ROTR - Brian Fink
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[00:00:00] This is Recruiters on the Rise. And I'm Colleen Gallagher. Join me for Candid Conversations with Talent Leaders as we explore the work that drives them, the lessons they've learned, and how they're helping people find careers they love. The show is sponsored by Lavalier and Interview Intelligence platform built by Textio.
Colleen Gallagher: Welcome to another episode of Recruiters on the Rise. I'm so excited to have my guest with me today. He has spent his career finding engineers and technical leaders who build the things we all use every day. He recruited for companies like AWS and Twitter and now runs his own shop, the Rework Group, where he works with organizations he really believes in.
What I love about Brian is that he treats recruiting like a craft. He has a very specific philosophy around making candidates feel seen, and I think you're gonna wanna steal some of his moves. He also describes himself as a rush chairman for life, which we're gonna make him explain. Brian Fink, welcome to the show.
Brian Fink: Well, thank you so [00:01:00] much, Colleen. I appreciate you having me on. I'm excited about this and yes, uh, I am the Rush Chairman Emeritus. Um, that is my, that is my. My claim to Yeah. uh, I went to college for three and a half years, graduated from the University of Georgia, and I think that I learned everything I needed to know within the walls of taught Epsilon Phi.
So shout out to all those, all those, uh, brothers at the new chapter at the University of Georgia.
Colleen Gallagher: Awesome. Well, uh, would love to get, you know, sort of your first, uh, take on, on something around recruiting and, and, you know, what's the one action or one thing that sets the best recruiters apart from the rest?
Brian Fink: I think that it's intentionality and I think it's, um, I was describing it the other day to a friend of mine as it being a glass jar of trust, right? Is that.
Hmm.
When you tell a candidate that you're gonna do something, it's like putting a marble in a glass jar. And when you tell a hiring manager, you're [00:02:00] gonna do something.
It's like putting a marble in a glass jar. But you actually have to do that thing that you tell them you're going to do for you to create trust. If not, you overwhelm the bowl. You shatter the bowl, you shatter the glass, and it can be done very simply in just a matter of seconds. Right?
Yeah.
I'm working with a hiring manager. Um, and I'm working one right now, and the rec was not in a great place. When I got ahold of it, I said, we're gonna go from red where we are today, to yellow on Wednesday and Green on Friday. And what that meant was is that they were gonna have cants in their pipeline by Wednesday, and they were gonna be able to make decisions on them by Friday. Here we are, we're recording on a Tuesday. I'm in constant communication with that hiring manager. Letting them know what the flow is, what's going on with the different tooling that we're using to select the candidate, uh, what we're doing to engage with a, a broader spectrum of individuals, how we're asking for referrals. [00:03:00] I'm trying to take it by actually putting the marble in the jar. And then by the same token, uh, shout out to, uh, Stacy, uh, zapper, um, is that if you're, if you're a fan of hers, great. If you're not, you need to check her out. Everybody. Stacy is an og. She passed down to my generation recruiting the idea of follow up Friday. So every Friday, whether I spoke to you on Thursday. I am following up with the candidate that I've spoken with throughout the week. That is what I'm doing in the first four hours of my day. It may look like a phone call, it may look like a text message, it may look like an email, but I'm reaching out to them because they need to know where they stand before they go into their next week of doing epic things. And ultimately, I think that if you're acting with intention. And I think that a lot of recruiters that they are going so fast that they can't slow down. Like they're either doing a lot of business development or they're doing a lot of candidate development. [00:04:00] Well, they're just shaking their hands.
They're doing a lot of jazz hands, right? stop doing the jazz hands. Let's put our hands in, do the work, and actually act with intentionality. Um, that's actually one of the things that draws me to the conversation that I'm having with you today, Colleen, is that, um, when I think of intentionality, I think of Textio because. What a great message that Textio has about creating outcomes for candidates and hiring managers and organizations in the process. But you put the rubber to the road, okay, man, like not to get too pitchy, but you actually say, well, this is how we're going to run a structured interview with lavalier.
So it's all about intentionality. That's what separates the good recruiters from the best recruiters.
Colleen Gallagher: I love that because sometimes we forget that really simple things like having an intentional block of time on our calendar that we actually respect. Is such a key to [00:05:00] effectiveness and the outcomes that we wanna drive. And you know, like one, one simple thing I use, it makes me think of it when you talk about this, is I, I often think, and I talk to my team about this too, is like, what's your time pie look like?
And, you know, what is, what are you spending the most? What, how is your time distributed during the week? And when you talk about like having your follow up Fridays, it really makes me think about, okay, when you think then, you know, maybe you work 40, maybe 50, 60 hour, depends on, you know, whatever, but whatever percentage that is right?
