Travis bake

‍So if we're really talking about. Humanizing things and making things personal. The ability to engage with talent in a way that the content really matters to that individual, to me, increases the level of, you know sort of the soft component of, of what we're trying to create. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Hello, and welcome to our series of Scaling Stories, a discussion with talent leaders about their lessons building teams at some of the world's fastest growing companies. I'm thrilled to introduce our guest today, Travis Baker, the VP of Talent Acquisition at Boulevard. Travis, welcome. Thank you for joining. To get started, can you give us an overview about you and your background? 

Travis bake

Sure. Thanks for having me. It's exciting. So yeah, as you said, currently the VP of of talent at Boulevard. So prior to Boulevard, I was at Zoom and led their tech recruiting during the height of the pandemic and all of their growth. And then previous to that, I've been in the startup community at places like NextRoll and Carta and Duo Security and other places. So I've, I've been in the game for about 15 years or so. . 

Nasser Oudjidane

Great. What a journey, and perhaps could you tell me more about Boulevard? What is its mission and vision? 

Travis bake

So we are a highly mission driven organization. You know, Boulevard is part of and built for the self-care community. So we provide a full featured operations software for modern self-care businesses. And our mission is to make it easier for everyone to look and feel their best. It's something that really drives us. It's something that, you know, is, is a big part of our talent acquisition strategy as well, you know, because as we both know, mission and values really differentiate you as an employer. So it's, it's a, it's a fun place to be because, you know, we're, we're working with customers who. Are our neighbors, you know, they're the people that we actually go to visit to make ourselves look and feel great. So it's an awesome place to be. It's spent about a year and life's good. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Awesome. And perhaps could we start the beginning of your career, something that we've discussed in the past is you cutting your teeth in recruiting agencies and there are some pros and cons to starting with your career in recruiting with a recruiting agency. What would you say are some of the strengths and weaknesses of, of embarking on a career that way?

Travis bake

Yeah. Yeah. So I started an agency, I heard of that Aerotech. So, you know, one of the largest agencies. And quite frankly, you know, when I look back at my experience, Both personally and the folks that I've hired on my team, I've, I've had a considerable number of people who have started their career as in agency. And frankly, like it's mostly pros. You know, if you think about what agency provides, it's a tremendous bootcamp for recruiting. It teaches you the fundamentals and really drills it into you. And it's a high performance culture. You know, if you don't deliver, you're not, you're not gonna obviously add value to your customers and clients, and ultimately you're not gonna be there, which is a bit harsh. But at the same time, it really sort of weeds out folks who, who can rise to the occasion and those, you know, those folks who can't. But when I look back at, you know, a lot of the people who have been on my team, who have been at agency or have started in, in agency, They're some of the highest performers that I've ever had on my teams. And a lot of them have moved on to bigger and better things. So, you know, like if I really look at it, you know, the, the basics of recruiting is, it's, it's a numbers game. At the end of the day, if you have challenges that you're, that you're encountering in the business, you can almost always solve it with volume and effort and hard work. And I think agency is one of those places where hard work always seems to pay off. And matter of fact, like when I started in, in my career, you know, Aerotech has basically a like a trial period. You're technically a contractor for 90 days and they decide at the end of that 90 days whether or not they're, you're gonna stay on as a, you know, a full-time staffer. and I almost didn't make the cut. And it was, it was funny because I was, you know, I was trying to do things a little bit differently and, you know, trying to do things my own flavor and, and obviously like aerotech and agency kind of wants you to, to fit into a box. And I, I just remember having this, you know, sort of discussion with myself where it was like, they don't think that I can, that I can cut it. They don't think that I can do this. I'm gonna prove everybody wrong. And I was in a, you know, a very niche part of the business. I was in the scientific side of the business. And, you know, it was just one of those things where it's like, I just, I just worked harder than everybody else and lots of failure, lots of challenge. And through all of that, it was just something where, you know, I developed a level of grit that I think has carried me through a lot of my career because recruiting is hard. And when you're accustomed to overcoming those challenges, When you learn from failure, you become resilient. So for me, agency is a, a, a tremendous place to start in recruiting. And certainly once you move in-house, it's a great place to, to, you know, to NAB talent because you can offer a far more balanced approach to work in life. But at the same time, like all of that hard work and all of that foundation that was built at agency, you know, carries forward and translates. 

Nasser Oudjidane

‍Does any cons come to mind speaking broadly about the behaviors that have been developed?

Travis bake

I think the only con, again, I I I think it's more of like something that needs to be developed when you move in-house. So obviously agency is very transactional, right? Like you're engaged on a search for a company you've gotta quickly ramp to. , the type of profile, the type of culture that they're offering, all of those things. But then when you're done with a search, you kind of wash your hands of it and walk away. When you move in-house, there's a long-term commitment involved. And let's say the search isn't optimal at agency, you can fire your client, right? Like they're not prepared, they're not ready to make the hire. You can't do that in-house. You have to have, you know, going back to that resiliency you really have to kind of push forward and, and, and commit to getting the behavior and the changes that are needed to be successful. So it's not so much a con as just something that when you transition from agency into in-house recruiting, you really have to frame it in terms of You're not dating anymore, now you're actually, you're married, you're married to the company, you're married to, the success of the company. And I think for some people that can be a hard transition, but I also think it's a fantastic learning opportunity for a lot of folks. And especially in our highly transactional society, you know, this, this idea that you can, you can just move on, sort of is pretty pervasive. So for a lot of people I think there's a challenge there. But, you know, again, I think the resiliency, you just have to reframe it. Like it's no longer resiliency around extreme success and, you know, extreme performance, me metrics and performer or, or be kicked out kind of thing. And it turns into okay, that resiliency is now about committing to making the environment that you're in more successful. So I wouldn't call it a con, but I definitely would say it's a behavioral change and switch that needs to be made 

