Talent Talks with Tom Hacquoil

Talent Talks with Phillip Blaydes
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Welcome to Talent Talks, quickfire questions to get to know leaders in recruitment. I'm Tom, founder and CEO here at Pinpoint. And today I'm joined by Phil Blaydes, Founder of Talentful and Managing Director at HIGHER. Talentful is a recruitment platform for high growth tech companies and HIGHER is the world's largest talent acquisition community with over 10, 000 international members and counting. Phil has loads of experience. Frankly, I'm super excited to have him here on Talent Talks. Are you ready for some questions, Phil?

Yeah hit me.

Awesome. If you weren't in the talent space running the various businesses you seem to have your hands involved in, what would you be doing? I've thought a little bit about this actually, but I think I would be an archaeologist, which is almost like the antithesis of what I've been doing in my career, really.

But I love history. I love trying to figure out, what's going to happen in the future based on what happened in the past? So yeah, I think I would be with a trowel well away a computer.

That's a very good answer to that question. Have you studied archaeology? And I know you talk about history, but have you got into that level of depth at all yet?

No, I didn't study at uni or anything like that. No I was always really into fossils, though, when I was a kid. I think I was quite a nerdy kid. I was quite a bookish kid. And yeah, I used to collect fossils. And I still have quite a lot of fossils, actually, here in the house. But, yeah, that would be my ideal.

Awesome. And speaking to nerdy kids, you're in good company there. Don't worry about that. Cool. Changing tact from archaeology very quickly. Give me the 60 second summary of why you founded Talentful.

So Chris and I, my business partner were working as TA contractors. In sort of startups and scale ups in London, but independently. And what we saw was that I suppose the way we could improve the service that we were giving as individuals would be to join together. And so that was the initial kind of thought about Talentful was just there would be a huge network effect of lots of contractors working together. That's not actually what the business is now, but because all the staff are permanently employed, but essentially the principle remains the same that you've got in-house recruiters embedded into tech companies particularly the fast growth space, but then sharing candidates sharing best practice, and using that hive mind really, to help clients. And I think that really helps us basically to navigate very tough talent markets. Particularly, we do lots of work in the AI space and you know that market is completely nascent really and you know you are breaking new ground every time so it's good to have other people that are tackling the same problems. So that's what we saw.

Yeah. Look, it makes a lot of sense. And clearly it's working well for you. I think the business is like a bit of a rocket ship. So congratulations for all the success so far. Let's talk about candidate experience. What's the biggest thing you think companies need to be doing to build the best candidate experience today?

Now, I was thinking about this, I actually have got quite a simple answer to this question and I think it's actually just about communication. I'm just getting back to people on time. And I think the biggest gripe, and I think it is a fair gripe is that people just don't hear back from companies. And, I think many people have said this before, but no news is actually news. And so do you actually, get back to the candidate and say, look, the hiring manager hasn't got back to me or I haven't got feedback on this thing, but believe me, I'm chasing for you. I feel like as a candidate, that's all you want to hear really. And I guess maybe just like further to that is just honesty as well. You know if you have got to give bad feedback try and actually give it in a kind way, but actually give the feedback because nobody's perfect. Everyone's got loads of learning to do. You can really help somebody if you do give them that feedback so they don't make the same mistake again or whatever it might be. I think you're true to an extent that it's a bit of a tried and tested, somewhat popular opinion, but like no news is still news is like a really nice takeaway on the candidate experience side, because it's the easy stuff that people just don't do.

I hear you loud and clear. I think the feedback thing is super interesting. We've been working very hard at that and continue to be honest to work at that. It is difficult to give quality feedback at scale, right? We all understand that but I think yeah, there is a bit of a burden of doing that for candidates that makes sense, right? Changing jobs is a big life event for people and making that process slightly less fractious is always a good thing in my opinion.

Totally, yeah, and I do believe that using technology to help you do that is the right thing to do, especially if you're doing mass hiring. It is very difficult for you to make 100 phone calls to let people know about things, but even just a one or two line email. I genuinely do believe that is really helpful for people who at least know that they are still there on the system and they're still a live candidate etc I think it's really important.

For sure and without digging into it too deep because we could talk about this stuff all day I think it's fascinating to me because we want to help organisations do this more and we think about; can we infer feedback and give better quantitative or qualitative feedback for candidates based on scorecards? So if you said JavaScript experience one through five and you score someone low, can we interpret negative feedback and deliver that in a positive way for the candidate? But it is a bit of a minefield getting that right and thinking about downside protection and stuff. There's a lot there and appreciate that.

