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The HR Kyle podcast discusses the importance of building and maintaining a talent pipeline. The host emphasizes that recruiting is a long-term process and that companies should invest time and effort in creating brand awareness to attract potential candidates. The podcast also highlights the role of sales and marketing in recruiting and emphasizes the importance of treating every interaction with candidates as a potential sale. The host encourages HR professionals to communicate effectively and build connections with candidates to ensure sustained success in talent acquisition. other exciting episode of the HR Kyle podcast. I'm your host, Kyle. And today we've got a fantastic show lined up for you. In segment one, we're diving deep into the world of building and maintaining a talent pipeline, a topic that's essential for every HR professional and business leader. So whether you're a seasoned professional or just getting started in the business or HR field, you're in for some valuable insight that will enable you to laugh when other business professionals are grabbing another box of tissues, lamenting the quote, talent shortage. Then in segment two, we have a very special guest joining us today. She's had an impressive career in the world of business, and she's here to share her experiences, wisdom, and maybe a few career secrets with us. I can't wait for you all to meet her and learn from her career journey. But before we dive into all of that, don't forget to hit that subscribe button and follow us on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode of the HR Kyle podcast. We're here to empower and educate professionals just like you, and your sport means the world to us. So let's take a quick break and then get started with segment one, where we'll explore the fascinating world of talent pipelines. Hi, you doing so far to the HR Kyle podcast. Again, I'm your host, Kyle. Today, as I mentioned earlier, we're going to be talking about building a talent pipeline. And this is for all of you out there, whether you're in the business world, or you're specifically in the HR world, and you're struggling to find talent for those roles you're looking to fill. We're gonna give you some advice and guidance to make that search a little easier, but you gotta follow what I'm sharing with you. Talent pipelines, for one, there are a few key assumptions that you have to start with. I'm gonna give you a list of those, and I'm gonna dive into each one of those specifically to elaborate a little further. Number one, you have to realize that recruiting is a long-term proposition. If you're attempting to fill your positions as they come open, put postings out there, you're not gonna have a talent pipeline. Number two, recruiting is sales and marketing. I'm gonna elaborate further on that, because I know sometimes when I bring that topic, you get a very curious look from the audience that I'm speaking to. Number three, your company has an employment brand, just like it has a product brand or a service brand. Number four, finally, hiring is a part of recruiting, but the terms are not interchangeable. Okay, so those are the four assumptions. Long-term proposition, sales and marketing, and employment brands, and then finally, hiring is a part of recruiting, but it's not the same thing, okay? Let's talk a little bit more about each one of those assumptions. First off, recruiting is in fact a long-term proposition. You have to create a plan, and then you work to execute that plan. What that plan really works around is the concept of brand awareness, creating memory for potential candidates in the future when you have an opening available, okay? Just like you would for your product or your service. When someone is open to making that purchase for whatever that product or service is, your goal with your brand is that they will have that opportunity to make that purchase. Your goal with your brand is that they will think of you first. Well, the same thing holds true with your employment brand. You want that person, when they're considering another job, that they think of you first. How do you accomplish that? You're investing the time and effort to build your connections. In other words, connections with candidates, and I don't use that term interchangeably like you would on LinkedIn when you're making connections or you're adding to your network there. Making a connection with a candidate is meeting them where they are, talking with them, interacting with them. Again, creating that memory of a positive experience with you so when they're looking for an open position, you are one of the first names that come to mind. You're also going where your candidates are or will be. If you're looking to hire younger candidates, where are you going? You're going to high schools. You're going to trade schools. You're going to colleges and universities and so on. If you're looking for more mature candidates or longer term, longer tenured candidates, you're going where those candidates hang out. So you're going to LinkedIn. You're going to professional organizations and clubs. Again, where those candidates are. You're investing the time, energy, and resources into activities that may not lead to an immediate hire. But guess what? That's okay. Building a talent pipeline isn't about a transactional process. That's what hiring is. A talent pipeline is not transactional. Talent pipeline is making that investment. It's adding that pipe, that additional pipe, and connecting those together. So when you need to throw the switch and have a candidate flow, just like you'd have a water flowing through a pipe, that's what you've done. But you may not need to do that anytime soon. What you're looking for too is sustained success. So in other