Are you allotting 10 to 20% of your time for the week? To follow up to candidates. And I think if you have that like mental model around it, kind of, you know exactly what you're saying is like it makes you more effective at actually following through on those habits than if you just say, okay. And then you can kind of look back at your time and say, did I actually [00:06:00] do my target?
My target for the week was that I was gonna spend 10 to 20% of my time on candidate follow up. Did I do that?
Brian Fink: You know, you phrase it in that direction, and I've never thought about it like that. And for somebody who tries to optimize in 25 minute increments, like I'm a big Pomodoro user, um, I've got the Pomodoro timer on my Mac, I've got it on my pc, I've got it on my phone, like. and my God, God forbid, my poor daughter's probably gonna think everything happens like in the span of a sitcom that we solve all the problems like that, right?
Like,
Yeah.
Back in the day on a different world, like everything was done in 23 minutes. But, uh, I, I really try to with intentionality in those integral blocks, but I've never thought about it in terms of committing 10 to 20% of my week to actually following up with a candidate. And it's like you said, like, I wanna make sure that candidates are seen and heard. Um, and not treated like pieces on a chess board.
Colleen Gallagher: Right.
Brian Fink: I mean, you think about it as a corporate recruiter. We sit in on [00:07:00] conversations on Monday morning. They're like an hour and a half long where you go through a spreadsheet and you say, where are we with rec status? Where are we? You? And there's nothing wrong with that. But if you're gathering all your recruiters to do that with your hiring managers, why aren't you gathering your recruiters to do that with your candidates?
Colleen Gallagher: yeah. It's such a simple tool, but. I like the marrying of the two where it's like here and like, here's how I wanna distribute my time and here's the block on my calendar that I'm gonna do it. And just, you know, every things come up. But if, you know, to be intentional about setting that time aside, I think it just makes you much more likely to follow through on it.
So that's a great tip for, I love that follow up Fridays.
Brian Fink: That's Stacy. That ain't Brian. That's Stacy. I stand on the shoulders of Giants. I say that all the time is that I stand on the shoulders of people like Tara. I stand on the shoulders of people like, uh, like Rob Macintosh. Uh, I stand on the shoulders of Shey Steckel, like, uh, Steve Levy, Steve Wrath, like all these people have built this and I'm just [00:08:00] coming behind them and I'm just doing the same work.
Colleen Gallagher: there was another thing you had shared with me previously that you like to make sure you include in every, um, screening call. There's a question you
Brian Fink: yeah, there's a question.
Colleen Gallagher: Yes. Can you share that?
Brian Fink: at the end of every conversation, I often say to the candidate, Hey, we've talked about a lot of things here today. Is there anything that we, that, that I missed that you think I should have asked you about that I didn't ask you about? I, I really appreciate you highlighting that, Colleen, because we talk about being seen and heard and how can we, how can we cover everything that's in a resume or how can we carry, cover everything that is in a GitHub repository? Um, I have had countless conversations where people say. didn't ask me about my internship that I did at Meta. Um, that was really important to me. It changed the trajectory of my career. It made me learn and, and they just open [00:09:00] up and I'm like, okay. And I think that I can't, I could probably ask a similar question at the front of the conversation. There's this hesitation that I haven't in the back of my head that I haven't earned the right. I think also a really powerful question that that is asked or should be asked is at the front of the conversation is that we say to the candidate silly things like, what can you tell me about the company that I'm interviewing for?
Right? Um, that's silly because we should instead be asking the candidate, can you gimme a two minute snapshot about where you've been and about where you're going?
Yeah.
As we have those recruiting conversations, we're trying to frame a conversation around past performance, predicting future behavior, right?
Or or past behaviors predicting future performance, whatever. The people at DDI have cooked up, I've apparently, I've, it's, it's just up with me today.
Colleen Gallagher: I like your, the framing of that other [00:10:00] question you just said. Like, what, what's the two minute overview of like where you've been and where you wanna go? My favorite question to ask people when I interview them, like the, if I'm doing my first like hiring screen as a hiring manager, or even if I'm part of an interview loop, is, um.
Just like sort of the open-ended, like, tell me about yourself. What do you wanna highlight from your experience? And it often, it, it varies so significantly between somebody who speaks for like 30 seconds and people who speak for like 10 minutes to the point where it's like, what was the original question that I was answering?
Right. But I like the, I need to, I need to gate it around a timeframe. I think that would be better.
Brian Fink: so here's the thing is that I like the way that you asked that second part of the question. Where you're really giving that person the on-ramp to accentuate what's important to them about their career, rather than saying like, tell me about yourself. Right? Because we, we know that, that that's a question that, that allows [00:11:00] bias to creep in to the conversation.