Nasser Oudjidane

Sure it, it gets me thinking about what conditions can be created within in-house talent acquisition teams. So those behaviors are not lost over time. Have you ever thought about, or have you seen or experienced an environment that can be created when onboarding recruiters, whether that's training development or general goal setting and KPI management to ensure that the best of the, let's call it the the agency mindset is applied to internal house in internal recruiting?

Travis bake

Yeah, so typically what I've found is you know, there, there are kind of two ways that you can look at at recruiting success. One is gonna be efficiency. , right? Like just somebody who is obviously, like if you source one hi, or you know one person and they go through the process and they're hired, that's, that's amazing, right? Like a one for one is incredible. It rarely happens, of course. So for agency recruiting, you know, there's a, there's a, a really high focus on activity metrics. So for me, as agency recruiters come into more of the corporate space, being able to continue to focus on some of those activity metrics as a way to kind of move into the efficiency piece. Like if you have the activity, if everybody is doing the work necessary, if they have that grit, that resilience, all of that kind of stuff they will be successful. Somebody who is a little bit more experienced in the announced community may be more efficient. , but we can work towards efficiency. And so to me, that's usually what I focus on with, with people who are in coming into the organization specifically from agency, is like, just keep focusing on activity and we'll work towards efficiency over time.

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. It's interesting because from when you started your career and in my background in career activity metrics have cha slightly slightly changed. I don't think candidates are being cold, cold that much anymore. Nope. So how do you define, or what would you say are the good measures of activity?

Travis bake

Yeah. So yeah, I can't imagine a software engineer answering a random cold call that probably wouldn't happen. No. I mean most of it is, is gonna be obviously top of funnel effort, right? So how many people are we actually sourcing? How many messages are we sending out? What is the what does the follow up look like? Like, you can't just, you can't just send one message to a hundred people and hope that that's gonna work out. You need to say, you know, you need to send three, four, or five messages to a hundred people to really get the conversion, the number of recruiter screens, like I'm a firm believer. And I see, I see this as, you know, a trend, and maybe we can talk about this later, but there's over, there's like an over-reliance on looking at somebody's profile and making an indication as to whether or not they're a viable candidate. Right. I don't think that's good practice. I think you have to talk to folks and I think you have to hear their story, and I think you have to really intimately understand the problems that they'd be solving at your, you know, at your business. and you have to find ways to sort of make those connections with somebody else's background. So, you know, I look at recruiter screens a lot because typically I find the people who are having the most conversations live, you know, in-person conversations, they tend to be the most successful. And they also tend to be the people who advocate for candidates in a really healthy way. Because we all know profiles don't tell us much. I mean, they may get your foot in the door but certainly they don't, they don't it's not an indication of whether or not you should be hired or whether or not you're gonna be , you know, successful in, in, in the future. So, you know, for me it's, it's have a lot of conversations. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah, absolutely. I think we will be getting into that shortly with regards to especially what you mentioned profiles. It hasn't been audited by a third party. So what is a profile? And fascinating. But I think if we can get into your experience with building, sourcing from scratch, you've led technical recruiting orgs like Zoom at the height of its growth as you mentioned. How did you think about the architecture of the system to drive connections, engagement, conversions at pace? 