words, you've always got someone or a group of someone that are coming in behind the candidate that you've hired, or more importantly, the candidate that's exited. So again, think of it as a long-term proposition. You may do all of these events. You may have all of these connections that you've built and all these communications that you've had, and it may not lead to a hire. In fact, you're doing all of this stuff you're doing all of this stuff before a hire is even thought of, okay? The number two key assumption that I made. Recruiting is sales and marketing. Again, I get a quizzical look every time I bring this up, but it is in fact true. What you're marketing and selling is your employment proposition. And when I use the term employment proposition, what I'm talking about is what it means to work for you as an employer. Of course, it's the pay. What do your pay scales look like? What do your compensation levels look like? But it also includes a total compensation package. So what does your pay look like in comparison to other employers or other people doing these jobs? What does your benefits, what do they look like? Your benefit offering to employees, and not just your healthcare plan, but all of your other benefits. So your vacation, other forms of time off, maternity leave, different types of leave. Work schedules and so on. It can be any number of different things from that tangible standpoint, but it's also a lot of intangible things as well. That's your employment proposition. And that is, what's it like working for your company? How are people treated? How are people managed? What do career progressions look like? What do trainings look like? How are you preparing leaders in the organization, whether they're current or future? Again, that's your employment proposition. What does it look like to work there? One of the things that often gets overlooked is, I'm a parent, I need time off to take care of my child or do something for them, or I have an appointment, or I'm a homeowner and I need to be home for a little bit to take care of something around my house. Again, how accommodating is your organization, your company, to those type of obligations that, trust me, every single employee has? Again, that's your employment proposition. What is it like working there? What's the total package look like from both the tangible and the intangible? Second point with recruiting and sales and marketing. Treat every interaction like a potential sale. The interactions I'm speaking about are the interactions that you have with your candidates, wherever you're interacting with them are. And keep in mind, when I say candidates, again, I may not be talking about a candidate you're looking to hire at this moment. This may be a professional that holds a job or will hold a job or experience that you will need in the future. What is the interaction like between you and that person? Does it feel like you're selling? Are you making that positive impression? So again, when that person thinks of a place to work in the future, do they think of you because of that positive experience that they had? And I'm reminded of the quote that says, you may not remember someone's name, but you'll always remember how they made you feel. And think about that. If you go back in your memory banks and think of all the different people you've met throughout the years, think about how many people you've forgotten their names already. But when you think about that person and you imagine them in your mind, you're imagining either a positive feeling or a negative feeling. Well, that's the same thing that you're looking to accomplish with your interactions with candidates now, candidates in the future, and someone who may never be a candidate. Because again, you're representing your employment brand. When I talked about connections earlier, I used that term a couple of times already. Certainly I'm talking about electronic, whether that's through email, through social media, any number of different ways that we connect now digitally. But I'm also talking about personally. What do those interactions look like with people that you're meeting on a one-on-one and personal level? Again, these could be competitors. These could be your current employee base you're looking to get referrals from. These could be recent college graduates, people that will be graduating someday, someone that's further along in their career that you meet at a networking event, any of those different experiences. How are you connecting with them? Again, what does that dynamic look like? Remember though, with sales and marketing, communication is key, okay? The same with recruiting and that talent pipeline. You have to communicate. When your connections reach out to you and they ask questions, or they're interested in talking more, or there's some way that you can help them now, take advantage of those opportunities. Don't let those slip by. Do not be short-sighted when someone reaches out and asks you if you have a job opening and you simply say no, wrong answer. Let them know that you don't. However, you'd love to have a copy of their resume. Please keep me up to date on what's happening with you. And I'll tell you what, I go as far sometimes if I'm aware of an opening in my network for that person, guess what I do? I share that opening. It's not with my company, it's with another company because I'm trying to help that person. Because again, people that we help, that leaves a positive impression. It may never lead to a hire with my company. But again, I'm building that brand awareness. I'm building that brand loyalty that I'm looking to accomplish. My communications are always personalized. Even if I use a template, and I've been known to use templates quite a bit, but I always make sure the message has some