Yes. I, I believe that we're all biased, that we're gonna hear something that's gonna turn us on or turn us off about the candidate. Let, let us not get turned on or turned off in the first 30 seconds of a conversation.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah, I was, um, I hosted a webinar last week and we were talking about like data and you know, I'm sure this is nothing new to most people, right? But you form your impression of someone in 30 seconds and you make a decision within the first four minutes. And so, um. I do think it's, you know, you have to be intentional about what you ask and how you ask it to try and make sure that you're sort of opening your own aperture in your head of, of, uh, interpreting what people are saying.
So I, I love, I love that. Um, in terms of, uh, you know, there's a school of thought out there that we should just get rid of inbound recruiting altogether. So I'm changing topics a little bit here. Like, what's your take on this?
Brian Fink: I got a lot of feelings. I got a lot of emotion and I have a lot of data, right? So, um, [00:12:00] so they're all coming together in this wonderful confluence, is that inbound recruiting has a problem right now for the technology community, and that's fake candidates or bad actors. And when I say fake candidates, I po.
I. Uh, I can point to how many fake candidates I've caught, but I can also put point to the structured data that Gartner has put out. That one in four candidates will be a fake candidate by 2028. Right. Um, that
Yeah.
Life really hard. That makes my life really angsty. And of the reasons that I like to get on video with candidates is to not only prepare them for the fact that they're gonna have to video interview in the. In the, in the next segment, but it's to see how they ask questions or how they respond to questions. Right? Uh, one of the things that I've noticed is that candidates will say to me, Hey, Brian, could you repeat that question? And I'm like, the question was, how was your day to day? Right? I don't need to repeat.
How is your day to day? [00:13:00] Uh, unless there's an LLM that's in your ear from your desktop or from your mobile phone that's repeating that. So I think fraud is a huge problem with inbound recruiting. I don't think that inbound recruiting, um, I think it has a place, I think it has a place in creating talent communities.
Um, I'm, I'm a trained sourcer, right? Like I talked about Shay stacker in the back beginning of this conversation, I should talk about Shannon Pritchett. These are two forces that taught me to go out and hunt, all right, to find candidates that are passive candidates. 10 out of every a hundred or one outta every 10 candidates is gonna be a great fit for what you're looking for.
Yeah.
Be just as strong as the candidate that you, that you sourced, actively sourced a passive standpoint. Right. Um, so I've got, I've got mixed Uh, I've got a lot of different data. There's, uh, there's, [00:14:00] there are pieces that don't fit in neatly.
Colleen Gallagher: How is the fraud showing up that you're seeing, like you, you use the example of sort of like a delay in terms of a, answering really easy questions, but um, are there other ways that you're detecting it or that you're experiencing it?
Brian Fink: Yeah. So there are other ways that I'm detecting it or experiencing it. Um, for instance, I would point to that people are using, like, I'm just gonna pick on John Smith. I have nothing against John that John Smith's of the world, but they've got a name that is severely anglicized. Uh, and then they have a LinkedIn profile that you go to and it only has 45 connections.
Right. Um.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah, no picture.
Brian Fink: no picture. Well, no, even, even in some instances, there are pictures, right? And they've got great company pedigree, but they've only got 45 connections, or they don't have a GitHub profile, right? Like I expect, uh, a, a developer that's worth their salt. An engineer's worth their salt [00:15:00] to have contributed to publicly available code bases.
So the first thing I do, Colleen, is that I get. A candidate who, and yes, I know if you work at Meta, you can't contribute meta's code base
Great.
The public repositories and, and what have you, which is interesting juxtaposition against the hacker ethos. But we can just make that later. Um, yeah, so, so I, I go and I try to find as many breadcrumbs as I can to make sure that that candidate is who they are. Um, and then also, uh, I, I'm forgetting the tool that Robert Perchard at Tier four Group, a great organization that he put on my plate, um, that I use, like to check email addresses and to figure out when it was created and how many social accounts it's affiliated with. But, um, yeah, like the spammers are out there. Um, you can go on GitHub and actually download to your IDE. A resume distribution, uh, email, uh, blaster that'll [00:16:00] match and blast your email out. It's actually like if you put, if you put resume automator into, uh, Google and put GitHub in there,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah,
Brian Fink: like one of the first ones that pops up and you can send out 700 applications in, in less than 15 minutes.
Colleen Gallagher: You know, I think one of the ways, and you know, I know us, us at Textio, we're thinking about this too and trying to solve that is, um, and people are talking about this a lot in the market, is doing more AI screening where you have sort of the first interaction with a company be with an AI screener.
Um, and I would say, you know, part of the reason that I, I think they're becoming more and more popular. Is because people are so inundated with inbound right now, and I almost think of it less as a first recruiter screen and more of a, as a way to help us [00:17:00] understand who might have the right qualifications in addition to the fact that like not only do we have fraud, we also have.
