? So once you understand that like, then you can carve them out. I think it's carve them out. There's no way that high volume hourly should be, you know, evaluated executive recruiter.

Allison McCutcheon Barcz: It's just like having two cycles. You, it's oranges. Um, you're talent into organization, but the, the that it takes, for each of those hires different. there's a lot of uh, to right, that be aware of.

Allison McCutcheon Barcz: So I think you have to split the role type. I you also look at what you're expecting that to How do have that position set up? Do you have a team or not? You know, do you talent marketer? you expecting your recruiter to do everything post the job, decide additional marketing activities do for the job everyone.

Allison McCutcheon Barcz: Present them to the hiring manager. I mean, you, you've gotta look at your process and what expecting to do and then pull the metrics associated that they have, uh, the ability to impact. And like forward-looking can be difficult. I really think that if, if you a recruiter that's hiring someone a bunch of people, but no shows up on day one, or they up on day one, but by day 30, then ton of money.

Allison McCutcheon Barcz: And so that's, that's a organization and to, to your budget. So I think you've gotta be really, careful that the that you are . Um, evaluating performance against, sometimes even incentivizing for, is drive you want that, that will lead, lead 

Justin : Yeah, we talked in a previous episode. About like a 90 day check-in or, um, yearly incorporating yearly review and performance and employee engagement surveys back into recruiting and that kind of stuff to give that kinda deeper

Justin : hook into effectiveness. Yeah. it's a, it's a theme that will be repeated often on this podcast, and that's not a bad thing.

Justin : That's means it's a best practice the. Next part of the interview that I would love to get your opinion on is regarding the step that happens in the career journey from maybe a manager or a high level individual contributor into that director level. Brendan mentioned that his. Equally qualitative and quantitative approach to how he manages recruiting has given him a lot of opportunities in his career. You are also somebody who's had a successful upward trajectory in your talent career. Prior to joining largely, and I would love it if you could maybe distill down some advice to somebody who's in that management track as a talent acquisition manager looking to get into the director level that sort of I. Step between management and senior management. What piece of advice would you give to somebody angling for a promotion there or looking to land a director level job in talent?

Allison: This question comes up a lot, right? Folks wanting to grow their careers, um, expand their leadership responsibility and. I think you and I share this. Our first question is usually is the, are you sure that's what you really want? Why are you doing this ? What's, what's really behind it?

Allison: Do you want the title? Do you want the, um, maybe the money that goes along with having, uh, a role of greater responsibility? Or do you really want to be responsible for people on a team? because you are, you have to step outside of just focusing on process. For example, I mean, managers typically manage a process, ensure that the process is working the way it's supposed to and help remedy problems as they come up.

Allison: But as you continue to grow, you become the the conduit, both up and down. And as a leader, you have to also make sure that what's coming down to your team is. The right message. You have a duty to prevent any of the, um, I know that we always say stuff rolls downhill, right? You're there to block that because your team should not be hearing from your leadership or the c e o if they're freaking out or anxious about something.

Allison: Your your role is to protect them so they can do the work that they need to do. Remove blockers and hurdles that that come in their way and oftentimes deal with a little bit more difficult or trickier situations or even political situations. And you've gotta make sure that you're really up for kind of stepping out of that constant, you know, process firefighting mode, and you're thinking more long term and you're thinking about, how can I grow my team?

Allison: What does my team need? and remembering that every human is different. So leadership and management is not a one size fits all. How, how you engage and motivate one person is gonna be different than, than another. And uh, and it's a great responsibility. So you gotta gotta make sure you're ready. You want it for the right reason.

Justin : That's exactly right, because the impetus of providing A strategic value over a variety of KPIs and initiatives versus kind of what you've always focused on is, is definitely a change. And you need to make sure, at least in my experience, people that go from that manager director perspective, like they are often in an organization that's going to help nurture them in that.

Justin : First few months of adjusting to the new level of responsibility or whatever, and no different in talent. So

Justin : thank you so much for your perspective as always, Allison, and we'll talk again soon.

Allison: Thanks Justin. 

Justin: And that's it for another episode of largely speaking on behalf of everybody here at largely thank you to show your support. You can subscribe by going to your favorite podcast app and searching largely speaking or largely podcast. And then hitting that subscribe button. To find out more about largely please visit largely.com and thanks again