personalization to it. I wanna be transparent. Gosh, please do that. Don't lie to your candidates. They figure it out. And all that lying or dishonesty creates is distrust. And that's not a good way to build a talent pipeline. Reachable. So many people say they're not reachable and they're impossible to get hold of. I think that's irresponsible. We live in a day and age where we have the incredible amount of technology in order to be reached. And maybe it's not by phone. But you know what I do when I talk to someone? I tell them phone is not the best way to get ahold of me. If they need to reach out to me, send me an email. And I respond to those. Guess what I do? I use templates. I mentioned templates earlier and I use that. But some of the responses are pretty standard as far as what I'm saying. And then I add a little bit of a personal touch to it. It's amazing how productive you can be in that. But you have to be reachable. People are not gonna beg and beg you for a job. In most cases, they're gonna reach out once or twice. They don't hear back from you, they're gonna give up. And that's a way to get an edge to your competitors because guess what? There are a lot of companies out there whose recruiting teams function like that. They don't get to candidates. They don't get back to people that ever expressed an interest in the organization. In fact, I've seen some LinkedIn postings where people are actually aggravated. Now get this, I wanna say this again and I'll say it a little slow. I see recruiting professionals, if you wanna call them that, that lament and complain that candidates are reaching out to them interested in jobs with their company because they don't have anything open. And why is this person reaching out to me? And all I can think is what a dilemma. You've got someone that's interested in your organization, wants to work for you, has taken the time and effort to reach out and express that interest. And rather than take advantage of that and build some sort of a relationship with them that could carry over into the future for referrals, hiring them, any number of things, but the least of which is goodwill. Instead, you ignore the communication and complain that someone's reaching out. So again, I'll stop on that one. Here's the other phrase that I take into every role that I've ever held as it relates to recruiting. It's never no, it's just not right now. So here's what I mean. We've got a group of candidates, we'll say it's down to three candidates. We choose one of them, that means we didn't choose two others, right? It's never no to those other two or however many we've considered. It's just not right now because I want them to remain interested. Makes my job easier if I have positions open and I've got a whole bunch of people that I can reach out to and say, this person's qualified, that person's qualified, versus putting the posting up and hoping and praying that the right candidate applies. I've already spoken to some people that are the right candidates. We just didn't hire them the last time. That doesn't mean they won't be the right candidate the next time because guess what? Since I last spoke to them, maybe they've gotten more training, they've gained more experience, they've done some other things to make them a better fit for the position that we considered for them before. But at least we've got these people that we can reach out to practically and say, hey, remember us? We talked a couple of years ago. We'd like to consider you again if you're interested. And you know what happens? The majority of those people respond with a favorable answer either that they're interested in being considered further or worst case scenario, they're not interested, but they'll share it with others in their network. What a beautiful thing. And guess what? They typically do. They typically do. That's been my experience. Be focused too on the quality of your process. One of the things I've implemented in my hiring processes is doing surveys with candidates that I've spoken with or have applied for jobs. I'll send them these surveys out and I do a quarterly to everyone who's applied because I wanna hear about their experience. I'm interested in the quality of that experience. Why? Because if they have a quality, rewarding experience with you, even if they don't get the job, they're an advocate. They're someone that's interested in your brand and interested in working for you. And that's a way to set you apart from other employers. Trust me, it does. Because there's, let me put it frank here. There are a lot of lazy employers out there. For them, recruiting is transactional. If it's somebody they're not interested in, they simply don't wanna be bothered by them. So you know what you do? You set yourself apart and you have a quality process that has a lot of communication in it and it's personalized and you're reachable. Stay in touch. Again, does this require a little extra effort? Yeah, but build your templates in there. Put reminders on your calendar to reach out to candidates that you're really high about. To just reach out and say, hey, just checking in, seeing how you're doing. Hope everything's well. You'd be amazed the goodwill that that creates. And again, it's creating that positive image with them, just like you would do with marketing your product or your service, okay? Third point, third key assumption. You have an employment brand. Every company does. Trust me, you do. It might be that nobody knows about you. Guess what? That's your employment brand. Wow, I didn't know that company was here. Didn't know they existed when you asked people. It might be, oh yeah, that place is known as to churn through a lot of employees. Oh, that place is known as a great place to work. Oh gosh, I'd love to work there. Believe me, your