Travis bake

Yeah, so Zoom was, when I joined Zoom, we were so it would've been May of 2020 and they had no technical recruiting at Zoom. So it was right at the height of obviously the pandemic and Zoom was going through the roof. And so when I joined and established tech recruiting at Zoom there was no sourcing function at all. There was no sourcing function on the go-to-market side of things. And so I introduced, you know, the idea of sourcing. At Zoom and you know, initially we started by embedding sourcers into the team. And typically I, I do that especially, you know, at, at, at companies that are a little bit smaller or developing their ta sort of acumen because there's, there's a really strong relationship that ends up being built. Like when somebody, when a sourcer is embedded in a team and they're consistently looking at profiles and consistently working with the same recruiters and the same hiring managers over and over and over again, that that ability to calibrate to the proper profile is, is just far faster. You know, the velocity on it is, is, is much higher. You know, so when we introduced sourcing at Zoom, we started from a very basic perspective of just like, let's, let's introduce a little bit of specialization. We've got recruiters who are gonna carry candidates through the active part of the funnel. And we've got sourcers who are really gonna generate a lot of the leads at the top of the funnel. And it worked really, really well. And the problem, and we'll, I know we're gonna talk about this later as well, you know, the problem is that's still highly transactional and maybe efficient transactions because we're able to calibrate and get more and more aligned to the proper profile and the type, you know, the type of individual that we want to hire for. But it's still like, you get a signal, you react to the signal, you get a signal, you react to the signal. So as we started to think about the future of recruiting at Zoom, and keep in mind, like I said, we started, it was sub 2000 people when I left last year, middle of last year we were 9,000 people. So in the span of two years, it's, you know, tremendous, tremendous growth. So the idea of, of like us needing to. You know, really accommodate the volume of people that we needed to hire for the business. It just necessitated a, a, a different view of what sourcing looks like, and that's where we started moving into more of the candidate generation side of things. And that we started to kind of carve off the team and looking at it like, okay, this is a centralized team that focuses on ideal candidate profiles that have been identified and, and, you know, partnered with the business to, to, to really highlight exactly what those ideal candidate profiles look like. And the idea there is like, you know, identification isn't a problem. The tooling that we have available to us in recruiting, like we can find pretty much anybody on the planet. That's, that's not the issue. The issue is how do you engage that talent and nurture them over time? How do you make your employer. You know, an employer of choice where it's not just like one in a sea of many, but all of a sudden it becomes maybe like the top 10 for a candidate. And then hopefully over time it becomes, you know, top three where they're actually, you know, they're actively considering, in this case it was Zoom as a destination in their career. And the only way you can do that is by building a relationship over time. How do you scale that up? Obviously more automation, you know, how do you share content that's relevant? How do you kind of carve people up into segments where they're getting content that's really relevant to them and really important to them, and will speak to the things that they really care about. So that was, that was sort of the genesis of what we were creating at Zoom was this idea of like, okay, let's, let's actually build a, a warm lead pipeline. Let's, let's. Watch people's careers develop and help them understand that Zoom could help them along in, you know, in their career and help them develop skill sets and be a great destination for them to, you know, come and grow and contribute at a high level. So, so that to me is like, that's the shift going from a transactional sourcing method which is always gonna be, you know, slower and highly reactive to something where we know the people that we want. It's just a matter of like, how do we, how do we really entice them to one shift to being active, but not just shift to being active to any company, but shifting to a very specific interest in, like I said, in, you know, in this case Zoom. So that's, that's the shift that I think is really important for a lot of companies to make. It takes a lot of resourcing and a lot of dedication, but you know, that that highly specialized, more demand gen kind of focused effort is gonna play far greater dividends in the long term. 

Nasser Oudjidane

And who were the key stakeholders for success in actually executing that strategy? Who did you need on board within the org? 

Travis bake

Gosh, you can, I mean, you can imagine it's everybody, right? So obviously like our business partners, you know, the, having the president of engineering and, you know, our COO and our cfo, like there's, there's a, there's a, a cost associated to it when, when you're, you're really trying to showcase that there's gonna be a, a greater ROI for this. And so where I really kind of focused my messaging was, you know, time to hire is, is something that obviously recruiting leaders always measure and think about. Well, time to hire is always going to be longer. When you're starting your pipeline from scratch, when the role opens, and you can imagine how detrimental and expensive it is, if it's a backfill, for instance. So being, you know, taking 60 to 90 days to identify, engage, and interview talent, and then close them over the course of 60 to 90 days. The, the, there's a cost to the business for some of those things. So to me, I started thinking about time to interview. So if we already did our homework, if we already knew the talent that we wanted, we've identified them, if we've already been engaging and nurturing them, over time, when an opening pops open, you are able to go to them and say, Hey, like, we've had conversations, you've been engaging with our content. You know, all of these things, right? We're ready. , if you're ready and you've been showing us signs, you know, there's been indication that you are ready. So now all of a sudden it's just like, how long does it take to interview? And if you can do that within, you know, let's say two to four weeks, which is, is completely reasonable, all of a sudden that time to hire is irrelevant. It's just time to interview and you can start maximizing your speed in the interviewing process versus the speed of the entire, you know, interviewing process and recruiting process. So that's, that's how I was able to sort of win people over is this idea that like, look, it's just gonna take a lot less time and the quality is gonna be much higher because we've already done the work to identify the people that we want.

Nasser Oudjidane

Right. You mentioned something earlier with regards to leading indicators of recruiting performance and one of those being those that are doing more recruiter screens. And when you intersected with this activity, what were some of the signs that the candidate would be interested in interviewing and then ultimately leading to a higher quality? What, what I'm trying to say here is were, were your sourcing team speaking to the candidates, writing briefs about them, and were, was that part of, let's say, part of the ingredients to build a kind of build this machine in order to be able to scale hire at scale and at pace? 