Candidates using AI to generate a resume. So they look, I, I, I guess my, my view is,
Brian Fink: picture perfect.
Colleen Gallagher: yeah, they're becoming commoditized. Like, I, I don't know how much value we can get out of resumes anymore. And so I think, you know, I, part of the reason I wanted to ask you about this, I know you wrote, um, I think in one of your recent newsletters about like, how do we.
Not lose, lose a relationship building aspect of interacting with candidates. And it, it, you know, genuinely got me thinking because we are looking at building our own AI screener. Like to me it's almost like the AI screeners become a replacement for a resume review.
Brian Fink: the way I look at them and that gets me excited. Right?
Yeah,
if, if I were going to build one and
yeah.
One, I will find you. The people who build it
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Brian Fink: is that I would use the [00:18:00] screener as a way to, um. My favorite word in technology is Kubernetes, not because it sounds funny,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Brian Fink: people put on their resume K eight, or they put EKS or a KS or GKE, and it all means the same thing.
Yeah.
If you've got a novice recruiter and I say, yeah, I have GKE experience, do they necessarily know when they're screening the resume or having the conversation that that means that you have Google Kubernetes? Experience. Right? Well, how closely is that aligned to Azure or
Yeah.
On Amazon,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Brian Fink: So you've got the screener that can ask those deeper questions around a person's experience. And then you've got the opportunity to query it, use the answers using natural language search. So when you use that natural language search and say, does this person have Kubernetes experience? It comes back and it says, yeah, they use Kubernetes to deploy, uh, a hundred thousand pods [00:19:00] using GKE.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Brian Fink: That's one. Two, about the candidate experience. You talk about the homogenization of resumes, right? When I worked for Apple. I worked for Twitter, when I worked for AWS, and when I worked at McAfee, we were all consumer facing businesses.
Yeah.
don't wanna piss off your consumer, you really don't.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Brian Fink: Uh, Matt Charney.
Love Matty. Matt. Uh, we have an argument about this article that was written back in 2016 that talks about how by delivering a better candidate experience at Virgin Mobile, they were able to raise their bottom line. For their prepaid phone plans. Right? Somebody else should come out with that study. But I think that when you treat human beings like human beings and you give everybody that voice, maybe if it's synthetic, maybe if it's an automated interviewer. You put up your CSAT score, you great. You raise your NPS score. You, oh, I sent off the fireworks [00:20:00] using my thumbs. Um, is, uh, for those of you who are not watching, uh, Brian just used Apple gestures and set up a bunch of fireworks. Um,
Colleen Gallagher: Love it.
Brian Fink: apparently it didn't have that turned off. But the, but the strong reality of it is, is that when I think of the work that I did at McAfee Security, we strive to make the world a safer place. And I would not want somebody to have a bad candidate experience that they would say, you know what? I don't need my McAfee security. They didn't treat me well. I'm gonna open myself up to getting all these viruses and having my computer taken over.
Yeah. Yeah.
Alternatively on the other end of the spectrum, apple, everybody knows on Apple fanboy love all my Apple devices.
Right? Uh, you know, uh, John Turn, if you're listening, I love Apple. Um, the, uh, the reality of it is, is that I would not want anyone to have a bad experience with an Apple interview. I would want them to be just as joyful as when they open up an iPhone.
Colleen Gallagher: [00:21:00] So do you think that that's impossible with an AI screener or how, how would you think about doing it in a way that, that 'cause I, I genuinely think the problem we're trying to solve isn't to make it less personal. It's literally to actually give people more chance getting through the funnel. Because right now it's so hard to identify who truly has the things you're looking for.
Brian Fink: So when you talk about it that way, I think about it and I, I think that it acts as an agent of good for inbound traffic.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Brian Fink: Candidates that have been headhunted, I don't know that I would put them through an AI screener. I, I really don't like passive candidates. But then you get into a lot of EOC compliance issues, right?
Like were was each candidate that was brought to the process treated equally and fairly. So you have to deploy that for each of those, for each of those candidates, right? Or that's my understanding of how that would work.
Yeah,
you know, get, get Keith. [00:22:00] So Keith, Keith Soling, my boy. come on the show with Colleen,
yeah,
but on Rise.
Colleen Gallagher: yeah. That's right. Yeah. Um, that's a good point. But I, I, I. I, I, it's something that we can look into as well and to be, you know, Textio has always been very conscientious about this kind of stuff and wanting to stay compliant and, um, we support,
Brian Fink: you lead the field in this,
yeah.
You guys lead the field in New York, right? Like
Yeah.
You were the people who said, this is the way things need to be in an unbiased way, in an unbiased fashion, before being unbiased was PC or cool or,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. So I think, you know, we're, we're, like I said, we're working on developing something around that, and to me it's less about replacing a recruiter screen and it's more just about using it as a way to, to get people assessed in a [00:23:00] way that we used to use res, like just resumes just aren't a thing that you can rely on anymore.