company, your organization has an employment brand. It's either good, bad, or indifferent. And quite frankly, two of those you don't wanna have. But you control that narrative and you control it with the other things that I've mentioned. Okay, how do you know what your employment brand is? People tell you, your employees tell you, your candidates tell you. Ask them, ask them what your employment brand is. What do they think of when they think of working for your company? Ask your candidates. What do you know about our company? What have you heard about it? Go out on LinkedIn, go out on Glassdoor, go out on Indeed and read those reviews. That's telling you what your employment brand is. And it also gives you an opportunity to either enhance what's good or somehow work to overcome what's bad. But at least you have an awareness of it. So when you talk to candidates in the future, you can address those things that you've read and that you've heard. And certainly you address them internally unless you really don't care and then you better figure out a way to overcome that. But I hope you do care, okay? Focus when and where you need to with your employment brand. That's what I was talking about a little bit ago. That's what sales people do, right? They're finding the segments in the markets that they know will generate candidates or in this case, revenue in the future. And they're going to those places now and they're making those connections. Again, that's what a pipeline is. A pipeline is not transactional, I keep saying that. So you're thinking about roles that you will meet in the future and you're making those connections now. And then sell it, sell your brand, sell what's great about your company. Highlight those things, make sure people know that. If you really honestly do have good work-life balance, and again, a lot of companies talk about that so those can be loose words, but sell that. You know how you sell it? You tell people what that looks like when you talk about work-life balance. Just don't say that we have work-life balance. Another popular phrase is diversity. Okay, oh, we're very diversity conscious. Well, great, every company is. Tell me what that looks like. What's it really look like to have a diverse workforce? Give them examples, but sell it because that's proving the point. When you're in an interview, you're expecting your candidate to sell their point. So you need to sell yours. So what does all of this lead to? You're probably thinking, oh my gosh, this guy's talked for all this time. What are we up to now? We're up to 19 minutes total. Most of that's probably been me talking about this. Here's what it leads to. In my case, it's by the hundreds of candidates that are interested in working for my company. Okay, and that number grows by the day. I can assure you, it grows by the hour. Okay, those are people that when opening up in those categories that I need to fill, those who I'm reaching out to first. I'm not just blindly putting a posting out there. Here's what else it leads to. Lots of unsolicited resumes. You'd be flabbergasted how many unsolicited resumes I'd get in a given week. What's an unsolicited resume? Hey, I heard about your company. So-and-so told me about your company. I've read about your company. And they're sending me their resumes saying, if anything ever comes open, please consider me. And guess what I'm doing? I'm engaging that person in a conversation. I let them know, gosh, I'd love to consider you further. Sometimes if it looks like somebody hot or if I know something's coming up, I will talk to that person directly. I'll spend 10 minutes on the phone to get to know them a little bit better. But that's what this pipeline creates, that brand awareness. You know what else it creates? And I love this too. Brand advocates. You know what those are? Those are people when I put a posting out on LinkedIn or someplace else and say I've got an opening, they share that posting in their network. So it takes my network of whatever it's up to, we'll say 3,500 people. And it multiplies that. Because they share it through their network, which is however many people. And guess what? I've seen plenty of my postings shared two, three, four levels and further away from me for my openings. Because I've got brand advocates that say, hey, he's a great guy. That's a great company. They do a cool thing. I wanna share this with my friends and family. Okay, brand advocates, they're a wonderful thing. Better quality hires, duh. The larger the candidate pool, and when I mean large, I don't just mean numbers, I mean the true reach of your candidate pool. That leads inevitably to better quality hires. How could it not? Because there are more options, more people that are aware of your openings. And then finally, again, we talked about this earlier, it's a topic that I'm sensitive to. This does lead to more diversity. Right? Not this talk of diversity, which everybody likes to talk about. I like to talk about action. And I like to talk about where all my candidates are coming from and their backgrounds and what they've done and how these are people that normally I never would have met or interacted with. But because I built this employment brand that I have other people that are advocating for me and what I do and what I'm looking to hire, that's how you get diversity. You cast a very wide net, an incredibly wide net that extends well beyond your limited reach. That's where you accomplish true diversity. And that's where you see it in action. Okay? So, I've gone on there a little bit. Looks like about 20 minutes talking about talent pipeline. If you haven't noticed, I've got a real passion about this. And honestly, I've just scratched the surface. I'm happy to talk with any of you at greater length about this, hrkyle.com. That's