Travis bake

To be frank, this is, this is a, this was a major gap for us at Zoom, and it's still a major gap in the industry as as, as a, as a whole, like when you look at a, a, you know, on the go to market side of things, and you look at demand gen, right? They have a lead scoring mechanism. So they're able to input custom pieces of data that indicate a lead's likelihood to convert. So people clicking on emails, signing up for, you know, downloading white papers, all of the, like, all of these little like points of of reference where once they reach this threshold, and you can obviously calibrate that threshold based on further down the funnel conversion. You're, you're in a position where when somebody reaches that threshold, you're like, there's a 90% chance that we're gonna be able to close this business that exists on the demand gen and go to market side of things. Right. Doesn't exist in recruiting right now that I know of. I'm not saying I, I know everything here, but it, you know, the, the tooling and I'm, I have partners that we're working with that try to, you know, to try to tackle this problem. But to me that's like, That's the silver bullet. You know, if we can get to the point where not only are we identifying the talent and then getting them into our, our sort of nurturing system, but we're actually able to measure the level of engagement that they're having with the content that we're sharing. Or maybe they've interviewed with us previously, or maybe we, we start a program where, you know, hiring managers have conversations with candidates in advance of need. You know, they, they're team's full, they don't have any openings, but they're still having conversations with folks. They don't have to be interviews. They can be very casual, but like all of these little points of data could contribute to this understanding of a lead scoring system for candidates. So, , that's, that honestly was the problem that I wanted to tackle at Zoom. And one of the reasons I joined Boulevard is because there was a shared passion with the executive team to tackle this problem. And when I look at technology partners in the recruiting space, I look for that same sort of mindset of how can we take some of the benefits that the go-to-market side of the business is seen and how they manage their entire funnel and how can we retrofit some of that stuff to recruiting? So it, it's an open problem right now, 

Nasser Oudjidane

right? Yeah. It's clear that the recruiting business model, the recruiting tech stack has not kept pace and has been dwarfed by its cousins in sales, in marketing. Why do you think that is? 

Travis bake

I think it's because recruiting is a cost center, and sales is is revenue generating. You know, I like revenue is king. Like if you, if you look at, if you look at any organization, you know, the rock stars are the sales team and the engineering team, the folks who build the product, and the folks who sell the product and bring in revenue. Recruiting is a support function. So, you know, the level of investment in recruiting hasn't kept pace because it's really hard to get, you know, the same level of money for recruiting. You know, I, I, I often think of like, like if you think about the volume of leads that a go-to-market team deals with compared to the potential of the, you know, the volume of leads that recruiting deals with. And then you look at the number of people in, you know, dedicated to the go-to-market side of of the business versus the number of people dedicated to ta, you know, zoom, for instance, right. there were thousands of people in the go-to-market side of the business at the height of our size N ta. We were about 130, 140 people. So there's, there's a, a scale difference that is massive and, and a lot of it, like I said, is just, it's just recruiting is a cost center. So a lot of what I've been trying to think of lately is like, how can we shift that? How can recruiting maybe not be a cost center or, or how can we shift the model for how recruiting is funded to where it's you don't have those barriers with you know, the finance team and with executive leadership around how much should we really fund recruiting to, to be successful. But like, I, I think of the volume all the time. At, at Zoom we were getting like 10,000 plus applications. Across all of our roles at the height, you know, of the pandemic. We were getting 10,000 plus applications across all of our roles in a matter of a couple weeks. Like, how, how do you deal with that volume with such a small, you know, number of folks, and obviously with tooling that, that, that is, is maybe a little bit, you know, behind where it should be. So yeah, so I think there's, you know, I think there's, there's a challenge there for all of us in TA leadership to figure out how we can make recruiting less of a cost center and, and, and something that actually generates meaningful value. That's, that can be recognized by, you know, the finance team and, and by the rest of the organization.

Nasser Oudjidane

Do you have any suggestions on what that is? Does it fit further into HR under that fold? or perhaps does it fall within its cousins in sales and marketing because some of the skills are transferrable because this is, yeah. Being compounded by the fact that their layoffs going around everywhere, but especially in tech where recruiting is disproportionately effective. Yep. The tooling available with reading applications, using artificial intelligence also makes the landscape fluid ever changing. Yep. How do you think about that? 

Travis bake

Man, I'm deep in, I'm deep in it right now, and I, I don't know if I have all the answers. I think I think there are a couple things, and I think there are, there are sort of iterations that need to happen. So one of the things that I've been really fascinated about recently is, is how can, how can we organize recruiting in a way that the business funds us? In a more performance based paradigm. So instead of it just being like, okay, recruiting, you know, this is how much it costs for the tooling, this is how much it costs for the people, and we stop there, right? It's just a cost center. It's gonna cost 2 million bucks this year for recruiting to exist within this, you know, within this organization, regardless of performance. We could hit our goals or we could not hit our goals. It's still gonna cost us 2 million bucks. I think there's an opportunity for us to start thinking about the business should budget. Like if we know our costs per hire, for instance, we should be very competitive in comparison to external agencies. We should have a lower cost per hire. If we don't, that's a, that's a whole nother issue. But we should, we, that's where we should be. So what if the business actually said, okay, hey, we need to, we need to hire 10 people this year for my function or my team. And the business leader then needs to budget the per cost higher. And every time the recruiting team delivers, they fund us through that delivery. So how can we switch it to more of a performance based pay? So if recruiting underperforms the function, the business would actually have excess budget and vice versa. If the business all of a sudden changes their signal and says, actually, we don't need 10 people, we need 15 people. The recruiting team itself would actually make air quotes for those listening to us on podcasts, make more money. . So like, I think there's, I think there are things that we can sort of walk into where it turns into that. The other, the other thought that I've been thinking about is the idea that every employee has, you know, a revenue per employee number that sort of floats over their head. And the idea there is obviously like you want, you wanna make more money maybe not necessarily in growing organizations that are scaling and all that kind of stuff, but, but generally speaking, you would want each employee to generate more revenue than what they actually cost. So there's also sort of this like investment portfolio lens where it's like when a recruiter makes a higher for the business, technically they're adding revenue because there's a revenue per hire or revenue per employee number. So that to me is another potential angle that we could look at just to, just to put recruiting in this in a different lens and get us out of this cost center perspective. which I think is just incredibly detrimental. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah, Absolutely. Fascinating. And it was Charlie Munger that said, I think incentives drive behavior. So if you're able to creatively think about some of the ways that recruiting can innovate, especially using the language of what the business Yeah. Is using revenue, employee revenue, overall profitability. How would you apply this to actually recruit a compensation? Is it going to be similar to AEs and SDRs? Fixed and variable? 

