Glenn Gutmacher Interview

Jonathan Kidder

4 years ago

I had the opportunity to interview Glenn Gutmacher he currently works at State Street as a Talent Sourcing Manager. I’ve been looking forward to this interview for a while now! I hope you enjoy learning more about Glenn and his journey into sourcing.

1. What are the unique talents you bring to the sourcing field?

I like to think of myself somewhat as a pioneer, spotting industry needs earlier than most, and taking action to fill those gaps before they trend, as well as (so people tell me) very good at explaining complex sourcing concepts clearly to any user level. For example:

The first to offer a full, self-paced online sourcing curriculum in the late ’90s. Others at the same time or preceded me slightly were certainly leveraging the internet as a sourcing tool, but it wasn’t their delivery platform then — AIRS was purely physical on-site training with a companion book, Barbara Ling delivered on CD-ROM with a book, and Judy West was similar. (Gerry Crispin says he was delivering some training online for some of his Shaker Advertising clients in the late ’90s, but I’m going to have to dig into that one further!) Like other early trainers Bret Hollander and Shally Steckerl, I started a popular monthly e-newsletter with sourcing tips — with paying sponsors, no less — that ran until I joined Microsoft full-time in 2005. Between that and my speaking/training engagements in the early ’00s, I got on the radar of other smart folks like sourcing’s legendary Steve Levy (who I’ve had the pleasure to bring as a keynoter to more than one event since — more about that shortly), and was even profiled as one of the early LinkedIn “superconnectors” in the first published article on that topic (in Business 2.0 Magazine, owned by CNN Money) along with one of LinkedIn’s co-founders.

I also saw the value of javascript, webscraping and automation earlier than most. One great introduction to it all is bookmarklets: they’re browser bookmarks/favorites that are infused with JavaScript code to allow them to do more than simply take you to a URL — a great free tool to boost your productivity. You should know how to customize the many existing ones for search, webscraping or general productivity (many are floating around online — just google Useful Bookmarklet List), ideally by learning some JavaScript. It will even allow you to build your own from scratch! I’ve mentioned them in most of my trainings over the last 15 years. If you want a free introduction to learn how to use them for sourcing, feel free to visit www.recruiting-online.com/bookmarklets (which provides links to some starter sets). I was the first to present a dedicated webscraping session at SourceCon, using an early version of Outwit Hub. I demoed that tool separately in a video with Jeremy Roberts who told me it was SourceCon’s most-viewed of 2013.

Speaking of SourceCon, I conceived and started two things that remain a part of the conferences in some form: In 2009, I proposed the idea of Sourcing Labs (which Shally, whose startup I was working for at the time, helped me flesh out) which debuted that year. These were roundtables where people could get actual sourcing questions answered in real time with internet laptops at the ready. While those have been standard at physical SourceCons ever since, up to then, every session had been presented from a stage. Then in 2017, I proposed the Programming track. Our initial lineup of presenters in Austin that year covered many of the types of coding and automation you’re familiar with now (here).

Last but not least, I’m very proud of co-founding the Boston Area Talent Sourcing Association (www.batsa.us) in 2014 with eventual SourceCon Grandmaster Randy Bailey, the first group of its kind in the metro area. While we’ve been relatively dormant this year due to COVID, our non-profit has held many great learning events to bring together recruiters, sourcers and recruitment marketers to learn from peers and other industry experts. While having the luminaries like Glen Cathey, Andrew Gadomski, Steve Levy (twice!) and Shally Steckerl to present has been great, I’m particularly happy about having brought new voices to a wider public audience, much like those I’ve put on SourceCon’s radar to speak over the years (not gonna namedrop, but you’d probably know them all). Seeing their subsequent success is very rewarding,

2. Tell us about your work experience in recruiting – how did you get your start, how did you progress, where are you at this point in time?

For me, I found sourcing — though back in the ’90s, we called it “internet recruiting” — when I joined New England’s largest newspaper chain in 1996 to help turn their printed classifieds sections into online properties. While real estate, personals and other categories were promising, the one with the most traction was employment. We partnered with a vendor to offer job search and resume database functionality, and surrounded it with content (it helped that I was a trade magazine editor some years before that). I was proud that our site, called JobSmart, won the industry’s two most prestigious awards in 1998: the EPpy Award (Editor & Publisher) and the Digital Edge Award (Newspaper Assn. of America) — even beating out the Washington Post’s career site!

But I digress: while I was explaining to our print help wanted advertisers what we offered, and they were aware of Monster.com, there wasn’t much else to buy at the time–this was before Google and Facebook existed, let alone ads from them! So they asked, “What else could we do to recruit online?” That’s when I started researching and discovered boolean search. Several search engines existed, but Altavista.com was the best for boolean at the time. Combining that with other search methods for other parts of the internet (particularly the discussion lists under Usenet), I was able to create an “Internet recruiting” course, all online. I started offering it as a freebie to our print advertisers where they used our 12-seat training room, each with its own internet-connected computer. Then in 1998, as it expanded into a full-day course, we started charging for it as a standalone product. We would fill every seat, usually twice a month. Even after I resigned to join a short-lived startup (sold to outplacement firm Lee Hecht Harrison in 2000), I continued to teach the course for the Boston Globe and independently. One of the companies I trained in 2001 ended up hiring me full-time in 2003 as their first sourcer.