my website. Love to have you reach out to me so we can talk more about talent pipelines. But please, whatever you do, don't lament this talent shortage. That's a myth. Talent shortages happen because we're not prepared for what's happening. And guess what? You build a talent pipeline, you're gonna be prepared. So that wraps up our discussion on building and maintaining a talent pipeline segment one. I hope you found our insights and tips valuable. Remember, a strong talent pipeline is not just a strategy. It's an investment in your organization's future success. And in just a few minutes, there'll be no more, or actually a few months, in a few months, there'll be no more talent shortage conversations if you follow the talent pipeline advice that I've given you. As always, thank you for joining us on the HR Kyle podcast segment one. If you have any questions or wanna share your thoughts on today's topic, feel free to reach out to us on social media or through our website. Again, it's hrkyle.com. And guess what? Your feedback's essential, and we'd love to hear from our audience. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and tell your colleagues and friends about us. We're here to help you grow and succeed in your career. Now let's take a quick break and then get into segment two where you'll meet our guest who will be sharing her career journey and insights. And trust me, you won't wanna miss it. So stay tuned for segment two. How you doing, Terri? Great job. Now for one of my favorite parts of this show, and that's segment two where we have a guest join us. Today we're welcoming Terri. Terri is director of operations for a nonprofit here nearby to me. Okay. They focus on getting high school students off to a successful start in their careers. And again, that may be starting a job at a high school, that may be going to a trade school, a college, so on and so forth. I'll let Terri talk more about that. But that's the work that Terri does. And specifically these students many times face either social and or economic challenges or other sorts of challenges in their lives that make it a little bit more difficult to get off to a good start. So I love the work that this organization does, and I'm really happy to have Terri join us today. Terri, welcome to the HR Kyle podcast. Hi, Kyle. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate being here today. No, you're very welcome. I'm glad you could join us. Well, Terri, let's start off today. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Sure. First and foremost, I'm a wife. We just celebrated our 28th anniversary. A mother of two adults. I live in Ohio and I've lived here most of my life. Graduating from University of Akron with a marketing degree. And in my spare time, I like to do yoga, bowling. I love, my mom used to be a program director at a bowling alley. And I kind of grew up as a little rug rat back in the day. And I've kept that passion of bowling throughout the years. I like outdoors and currently in my home town, and currently in my life. I am 56 years old and I'm setting up for retirement. So kind of looking at the last days of how I want to live my life and getting prepared for that. And I'm enjoying every moment of it. So every decade gets better and better. Thank you so much for taking the time to introduce yourself. The only thing I think of, gosh, you've been married half your life. You realize that, right? Thank you, Kyle. Yes, I do. Oops. No, I did think of that when I turned, because my birthday is two days before our anniversary. And I thought exactly that. That's incredible. Good for you. 28's a nice run. Congratulations. Thank you. We grew up together. Aw, literally and figuratively, right? Right. So Terri, first question I'd like to know. What work did you do before getting involved in the nonprofit sector? Because you've got an interesting background. I always ask that question or try to ask something like that, because what I found is so many professionals I talk to, their career is never linear. They never started out as a young professional saying this is what I'm going to be, and they stay that their entire career. So love to hear a little bit about your story. Sure. My very first job, and I'm saying that because I do work with currently young people, ages 14 to 24. We service them to help connect them with their education and employment. So a lot of times these were connecting them with their very first job. And I always reflect back to my first job was in a grocery store, a little mom and pop shop. And it was wonderful because I was able to do several different positions, cashier, stock, cutting meat, helping customers, customer service, stock or tracking orders, when we were running out of things. So a lot of positions that I held for my first job helped prepare me for everything that came thereafter. After, once I was in college, I got into real estate and also sold insurance. So during college, I worked sometimes three jobs, usually two jobs, paid for myself to go through college and graduated. I think I only had $8,000 of a loan that I had to pay off, but that was it. I received a bachelor's degree with a marketing degree, which has served me very well. But when I graduated with a marketing degree, I never imagined myself going into telemarketing. That wasn't necessarily what a young person aspires to be when they're starting out. Oh, I wanna be a telemarketer someday and call people and annoy them. But I worked in total 32 years within the call center industry. And I thought, yes, I loved it. And again, you are talking a lot of HR and recruiting and that fell under my umbrella being starting out as general manager and then vice president of operations. And then my last years with this organization, vice president of strategic global service