Travis bake

Yeah. I mean, I, I think there's a world where that possibly exists. You know, I think there's, there's a big culture shift there for a lot of recruiters. And I think, you know, the change management would be really, really interesting. But at the same time, you know, look at what. Look at what commission based structure and spiffs and all, you know, everything that, that happens in the, in, in the sales world. Look how it drives performance. Now, I, I don't know if it's like because, because of the compensation structure that they achieve that performance or because they just tend to be very competitive, you know, driven individuals. Like I, I, I, you know, I don't have the data to kind of tease that out, but I do think there, there's a world in which a recruiter is paid for performance. And, you know, really their, their earning potential is, is wholly based on, on how well they're able to deliver for the business. I, I don't think it's that big of a shift because when you think about it, like recruiting is always under the gun when it comes to, when it comes to delivery. Like we, we get as much pressure as sales. So I think the idea that, you know, as a recruiter, That pressure is a constant that doesn't change, but maybe you'd be able to be compensated a little bit more aggressively in that environment. I don't know. I'd take that bet. You know, personally so I do, I do see a world where potentially, you know, compensation and recruiting starts to look a lot more like sales. And I, I, I think it's something that, you know, would be a, an incredibly interesting experiment. I, I've heard of some people doing it, but I don't think they've done the full model switch. So again, it's just, it just appears as like additional cost burden. But if you do the model switch where it's like the recruiting team doesn't get paid unless they perform. And if they perform, then they get paid. You know, I, I think, I think there's probably a a strong argument there. 

Nasser Oudjidane

How would you think about the analogy of. recruiting your sales, marketing, or even perhaps an element of customer success, aligning ultimately with what the business wants, which is high quality team members that are productive quickly and stay for a long time, versus the notion of perhaps just bums on seats. So if you are, if you are getting hires, you're doing your job in, in air quotes, but it's actually not aligned to what the business needs, then perhaps that can cause the wrong type of incentives and behaviors. So paying for retention, for instance. And then in addition to that, you're mentioning about architecting and building sourcing solutions. How does one grow their career if they're awesome at sourcing or in recruiting coordination, and then attributing the hire rather than the, the account executive slash recruiter who's enabling the the the, the candidate to become an employee by signing the offer letter. 

Travis bake

Yeah. So a couple different things there. I think one is, is like quality of candidates, right? So like the, the concern that, hey, if you are providing incentives for recruiters to close roles, you know, will there be a quality component or, or, or a drop in quality? I think there are really interesting thoughts on that. Like, one could be, you know, the average retention for, for most employees in tech is 18 to 24 months right now. Which is nuts when you think about it. Cause that's such a short amount of time. So it, it, you know, there could be a component where part of, part of the bonus is, is paid out once, once your hire is, you know, reaches that milestone, right? But I always say like, recruiters don't make hiring decisions. We facilitate the process. So at the end of the day, . If we're making bad hires, we kind of have to look at ourselves in the mirror as a business and say like, are we making compromised decisions or are hiring managers making compromised decisions? And to me it's always, it comes back to the confidence of the interviewing process. If we have confidence in the interviewing process that it is getting us the signal that we need to make really strong hires. We shouldn't have concerns about quality because we, we should have confidence that we're making strong decisions. So there's, there's one piece of the quality component. The second piece is sort of career progression and, and laddering for, for recruiters. If we start to specialize in break breakout recruiting a little bit more, right? Where there's like candidate generation, there might still be some transactional sourcers who are kind of embedded in the teams. . There's also like, you can kind of follow more of like the Facebook Google model where sourcing is, you know, first conversation basically up until after the hiring manager has the conversation and then it's handed off to the closing recruiter. And that to me looks very much like an SD r AE relationship, right? So I don't think the commission compensation needs to, needs to flow all the way through, you know, like recruiting coordinators and everything. Like, I don't think it needs to flow all the way through. But I do think that there's like an interesting component there where it's like, okay, there's, there's a laddering of compensation and there's a natural progression to, to sort of move up within the organization. That said, I also don't want to create an environment where it's like you have to move up to continue to elevate your career. So if you're a phenomenal sourcer. or you're a phenomenal candidate generation person. It shouldn't, you shouldn't have to move into recruiting to be able to realize, you know, some of your career goals and aspirations. And again, I look at the go-to-market side of things. So if you're in demand gen, you can be a demand gen specialist. You can move into leadership, you can move into all, all different types of demand gen, like that whole function is sort of built out and, and is, you know, its own thing at this point. Same thing with str like we have, they're SDRs who just love sales development. They can move into leadership positions and have an opportunity to continue to elevate and grow their career. And recruiting has all of these different components. We've got operations, we've got branding, we've got all of this kind of stuff that all plays. So to me it's not, you don't necessarily have to pull the, the commission structure all the way through to have it actually work. But I do think. , you know, if you are going to be a recruiter, you have to like closing people. You have to like winning. You have to, you have to kind of be fired up when you have a successful candidate that the business loves that we decide to make an offer to and hire. And if that doesn't excite you, there's lots of other places in recruiting where you can lean into your strengths and still contribute at a very high level.