And, um, that's, so I think it's just more.
Brian Fink: I mean. Look, you know, I have, we sit here having this interview, I have three Macs on my desk, right? I have one Mac. I have one Mac that I have that I just run for IDE purposes. Uh, and I go to the code on GitHub and see if it will compile and do the thing that you said it was gonna do right. Um, if it does. Okay. Now I've gotta make sure you're not a fake candidate, but you can do the work. You can
Yeah.
This epic shit. Oh, sorry. Okay.
Colleen Gallagher: It's fine. You're allowed, I don't think any children are gonna watch about, um, a recruiting podcast, but,
Brian Fink: recruiting podcast. Who? I mean, I have the Star Wars helmet in the background, so there might be a.
Colleen Gallagher: I guess what, kind of shifting gears a little, because you're so deep in recruiting in the technical space, I'm curious how you're seeing the [00:24:00] evolution of what people are interested in, skill wise, responsibility wise, like how has that changed in the last 12 months, the last six months, in terms of like what people are hiring for, where there's sort of this broad narrative that engineering roles are going away and the data doesn't really support that, and so I'm just curious.
If that's just inflated or is it, is, are there nuances to what people are looking for that are feeling different than they were 24 months ago?
Brian Fink: Okay, so 24 months ago, months ago, 96
Yes.
We all as. Organizations that are eager for talent is that we all wanted to raise the bar. We all want to go, I want this person who knows these four languages and if they know this, I want this.
Yeah.
So 12 months ago it was, Hey, I want somebody who knows Java [00:25:00] and I also want them to know AWS's. Automation Cloud or AWS's, uh, AI features, or I want them to have experience with N eight N. Now, six months later, it is, my expectation is that you're gonna find me a coder who knows how to use, who knows how
Yeah.
Native code, and who also knows how to use a tool like Cursor or Rept. Or, um, or Claude code, uh, or, or Codex.
And they have to be able to do that. And they're gonna be able to QA their, their technology. They're gonna know how to DevOps their technology. They're gonna know how to triage their problems. These, so 96 months ago we were like, we want this. Plus 1 48 months ago, we were like, we want this plus one. 24 plus one, 12 plus one. [00:26:00] Today. Everybody says to me, I want a candidate who knows how to do agentic. That's a big lift, Colleen.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Brian Fink: a big lift. Right? Um, because you know, there's some organizations that they say in eight N or some, there's some organizations that say, uh, we want you to make sure that they've experimented with open claw.
Hmm.
Okay. Um, there are a lot of moving pieces, but what I would say is that the overall thing theme that has not changed is we want software developers and we want them to be curious and we want them to index on applying that curiosity.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. I feel like that's sort of broadly speaking, you're hearing a lot more around curiosity, like learning agility and those types of things. Um. Which is why, you know, it's so important to have that candidate relationship and have that good connection and have the structure around the interview process, because I [00:27:00] think that's the only way you end up actually getting signal on some of those things.
But, I mean, are you finding that the talent that you're seeing, it's, it's sort of the same people and they're evolving or.
Brian Fink: that's a, that's a good call out. Um, there. So, uh, there have been. There has been that evolution. Um, but there are also some people who, Colleen, it's a 50 50. It's super dichotomous, is that you have those people who are doing things like with open claw or N eight N or uh, Zapier marrying it to Claude Code and what have you. you also have the people who are tiptoeing into the, into the pool and they're doing. Very small QA tasks in Claude,
Mm-hmm.
And
Yeah.
Not gonna get them where they need to be tomorrow. So there are those, uh, there are, [00:28:00] and, and I honestly think there's a technology divide, is that you have organizations like that don't want. Their employees to put anything into an LLM and we can understand that, right? Like there was the, there was the developer that loaded, um, Samsung's version of Android into an LLM and that created a bunch of problems. These are the same organizations that they don't have an AI governance strategy about what can go in an LLM or if you're gonna have a chat GPT Enterprise license or a clawed enterprise license, so that you have that instance on, on copilot, even restricted and giving that guidance.
And so you have organizations that are saying, here are all the tools. Go play with them in the sandbox, build epic things. And then you have other organizations that are handicapping. Uh, their employees are really chaining and shackling them to the past.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. And guess what? They're, they're doing it anyway, [00:29:00] right?
Brian Fink: Yeah, yeah. They're
Yeah. So,
I just
Colleen Gallagher: so like, just get it behind the security, right. Get it behind your own infrastructure, because that's. Just a cost of doing business now is like you just, everyone has to have, have a license.
Brian Fink: everybody has to have a
Yeah.