delivery and managing just operations, training and development, HR and recruiting, setting up policies, new hire training, and pretty much managing the P&L of $25 million all related to cost of goods sold. So a lot of experience and many different hats being worn. So I'm excited to talk about some of those things later because just how it has really shaped my entire life, both in HR and recruiting. And that all stemmed from my first job in a grocery store, again, wearing many different hats. That's right. There's a good lesson there because it sounds like, and again, I talk about this a lot with the candidates and so on that I work with, not being afraid to raise your hand and taking on additional tasks. I hear that in your story. Yes, absolutely. I've never said anything along the lines of it's not my job or you'll never hear me say, I don't have the time because when someone comes to you, especially in management, you're there to support them. Anytime I'm managing a team, they are my first priority, even over leadership or over my directorate reports, I have to support my team. That's my first and foremost. So I'm always saying, whatever you need me to do to support you is what I'm here for as your leader. And what a coincidence that mindset has led to an extraordinary level of success over your career. Thank you. Yes, I believe so. So 32 years in call centers and now you're in a nonprofit. What prompted the career change? That, again, I was hoping to retire from the organization that I came from. It was a family owned call center and we've really developed a lot of relationships just because of the culture that we had where we worked for each other and we worked to support each other. And when the owner decided to retire with his wife for a well-deserved retirement, he sold the organization and it was still bought by a global organization. And just everything that I've learned through my network is when an organization is bought through a global means, then you usually have turnover, planned and strategic turnover all the way up through leadership within the first three years. So I kind of prepared myself knowing that that most likely would happen. A lot of our work, especially with call center could be done offshore versus onshore. A lot of that is due to cost. So it's just business, that's what happens. So I was prepared for it. When it happened, I left on good terms and I had some time off last summer where I could rethink about what it is that I wanna do when I grow up. And I did feel like a high school kid again where I could do anything I wanted to do. Who am I? What do I wanna do? So that's kind of where I started. My best friend is a yoga instructor and just learning through her, how to reflect on yourself and figure out that mindful path of your journey. I did a lot of walks. And for me, my walking was my meditation. And there were just two things when I started job seeking again is I definitely want to help people. That's kind of been in my nature and call center. I don't, we did a lot. We did some nonprofit work through the call center, but it's very different than the nonprofit organizations that I am involved with today. And so I did not wanna work in a call center again. And I did not wanna work for a global organization. And that's just my own personal preference. So keeping those two is my top priority. Then I organized my job seeking in that fashion and started looking for fun things, things that I felt that would be fun and kind of batched my skills and anything that I didn't have. And at the time I hadn't quite finished Lean Six Sigma. And I think a lot of organizations are looking for certain certifications. And for me, the Lean Six Sigma, White Belt and Yellow Belt training was important for me. So I also spent that time off certifying myself and adding that to my resume. Well, I love what you shared there, Terry, because I know there's a few of our listeners that are in the circumstance that you described, having been a little later in their careers, lost a position, and then they're sitting there saying, okay, now what? What's the future hold for me? And one of the biggest things that I took from your story, and there's a lot of lessons there, again, for the listeners to take, is you took control of your future. And if I'm passing on to the listeners that are in that circumstance now, that's probably the biggest thing that I would, if I only had to draw one, and that would be doing what you shared a disservice, but you can and you should, and you need to take control of your future, which is what you did. Absolutely, I truly believe that. And my mother has always said, you're never too old to learn something new. She is 76, and she's always been a mother. I came from a divorced family, so she was a single mom for many years. And when she retired, she always had wanted to open up a shop where she could sell children's clothes. And she never had her shop. She always tried to get my dad to buy her one, 50 years ago, and that never happened. So she taught herself, got herself a computer, taught herself how to design a website, went on to Etsy, and created, she's a seamstress, and she also crochets. So she created her own little shop online, and she's been running that for three years now. And again, she's 76 years old. And it keeps her busy, and she always says, Terri, you're never too young to start something new. So she learned the internet and opened up her shop, and she's making, creating money for herself and keeping herself busy. Love it. Yeah, the thing we know about the future is we have to keep changing and evolving. Isn't that so true? That is. Terri, what has your work with employers told you about the job market, and more specifically, what your hearing employees are looking for? That's a great question. I, a