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah, absolutely. From what you've said, you very much believe, and please correct me if I'm wrong here, that the future of recruiting is going into specialization. And one could argue that that could be a a zero interest rate phenomenon where there was a lot of hiring going on during the CO and after the Covid era. And. We're now reverting back to the mean and what has been the norm within HR and recruiting organizations, which is that they're usually starved of resources and recruiters have to do everything 360. What would you say to that? And, and, and why am I wrong? 

Travis bake

So let me, if I'm understanding you correctly, the question is like, does specialization actually help? Is that fair? Yes. Yeah. So when I think of specialization in recruiting, I really think about it from a human element perspective. Like we all bring strengths to our work. We also have blind spots and weaknesses. And the culture that we've created is this, this idea of. we recognize somebody's strengths, but we focus on somebody's weaknesses. And the burden of development is on the individual to shore up those weaknesses. And I'm not necessarily saying that's wrong because we all want to be better, more well-rounded human beings. So having awareness around your weaknesses is a good thing. But I, I think about my time at Duo security. So when I was at Duo and I, and I came in to lead the tech recruiting team there, we had a 360 model where recruiters were full life cycle, and most of the time they were moving to wherever the need was. And as a result, you had people who maybe were very, very strong at the sort of closing recruiting part of, part of the job where they were great at building relationships with, with candidates. They were great at building relationships with hiring managers and they were great at closing candidates. But we all follow, like recruiting, especially for lifecycle recruiting. You, you have to follow a closest to close prioritization when it comes to, you know, managing our day-to-day tasks. So as a result, like you're always gonna focus on, on the candidates that are closest to close. And you get to the end of the day and sourcing, cuz you're working backwards, you're going, who's that offer? Who do I need to close, who's ready for the next round of interviewing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you get to the end of the day and sourcing doesn't. Part of that is because maybe that person doesn't like sourcing. Like sourcing and recruiting are two very different things. Sourcing you are largely by yourself. You know, I, I happen to love sourcing cause I put my headphones on and I just jam and I, you know, I'm looking at profiles all day long. I'm messing with my search. I'm just trying to, you know, optimize every little aspect of what I'm doing to, to, you know, find the talent that I need to. And so that's a very different, that's a very different skillset. And some people are extremely strong at the sourcing element because they're really great independent workers and some people are, are energized by that, you know, by working with candidates and having that sort of human interaction. So we had this environment where, you know, we had some people who were really, really successful because they were focused on the strengths that they were offering. And you had other people who maybe weren't having the same level of success because they were being asked to do a job that was actually more focused on their weaknesses. So I remember having this conversation with everybody where it was like, okay, what is recruiting responsible for? And we came up with these five different buckets, and then I said, which one of you is really strong at all five of these things? And nobody raised their hand. And I said, this is why we need to specialize. This is why we need to pair strength with strength to balance each other out so that overall the output is better. And we saw like a 25% lift in our offer numbers without adding anybody additional to the team just by putting people in positions where they were stronger. So, you know, when I, when I think about like specialization there, there's it, it not only is it like better from an outputs perspective, but it's better from a human experience perspective because we're all going to be just stronger when it comes to the things that we're really good at. And so why not put people in that situation? And again, if you look at go to market, like it, it, there's a, there's a sort of a natural gravitation. For talent to go into the area that they're strongest and then their strengths just become even more prominent. So to me, like specialization is just an opportunity to not only like optimize output, but optimize the human experience when it comes to work. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. Very succinct explanation. Thank you. This may be table stakes, but what were those five areas of what recruiting are responsible for? 

Travis bake

I knew you were gonna ask me that. I don't, I don't remember. I mean, I know obviously one was like delivery one was you know, provide an awesome candidate experience. One was partner with, you know, with the, with the business. And then funny enough, I think one of 'em was like be a candidate and hiring manager counselors or something like that, or, you know, recruiters were just laughing about how they they always seemed to, to be providing not just career advice, but life advice. But I don't remember all five of those areas, but you can imagine it's, it's pretty similar to what you would expect at most companies. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Sure. Yeah. It's, it's interesting because what, what you are talking about earlier with regards to aligning on a compensation based component structure, and then you mentioned the counseling aspect. There are so many nuances with recruiting and overlaps with coaching managers on how to hire and everything else that, you know, I'm, I'm sure is going through your mind right now, which is like almost inhibiting. recruiters getting paid under that model because so much has to be aligned between recruiting and the business in order for hires to be actually made mm-hmm. and for them to stay because like you said, it's not the recruiter's job to actually make the hire, it's to facilitate. So there is like a, perhaps a potential barrier there because recruiting can be doing its job and can be delivering, and hires may not be made because you know of, of, of, of a variety of, of of different reasons. Yep. Look, looking into the future in terms of like the, the developments that have happened and what you foresee to be happening, are you an optimist overall with regards to recruiting and technology and the overall profession to flourish? 