You know, you talk about that 10% of, of maam doing follow up Fridays, um, for that kind of engagement is that we, we both know that I spend a lot of time writing. Now I'm spending probably. Last week, I know I spent, I, I say N eight NI know I spent seven hours in N eight n building different automation sequences, um, to maybe power my engagement on a social network. Um, but like I, I'm, I'm a recruiter, I'm not a developer. So like, if you're a developer and you're not playing. You're not playing this game, we're not having this conversation
Yeah.
Putting you with [00:30:00] one of my clients that, that, that that shit ain't gonna fly.
Colleen Gallagher: well, shifting gears a little. Um, you're, you know, you're recruiter for, or, uh, what, what was it called? Um, the, uh, rush Chairman for Life. Tell me more.
Brian Fink: Emeritus. Yes, ma'am.
Colleen Gallagher: Yes. So tell me more about that. I think, um, when we had talked about this originally, my question to you was like, what advice would you have for people coming out of school?
And you told me the story, so I'd love you to share it with our audience around. Why you call yourself your rush chairman, emeritus.
Brian Fink: Okay, so here's the thing is like, you're gonna learn a lot of different things in school. Uh, I've got political science degrees like it, it's all well and good. I know how to use SPSS like I, I know to use sas. Great, fantastic. But the reality of it is, is that being Rush Chairman at the University of Georgia for top SL five for the new chapter. Put me in unpredictable situations. Okay. It, you know, it would be like, well, we've got, um, I'll [00:31:00] give you, I'll give you a really good example is that we had one individual, one kid that is a good friend of mine now, um, who had certain dietary restrictions, right? And then we had everybody else who had, was, you know, could eat pizza and what
Yeah.
Is that, how do you make that accommodation and, and make it where? It doesn't single this person out, but brings them into the event and brings them closer to everybody else. Right? Like how do you deal with those challenges? Or how do you convince a rap super band run DMC to play your fraternity house?
House when, oh, wait a minute. What did we talk about? Did we not talk about
Colleen Gallagher: No.
Brian Fink: so, okay. Okay. So, um, so real quick, for those of you who are, um. Who are watching? I, I just got this from one of my fraternity brothers because I am a huge, uh, run DMC fan because they did play tops on fa, but I'm also a [00:32:00] huge Beastie Boys fan, and this is the book together forever. It's about their story, about how they came up in the rap game. And so one of the things that's really unusual about my fraternity is that we've had the opportunity to, uh, to grow. Uh, my pledge class was 18, the next pledge class. I was Rush chairman for. We grew to 24 and then eventually we had a pledge class of 32 while I was Rush chairman.
Right. So I'm constantly trying to encourage people to, to go Greek still today. I think it's important. Um, I, I know that people say you're buying your friends, but I think that you're opening yourself to up other opportunities. It's like how I write about people going into small rooms that you don't belong in
Yeah.
Saying what's on your mind and building that, um, you know, uh. Social chair decided we were gonna get run DMC to play our fraternity
Colleen Gallagher: Wow.
Brian Fink: And uh, it was a great rush tool. And we had, uh, four days before they were supposed to play the university sent the fire department in [00:33:00] to say our house could only fit 200 people. And there were, there were a, I mean, uh, 150 people and there were like 200 other people coming to this
Yeah.
So how did you, so like, it taught me to be resourceful and to go out and find a club that would be in downtown Athens that would host this. Right? Like, um, so as Rush Chairman, it really taught me. How to build bridges with people, how to create full and lively engagement.
Yeah.
Listen to people about what was important to them.
Yeah. Like not every, not every kid that wanted to join, tap, join, tap. Right. Like it, it requires you being smart enough to say to 'em, I know that you really want to be here, but these, these guys here, they're not your friends. You should go be with your friends. Be with your friends. Right. Um. You know, yeah.
Lost some great kids by, uh, by and, and became rivals, if you [00:34:00] will. Um, because I made that decision. But at the same token, not every person you interview for your company, no matter how badly they wanna work for Apple, John, turn, for the phone, um, is, uh, is that no matter how badly that they wanna work for your company, it isn't always a great fit.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Brian Fink: Right. So you've gotta be able to make those decisions as a rush chairman, but you also have to figure out what is important. Now I'm giving the thumbs up. Is that what, what is important? Do they want to come to a to great parties? Great, we've got that. We can make that
happen. But what are you gonna have to invest to have a great party?
Yeah,
Well, you're gonna have to invest in going to study hall and study hours because we have the number one GPA on campus flip side. We've got the number one GPA on campus. You want to go pre-med? You should come here. We've
yeah.
Of
Yeah.
Uh, guys, right? And we can help level you up. So that's what I mean by being the rush chair emeritus, because when I'm recruiting for a great organization or, or [00:35:00] maybe, maybe they're not great yet, maybe they're going from good to great in the
Yeah.