After a couple of years, I joined Microsoft — which has an interesting story behind it: In early 2005, I was asked by WalMart corporate to train all their recruiters on sourcing at HQ in June, but there were 2 problems: it was a group of 60+ people, and they wanted both phone and internet sourcing covered. I wasn’t skilled at the former but I knew Shally was. He agreed to join me in Bentonville and split the group: I’d cover online in the morning with half of the participants while he did phone training with the rest, and we’d switch the groups for the afternoon so everyone would learn both parts. Walmart agreed to videotape the whole thing and share a copy with us afterwards. Little did I know, this was Shally’s final audition for me, informing me he was about to start a new global central sourcing team at Microsoft under Rob McIntosh and asked that I join.

During my 3-year Microsoft tenure, our team had a number of folks who remain luminaries and/or well-regarded SMEs today — besides Shally, there were Jim Stroud, Rob McIntosh, Jeanna Barrie, Vicky Bouras-Boudouris and several others. Among the Microsoft recruiters we trained was Cyndy Davis, which inspired her to shift her career direction to sourcing, and she became SourceCon Grandmaster in 2018! All those contacts proved valuable when Rob brought me to Avanade in 2010, where I spent five years working with Jeanna to build out a mostly-offshore sourcing function in mainland China. And that experience proved invaluable when my current company, the global bank State Street Corporation, decided to switch to a centralized sourcing model in India and Poland.

While I’ll always enjoy sourcing training and tools, I’ve gained a lot in learning about optimizing the handoffs between sourcers and recruiters, squeezing CRM functionality out of an ATS, and metrics. I’ve enjoyed the learning by participating in various SME call circles, plus volunteering on two different whitepaper-publishing committeees between 2018 and 2020 related to sourcing for ATAP, the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals. But the area I’ve increased my awareness and skills the most over the last five years is diversity. In fact, that was the initial appeal to leave Avanade to join State Street in 2015, because I knew it would become an area of increasing importance. Thanks to an introduction from one of my mentors, Frank McCarthy of DiverseWorkplace.com (who literally wrote the first book on sourcing in 1973, “Mastering the Search Research Function”), I met my future boss, Paul Francisco (since named State Street’s first Chief Diversity Officer). He asked me to lead a new US focused diversity sourcing team, which featured a mix of experienced recruiters and D&I staff. I learned as much from them as they learned from me about sourcing. And now I get to work on centralizing diversity-focused sourcing globally for the company.

3. Share your biggest success story in recruiting so far

It’s hard to point to one thing, but in retrospect, the system at Avanade was pretty impressive. We had a mainland China-based team technically employed by our majority parent company, Accenture, but trained by me. They were tapping automated feeds and doing other people research on about 20 technical profiles during our overnights, with an onshore calling team ready to act on their leads and route good screens to recruiters. Once it got rolling, we traced well over 100 full-time hires per year for very high bar roles to their efforts. While the typical issues you’d expect on any midsize team existed, I think any recruiter liaising with us at that time would fondly recall how well it worked. Big kudos to my boss, Jeanna Barrie, who was the systems mastermind that I learned a lot from. However, with the unprecedented level of industry focus on diversity today and increasing resources to back it up from the C-level down, I expect the biggest success stories for sourcing and recruiting teams like ours are soon to come.

4. What is the best advice you’ve received during your career path, and from whom?

It’s hard to point to any one thing — as the proverb goes, I think we’re all the sum of our experiences. And at this point, I’m not sure exactly who I heard what from. But I’d say thank you to everyone who told me to focus on integrity and to keep sharing what you know and not worry about being paid back: as it turns out, karma usually returns at least as much as you give, or as Sir Paul McCartney more eloquently stated it, “the love you take is equal to the love you make.” Jeanna reminded me to “stay in your lane” when there were too many opportunities to contribute and you should pick the most impactful ones that you actually owned. For the other opportunities you really felt strongly about, build a coalition among stakeholders who would ultimately each need to own a piece of it. And I certainly gained a lot from my years working closely with Shally. Though that’s over a decade ago now, we still communicate and I help out as the highlight notes taker for his free Shally’s Alley training sessions every Friday on Facebook Live in The Sourcing Method group.