Travis bake

I am on the spectrum of being very fearful all the way to being a enthusiastic optimist. I would find myself being an enthusiastic optimist. And again, if you look at the go to market side of things, if you look at all of the technology and all of the tooling that has been developed for that side of the business, it is, it has created categories that didn't exist before. And I know that's a, an old argument when it comes to AI and automation, but I find myself having a hard time making an argument against it. So when I look at recruiting, just, just in the time that I've been in recruiting sourcing has become a recognized specialty. Still hasn't elevated to the level that I, I think it should, but you know, Regardless, it is, it exists. Operations has been something that has really started to come into its own and is critical to the success of an overall TA team. I look at enablement as a part of operations that didn't really exist previously. I look at employer brand, which has really developed as a specialty. And then even getting into sub-specialties, you know, d EI focused recruiters and sourcers and so on. So, like, it's already happened just at a much slower pace because the level of investment in the technology has been lower. So, to me, as the technology investment increases, which I've noticed lately, like HR and, and recruiting technology has really started to, to accelerate. I just see an opportunity for. More specialization and for segments of recruiting to really become their own thing. So I'm, I'm highly optimistic that the future of recruiting is gonna be bright.

Nasser Oudjidane

Here's one thing that I know that you are passionate about, which is intersecting the implementation of technology with keeping recruiting human and humanizing the interviewing and and, and the hiring experience. What are some of your perhaps experiences, techniques, and thoughts about this matter?

Travis bake

Yeah. Again, very optimistic. If we really look at what's happened with technology and sort of the social movements as a result, it, it's, it's been a shift to. Individual how would I put it? Individual focus, you know, lots of individualization. So when you get on Instagram or Facebook or whatever, right? It's customized to what you want it to be. You know, it's who you follow. It's the content that you like. It's, you know, and we can argue whether or not that's a good or bad thing, but like the fact of the matter is all of your technology is specific to you. Right now, the job search doesn't work that way. As a recruiter on the sort of opposite side of things, it doesn't work that way. So if we're really talking about. Humanizing things and making things personal. The ability to engage with talent in a way that the content really matters to that individual, to me, increases the level of, you know sort of the soft component of, of what we're trying to create. Because if I'm sharing, you know, if you're, if you're somebody that we're interested in and you fall within one of our sort of, you know, ideal candidate profiles for something that we hire all the time, something that we're, you know, consistently looking for a skillset set that we need within the business. If I share just any, any type of content with you, you're not gonna have the same level of engagement. But if I'm sharing things that are very topical to what you do, if I'm giving you insight into. , how maybe we approach problems that you encounter as a professional doing what you do. That level of intimacy is increased and we're able to build more trust, more visibility into what we do, more transparency around what we do. So to me, again, like highly optimistic because we're, we're just gonna get to a place where things are more relevant to you as, as a job seeker. And again, like you can make these decisions for yourself. Like if, you know, company A is, has some values or cultural components that don't really match your value system, your principles, you can opt out. But, you know, like Boulevard, we're, we're highly, you know, values driven. We're highly mission driven. . And if you align to those things, you get to start calling down your list of companies that are targets, and you get to be more focused in your job search. So again, like to me it's just like that, that personalization is gonna matter, it's gonna be meaningful 

‍Nasser Oudjidane

can you share some of the tools that you've used to our audience who's interested in actually implementing the, the architecture that you've described during this discussion? What has delivered value to you? Feel free to plug and, and, and shout out any, any companies you like. 

Travis bake

Yeah, so I'm, I'm really excited in particular about a, a company called Find Dem. So F I N D E M. You know, I was introduced to their CEO, I don't know, a year ago or so, and he and I got to talking. , obviously we were very TA focused in, in, in the topic. And he really sees this vision of what recruiting could and should look like. And I often tell people like, it already exists. Marketo, you know, as a, as a marketing tool. Eloqua as a marketing tool offer a lot of the features and benefits that we just need to retrofit for recruiting. So when I look at, find them, find them as you know, a sourcing aggregator and they have what they call find them magic. . And what it allows you to do is like, they actually, they, they look at publicly available profiles and they, they actually fill in more of the profile data than you could you could ever imagine. So it looks into company size and scale at the, at the time that the person worked there, it looks at their, you know, their series of funding. It looks at, you know, GitHub contributions and whether you're, you know, a part of a verified repository or, or, or not. And it just allows you to sort of start to think and screen down to folks who have a much higher likelihood of being aligned and understanding not only who you are as a business, but where you are as a business, the stage that you're in, the challenges that you might encounter, all of those things. So, so it like, what's really interesting about it is I could almost see, I could almost see a specialization of talent. to, to the extreme where it's like you could be a software engineer working at a very specific technology who specializes in, in a size and stage of company, and you spend your entire career maybe working for Sirius C companies where you spend, you know, two or three years with them creating a ton of value and, and then you move on to the next one because you know those problems intimately and the value that you're bringing to that next organization, who's more than likely facing a lot of the same challenges and problems that you've already solved is huge. So I, I could almost see a world where like specialization with, with talent starts to become even more extreme than it already is. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. Same as go to market. You've taken companies from series. Name the series and yeah, apply a playbook into actually growing out that executive team or growing out the reps, et cetera, and getting to getting to a number. So Find Dem anything else. 