Collins, right?
Yeah.
We've gotta say. do we change the game and make sure that we're bringing people in that are foundational pillars that we can build success on in incremental fashion.
Yep.
Not trying to boil the ocean all at one time.
Yeah.
Yeah. So I, I'm Rush chairman. Damn.
Yeah.
You.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. I mean I love, I love that story because I feel like most recruiters I talked to came, came into recruiting from a very different path. Um, either, you know, I think somebody I was talking to recently, she was an engineer and was frustrated with the talent she was seeing, and her boss was like, well, then go fix it.
You know, and she did, and she, she moved into recruiting. Someone else I talked to was a social worker. So I feel like you're a little bit of a, of a unicorn of somebody who sort of found their path very early.
Brian Fink: Do you know? I I do. You know, it's really funny, like funny [00:36:00] haha. Is that my first job outta college when I was selling computer training? Um, for New Horizons Computer Learning Center, my number one biggest superstar client. Was Ron OD staffing
Colleen Gallagher: Oh. Mm-hmm.
Brian Fink: I was like, you find people jobs? And they were like, yeah. I was like, okay, I get people computer training, you should come and we should, we should work out something like this. And, and we did. And, uh, staffing and recruiting. always in my DNA. I just didn't know it until I hit the jet stream and I was like, I've been doing this, like I can
Yeah.
Can
Yeah.
I can listen. And that's important as long as you're talking about listening. Remember you got two ears and one mouth, and I know I've done a lot of talking today, but you need twice as much listening to your candidates as you do talking at them.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah, so important for sure. Um,
just I guess transitioning a little bit more to what you like to do, um, when you're not focused on, on [00:37:00] recruiting, tell us about your latest endeavor with fostering. Some little.
Brian Fink: yes. So, uh, so for those of you who have been my candidates, and for those of you who have been my clients and for those who've been somewhere in between, like Colleen, um, Allie, and I, that's my wife, um, actually Ally. This is all Allie, right? Like I said, I, all I did was say yes. I didn't realize what the responsibility was gonna be. Uh, shout out to my wife and to a neonatal puppy rescue called Bosley Place here in Atlanta, Georgia. So we had the responsibility of accepting, um, of fostering five, I mean, I'm sorry, three, five week old puppies, um, just after they had been weaned. Uh, they were, uh, part of a litter of nine. The nine were named for, uh, Catherine O'Hara Characters that she played on, uh, whether it was, uh, uh, uh, Myra, [00:38:00] whether it was, uh, Delia Dietz,
Mm-hmm.
We still have Dietz.
Dietz is with us, so he may, he may speak up every now and
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Brian Fink: it's been such a great passion. Uh, you know, our, our guy Cam. Who's, uh, who makes his appearance on LinkedIn every now and then. He's my teacup pity. He is a, uh, he's predominantly pit bull and chihuahua. Um, I call him my teacup pit, and we got him from, uh, or my teacup pity.
We got him from Bosley and started a relationship with them, whether it's bottle feeding puppies, whether it's cleaning up pens. Now it's having them come here and. and be part of our lives. And, uh, if you're looking for a great guy or maybe you're looking for a great gal, right? But I got a guy right here, like I got one left. Uh, his name is Dietz. Uh, he looks like a boxer. He's 23 different breeds. I say he's the designer version of Jordan. Right. Um, this is, uh, it's [00:39:00] been great. It's been super rewarding. Uh, I don't know that Cam is really thrilled about it,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Brian Fink: You know, watching these, watching these puppies go after Cam and cam's like, I dunno what I'm doing. I'm like, don't, don't worry. I didn't know what I
Yeah.
I was a dad either. I'm not a dad. I'm, you know,
Yeah.
Colleen Gallagher: Oh, that's so fun. Um, do you have interest in Dets? Like, are you gonna be a foster girl?
Brian Fink: here am I gonna be a foster Fail?
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Brian Fink: We're not allowed to fail on, on this. Go around. So Dietz, like I said, Dietz is like a, he's, he's 23 different breeds. He looks like he's a boxer. Uh, boxers are super intelligent. Um, my sister Laura, uh, she had a boxer, loved him. Uh, loved Tucker. He was great. Um, he reminds me a lot of Tucker.
There are a lot of feelings with me and Dietz and like, yeah. So, uh, he's a good dude. Um, I wish that he's, he's not, um. He's not so interested in being on a leash, which makes the runs kind of [00:40:00] difficult, like running,
not whatever,
Yeah.
Uh, it makes running a little difficult with him. I've tried that and he kind of wants to go every which away on the leash.
Um,
Mm-hmm.