5. What’s your favorite recruiting tech tool?

I don’t disagree with Dean Da Costa on “your brain” and I love how much Chrome extensions have grown, but at this moment, I’d have to say custom webscrapers. Even when the popular off-the-shelf ones like DataMiner, Outwit Hub or Webscraper.io don’t work, if you know a little JavaScript and understand how to use it against CSS selectors in the DOM, you can grab just about anything on webpages. It’s not that you can’t do this with Python or other languages nowadays, but JavaScript has been web-centric far longer than other languages, and even Google uses JS as the programming language in Google Apps Script rather than their own Go language, should you wish to do fancy stuff within Google Sheets, Docs, etc. you can grab anything. It’s also a gateway to being able to do so much more in programming, because now you have the skills base and motivation to learn and do more. Sourcers who became true, self-taught programmers such as Mike Notaro and Andre Bradshaw, and others who started in tech and then moved to sourcing like Donato Diorio and Ivan Stojanovic, have done amazing things, creating legitimate software to benefit their employers and others.

I am also impressed with the growing set of tools leveraging ML (and sometimes AI) that let you find candidates at scale (profile aggregators), do data enrichment, and automate/integrate the outreach messaging with a decent level of personalization, as well as scaling early candidate journey interactions through chatbots. Thanks to APIs, one system can be made to interact bidirectionally with another, and that’s how an increasing number of vendors pitch their services. I would expect as this space matures, there will be effective all-in-one solutions where all that interaction is built into the background and won’t require much technical expertise from the TA end-users.

6. As a recruiting professional, how do you handle recruiting to achieve the best results?

If I didn’t make it clear already, I’m a sourcing professional. I’ve never been a full cycle recruiter, though many people tell me that if you can take a candidacy all the way through the first phone screen, then you already do the important parts of that job. It’s even better if the recruiters trust you enough that they often just forward your submissions as is to a hiring manager for review. However, good recruiters probe for extra information in a behavioral or technical interview that a sourcer doesn’t — and frankly shouldn’t. Sourcers should conduct a relatively quick screen for a ballpark match on: qualified, interested, available and affordable (QIAA). Their job is to find talent and make submits of relevant talent who wouldn’t naturally apply. That service is particularly important nowadays with the focus on diversity. Who else can make a bigger impact on diversity at the top of the funnel? However, I am fully aware there are other important parts of the recruiter role, such as making a business case to hiring managers, understanding the needs of hiring teams and interfacing with other stakeholders like HRBPs, offer negotiation and working with comp teams, onboarding issues, and many other HR-related tasks that sourcers don’t deal with. I’m happy to let recruiters own all that (as well as the administrivia of recruiting) and trust them to be sourcing’s partner in the candidate journey. That same partnership is essential with recruitment marketing and talent solutions (or whatever you call the TA operations, systems and data insights team at your company) if you want results.

7. What do you hope to achieve in 2020?

As mentioned before, I think the recent unprecedented focus on diversity presents phenomenal potential to make headway in diversity. We were ahead of the curve in terms of diverse interview slates and panels, but there’s still much more to go. Fortunately, our CEO recently announced some bold goals for the next year in diversity — including hiring but going beyond that — and is backing that up with resources, so I’m hoping to contribute towards realizing parts of those. But with the overall reduction in external hiring due largely to COVID-19, I’m hoping this is the year we finish a lot of those backburner projects to improve systems and processes that can set ourselves up well for the inevitable bounceback. Our company is working on automating matching employee skills and job needs for internal mobility, and I’m hoping to leverage that solution eventually for external candidates as well. I’m also working on a new competitive intelligence system to gather and filter lots of external data and feed just-in-time, actionable knowledge to our sourcers (h/t to Aaron Lintz for sharing some of his favorite tools in his recent SourceCon presentation). I also want to leverage our company’s new enterprise license with the Degreed platform to offer some kind of sourcing certification path for the trainings that I offer. Personally, I just want to keep learning, seeing what can be applied to my work, and sharing any useful insights to the sourcing industry at large (minus anything proprietary) in articles and conference presentations as I have been for the last 20+ years.

8. What’s your favorite Boolean String?

There are 2 closely-related ones: the first is “MustHaveKeywordOrPhrase1” “MustHave2” “MustHave3” which I coined over a decade ago when I worked with Shally as the “3+ Method”. I noticed something important whenever I searched for 3 or more related things I knew, whether they were people who worked together, competitive companies, association or conference names, technologies or whatever: The results typically include pages that contain even longer lists that include those 3 things and others that naturally go with them. It’s a great way to build out team target lists and other related resources to tap.

The complementary string is counterintuitive, which I picked up from a Glen Cathey presentation about 8 years ago:

“MustHaveKeywordOrPhrase1” “MustHave2” “MustHave3” -“MustHave4”

Note that I have a NOT minus sign preceding the last must-have. This is because many sourcers assume every relevant profile, article, blogpost or CV must have certain keywords on it. Not true! For example, how could a page referencing a Microsoft software engineer not have the word .NET? It’s usually because the user thinks differently than you (some people just express the same things differently) or it may be purposely to minimize the chance of spammy TA folks finding them. When you search this way, you uncover some very interesting results that most sourcers and recruiters at your competitors won’t ever find. After exhausting these new results, you can rotate a different must-have in the NOT position and discover yet more relevant results!

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