lot of my experience, obviously 30 years, being in HR and recruiting in the call center, and then now with nonprofit, there are a lot of similarities. And I think, just with all of that, the various employers that I've worked with, the insights into the current job market trends is very important to stay abreast of. You need to know what's going on with the marketing trends. Just because you've tried it once doesn't mean you can't try it again. I hear a lot where, well, I've gone to the colleges and I wasn't able to find the candidates. It didn't work. So I stay away from going to colleges. But if you think about it, the colleges, there's a new set of young people coming in every year. They're constantly changing. So what worked or did not work four years ago could be a whole different story because now you're reaching out to a whole new set of people and different technologies. Again, if it didn't work before doesn't mean it's not going to work now because there's new technologies and there may be improvement in those technologies and more people are using them. I've gained valuable insights for technical skills. I think employers are looking for those technical skills, adaptability, creativity, communication abilities, all of those skills. If a person doesn't have those, those are things that you can develop. And many times it can be done free. I utilize free online learning through udemy.com. It's U-D-E-M-Y.com and then Coursera. Many people have heard of Coursera and you can filter the free online courses and you can learn. And sometimes learning doesn't mean liking it. Sometimes learning is also knowing what you don't like. So if you decide you want to try something new like web design and you start going through these courses, these free courses for web design and you realize, you know what, this is too much creativity. You know, this is not what I'm interested in. You're still learning what you don't want to do. And that continues to lead you to your path as you're changing and making adjustments. Mm-hmm, no, all wonderful advice. Thank you for sharing that. Terri, to wrap up today's interview, I've got one last question for you. What would you say to employers out there who are looking for talent? Build a pipeline. And I think you said that earlier, Kyle. Promote from within. You already have a potential pipeline within your organization. And continue to invest in training, training your current staff, doing a nice balance of work-life balance initiatives like potlucks. It's Halloween time, so trunk or treats. Those type of holiday gatherings with employees where they can bring their families and really integrate their families with work and getting to know each other and creating that environment that allows people to work for each other. And then by doing that, you have your pipeline of not just staff that you have, but also their network. And you had mentioned sharing your LinkedIn posts. Well, that's in real life too. If someone's talking good about the company that they work for, they're also telling their friends, their family. And when it comes time to have a position available, they are your best advocate to find employment. So I think those are really important for employers to remember. And then the last thing I wanted to mention, you hear about exit interviews after people leave, find out why they left. Those were not as valuable to me as actual stay interviews. Exit interviews, they usually leave. They don't wanna hear from you again. They're shutting their phones off and not answering their texts. But stay interviews, you have a captive audience. Stay interviews are done with people that are currently working within your organization. And it's meeting with them on a scheduled basis, like 60 days, 90 days, six months, one year after hire, and just touching base with them and asking some mindful questions of what do you like about working here? What is your career path? What type of training do you feel that you need? Are there any issues that are going on that I can support you and help you with? What do you find, what do you like best about working here? What do you like least about working here? And how can we work together to improve that? But stay interviews, I think, are just really important for companies to do and not enough of them spend the time doing that because they're so busy trying to find still positions that people have left because they didn't do their stay interviews. Exactly, purely reactionary. Well, Terri, that wraps up segment two. And I'll tell you what, I really wanna thank you for joining us today. You shared a lot of valuable information for both sets of our audience. I always say we have basically two sets. We have the professionals that are looking to get more insight into the world of work and HR. And then we've got this other segment that are job seekers looking for a new opportunity. And the great thing about your interview is you've addressed both audiences. So I appreciate that. Thank you so much for joining us. For our audience out there, that's a wrap for today's episode of the HR Kyle Podcast. We hope you enjoyed the discussion on talent pipelines in segment one and found our guest insights, Terri. Found her insights in segment two to be both inspiring and informative. If you have questions, you're very welcome, Terri. And you have questions, feedback, or suggestions for future episodes, please reach out to us on our website, hrkyle.com, or through our social media channels. We're here to serve you, our amazing audience. So until next time, keep striving for excellence in your professional endeavors and keep building those talent pipelines. And until next time, thank you for tuning in to the HR Kyle Podcast. Okay, we're paused. Whew! I know. I always work up a little bit of a sweat.