Uh, yeah, but like, yeah, he's, he's a dude. He's a good dude. If you're looking for a good dude, I got him.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah, my, I have a, I have a pit boxer mix and, um, he's, he's a single dog. We're a single dog household. He's not, um, accepting of other, uh, four-legged friends. So it's, it's helped us to not be a foster, fail or, or taken other dogs at any point in our lives, so That's good. But, um, before we jump, you have talked a lot about the people who you learned from coming up and.
You know, sounds like you had a really, uh, they had a big impact on how you operate, and I'm curious, are there other folks that you would recommend, you know, sort of newer recruiters or, or people who are [00:41:00] earlier in their career, like, do you have any advice from them, from, from you or for, or folks they should, should look to for inspiration and follow?
Brian Fink: Okay, so somebody who is new has impressed me and I think of him as a reverse mentor is Martel Howard. Martel Howard is gonna be taking the stage at ERE here in Atlanta in a few short weeks.
Huh.
I'm really excited and impressed by what he's going to say. Okay, so that is somebody new. I think that you need to look to
Okay.
Somebody who's kind of in the middle.
A wise sage would be Aaron Matthew, who I, uh, I text with Aaron all the time. She'll say, I got a problem, and I'm like, I gotta fix. Or I, I've got a problem. She's got a fix or intelligence, and she's really leading the charge in that area. Um, and I mentioned Steve Levy, you know, uh. Colleen, the first time I was [00:42:00] on stage super, I mean like, like I would, I mean it was, I had done like local events, but like this is the first time that like I went to Texas and I did an event and I was the second speaker in the morning and I was gonna show people how to hack LinkedIn and. I did the presentation and everything was great, and people were kind of in awe, and then all of a sudden, my mic runner is Steve Levy, who I've never met in person, but I followed his blogs, I've followed his videos, I've seen him at Source Con, and he is my mic runner. Okay. He's gonna ask me questions and I'm like, oh, okay. The first question is from Matt Charney. Okay. Do you wanna talk about being baptized by fire? Okay. That, that was my baptizism by fire. And, um, if anybody knows Steve Levy, Steve isn't satisfied with your first [00:43:00] answer, he presses you
Colleen Gallagher: Okay.
Brian Fink: Man, he makes me a great recruiter every day.
Colleen Gallagher: good. That's a good tool. Well, where can folks find you to connect with
Brian Fink: Uh, you can find me on the linkedin.com. I'm Brian Fink on LinkedIn. I'm the Brian Fink on Twitter, Instagram Substack and Threads.
Colleen Gallagher: and, and you have a newsletter that you published. Tell us a little bit about what that, what that is.
Brian Fink: Okay, so I've got two newsletters that I publish. I publish one on LinkedIn. It's called the Talent Architects, where I talk about all the things that are going on in TA and kind of my, uh, my spice, if you will, on what I, what I think is good, bad, and ugly. Um, and I'm not afraid to call it out. Uh, I'm also not afraid to get into it with you in the comments, so bring it on.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah,
Brian Fink: put up my fist for those of you are listening and not watching.
Yeah.
And then I have forward motion is that, um, I take the name from, uh, Bugsy, Siegel's character. sorry. Uh, the, the character [00:44:00] that, uh, oh man, I just lost my mind about who the actor was who played Bugsy Siegel, uh, alongside Annette Benning, his would be his wife.
Colleen Gallagher: can picture his face, but I don't know the name. I can't think of the name.
Brian Fink: yeah. So, so Bugsy Siegels had used to mutter, forward Motion solves all. And when he would mutter that, and so like that stuck with me as a kid. And I'm just trying to propel the discipline of being an entrepreneur, the discipline of being a great recruiter and the discipline of being a great dad. That forward motion will solve all
Colleen Gallagher: It's great and I love reading it. It's great. It's a great newsletter, so it.
Brian Fink: Thank you.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. Well thank you so much for being on the show. I really loved, you know, you have such deep knowledge and experience in this space and you can tell you have a real true passion for it and it really comes out in how you talk and I think there are a lot of things people listening could, can learn from this conversation.
I'm really appreciative that you, that you joined us today.
Brian Fink: Colleen, [00:45:00] thanks for making space for me. Thanks for making sure that I was seen and heard, and I just look forward to all the work that you do to hear. Make sure that not only recruiters are seen and heard, but the candidates are seen and heard, so thank you.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. Well thank you and thanks to everyone who's listening. If you learn something today or laughed, please tell somebody about the podcast. Thank you again to Brian for joining us. This has been another exciting episode of Recruiters on the Rise. We'll see you all next time.
And that wraps up another episode. Thank you for joining. For show notes and other episodes, visit us at recruiters on the rise.com. Recruiters on the Rise is sponsored by Lavalier, an interview intelligence platform. Lavalier goes beyond basic note takers to approve your ability to assess candidates with AI powered interview questions, summaries, and transcription.
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