Travis bake

Find Dem, find them is my favorite right now. I'm not saying that there's, there aren't other amazing tools out there. But right now find them is, is, is my bread and butter. 

Nasser Oudjidane

‍Okay.  What's your experience of employee referral programs at Zoom at the other companies that you've been a part of? What's been the good, the bad. 

Travis bake

Please share the good, the bad, ugly. I, I love referral programs because nobody can speak more intimately about the experience of working at a company than somebody who's a current employee. So, you know, I think the, the interesting thing about referral programs is I've seen sort of two extremes. One is people refer their second cousin's boyfriend's best friend who we have no validation whatsoever. Like, you know, the person who refers that individual has no idea whether or not they're actually good at what they do. And it creates a really noisy signal for the recruiting team because you do need to treat referrals with velvet gloves because you know your employees are going out of their way to make these connections for you. Right. The other end of the spectrum is a referral program that's, that has some qualifications, right? Where it's like, Hey, you need to be able to validate this person's work product in some way. Whether it's, you know, you have worked with them directly or whether. Somebody that you know and trust who has potentially worked with this person. But regardless, it comes down to the validation that the person is really good at what they do, because that increases the signal for us in the interviewing process and, and, and adds a lot of value. So what I've always tried to focus on is like, how, how do we drive those really high quality referrals and how do we create incentives that, you know, really make employees want to participate, but also make them think about who they are bringing in to the top of the funnel as a referral, because it's a reflection on them as well.

Nasser Oudjidane

What, what has worked particularly well in order to drive that behavior? 

Travis bake

That's a great question. Honestly, most of what I've found is it, it ends up being sort of the cultural zeitgeist of the organization. , you know, and like I have built, I have built programs that have been sort of based on you know, bonuses that you get paid when somebody gets tired. I've built programs where it's maybe more of a lottery. I've built programs where you get you know, you get some sort of small reward for when a referral converts to a conversation with recruiting. It just depends on what problem we're trying to solve. Some organizations are just phenomenal at, at providing really high quality referrals without any incentives whatsoever.

And others, you really have to try to motivate people to to participate. So I think it's very company specific is what I've found. Yeah, absolutely. 

‍

Nasser Oudjidane

Last question before we get into closing. What's one piece of advice that you've heard often or perhaps experienced and seen when recruiting building talent organizations that you think is total bs?

Travis bake

Yeah, so total bs early in my career and even up into today I hear a lot of it is what it is, a lot of sort of resignation to to recruiting's place in the world. And that is absolute bs. Like I refuse to not be a part of driving recruiting forward as a profession because it is. So that, that's one that's always irked me is just this resignation to recruiting is is where it is and there's nothing we can do about it. don't buy it. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Love that. What's one piece of advice you wish you had when you started at Aerotech?

Travis bake

So, I, I had to think about this one cause I've been really fortunate to have a lot of good advice throughout my career. And I've learned a ton from failure. Like I've failed a lot in my career. But I learned from experience to every step is really contributed to where I am both good and bad. So I think that's the advice is good or bad. Whatever happens, it is all contributing to where you're supposed to be. And you just have to have that sort of positive, optimistic outlook on, on your future. And as long as you're in that process of like continuous learning you're gonna be fine. 

Nasser Oudjidane

What are you listening to or reading or watching that you find inspirational at the moment?

Travis bake

Yeah, this was fun too. All right, so I, I'm a big sci-fi book person and movie person, frankly. So Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a series of books in the late eighties and early nineties called called the Mars Trilogy. So I find a ton of inspiration from sci-fi and futurist writing particularly fiction as you would imagine, cuz it's the future. So it has to be mostly because, especially like optimistic, futuristic, you know fiction because I want to be a part of trying to create this world that, that these authors and writers are trying to create. Cuz you know, a lot of times you read these things and it's just like, Whether it's the technology or whether it's the philosophy of, of society or whatever it is, like, it's just so intriguing to me because we're, we're projecting our, our values on the future. So that kind of stuff is so inspirational to me because I, I, that's, that's where I live in my mind is this future world where where we've solved some of humanity's problems. And so that gives me a, a ton of motivation. 

Nasser Oudjidane

So abundant energy, AGI,

Travis bake

You got it. 

Nasser Oudjidane

All of that. 

Travis bake

All of that stuff. All of that stuff.

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. Love it. Why not? Why can't we aim for that? 

Travis bake

We should. What, what else are we doing?

Nasser Oudjidane

Exactly, exactly. Last one. What is one thought value or phrase that you live by? 

Travis bake

All right, so remember the lifestyle brand. No fear. , yeah. With the eyes. Yeah. So like, I grew up in the Midwest and like everybody put it on their trucks and all that kind of stuff. Like I never, I never actually got into it, but you know, I have a pretty debilitating anxiety and depression. And you know, it, it, it's, it all kind of stems from being fearful about potential outcomes and spinning scenarios in my head and all of that kind of stuff. So as cheesy as it might seem, no, fear is something that I repeat to myself quite often.

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing. It's been a pleasure having you on board. And that's it for now. Thank you. 

Travis bake

Thank you. This was fun. 

Nasser Oudjidane‍

Cheers.