I think it should always come down to quality of hire. Maybe through some of the rush periods of the last few years and I'm particularly talking with reference to tech, because that's my background. Yeah. So where there definitely were periods where people would try looking at quantity of hire I think really that wasn't really how it was described but essentially, how many people can I get past the final hiring manager to get in seat? Whereas I think now again particularly with reference to tech, but I think probably in a lot of markets really that companies are trying to do more with less more ideally more with less. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah And but I suppose coming on to like how you measure that, really quality fire, it's quite difficult to measure, I think. And, certainly in the conversations that I'm having with people at the moment it is a bit of a question mark topic. I guess from my personal opinion, if I look at all the people that we've hired over time and that's, probably had about, just under a thousand recruiters, maybe in teams over, over the years. I think looking at sort of promotions is probably good. Or some metric kind of around that, because you want to try and make it quantitative. The promotions I think is a good one because if I look back at all the people that have been really exceptional, and I think that most people that we've had in the company have been really good, but if I look at that very top percentile, they will have moved really quickly through a business. And I think that for most department heads, business owners, et cetera, it's a sensible business decision to keep an eye on that very top percentile and make sure they keep moving. Because frankly, if you think they're great, then someone else is going to think they're great and they will have lots of options. So keeping them moving is a good way to keep them interested, basically. So if you can set some kind of measure of that, that's quite a long-term metric. I suppose recruiting is used to quite short term metrics, cost per hire, time to hire, that kind of thing. That's all captured within a couple of month period. This is much more of a sort of two to three year type of metric. But if you've got a good HRIS, you could probably pull the data out of it, at least if it doesn't analyse it in the platform itself, and create some kind of metric on that. But I would imagine that if we looked back at our data, say it was like the talent pool data, you would see that top percentile would probably be moving pretty quickly. So yeah quality of hire is what I think really?

Yeah, I agree with you actually. The interesting bit to me is the how you calculate it, right? Because I think quality of hire is a great answer through and through. There's a lot there in working out what that means to each different organisation. Clearly we're a tech business and we spend a lot of time in technology, but we also work with a very wide range of industries, all of whom have quite different perceptions around what quality of hire looks like. And again, we come back to this scorecard data, typically an ATS wants to make predictive modeling on who you're going to hire based on who you hired. Oh, this person looks like that person from a data perspective. So you're likely to hire them because you hired people that look like that before. I think we're less interested in that and much more interested in we want to help you find people who do well in your business. And so we are spending a lot of time looking at that. And I think it's the same sort of stuff you're doing, right? We try and look at velocity and what I mean by velocity is every organisation has different progression timelines, promotion timelines, compensation timelines, and what we want to try and model is, what is the average velocity for compensation increase in an organisation? What's the average velocity for promotion in that business? And how does this individual relate to that? And if they're above that velocity, we think you think they're great, but it's like an organisation by organisation basis if that makes sense. But yeah, no love that and I think unilaterally the right answer.

Yeah, I think it's really interesting how you can actually automate it how you can measure it in automation I think that sounds like a good solution to it. I do think just to pick up on an earlier point you made about the templating of what people look like and inferring that's what the next good hire looks like I think is wrong and I think it doesn't work. We've definitely hired many people that look amazing on paper and then didn't turn out to be amazing didn't actually turn out to be good actually, and also hired people who maybe didn't look so good on paper, but actually had turned out to be absolutely stellar. One interesting thing that we have picked up on over time, which you wouldn't probably be able to automate because not everyone has this on their CV, but we've always found a thread actually in people that do something extracurricular and a level of achievement within that. So say, and it could be literally anything. It could be, music, it could be art, it could be sports, it could be whatever, and we found that people who during school days and during university in that kind of early period of their lives if they managed to knuckle down and do something during that time alongside their studies and it doesn't necessarily mean they need to be straight A students. We found that's actually a real inference of success in recruiting. I don't think that would be the case for every job, but because recruiting requires a lot of resilience mainly that is the resilience factor, really that we were looking for. And that's something we just discovered over time without being too scientific about it. We just looked back at great people and you just could see this sort of that was the thread through people it wasn't about you know being degree educated or anything like that. There was no correlation there whatsoever.

Anyway. I love no, I love that. Would you describe yourself as an introvert or an extrovert?

Yeah, I think I'm an introvert.

Why do you say that?

Because I get my energy from being alone mainly. I don't really like group situations either. And yeah, so I think almost certainly introvert and I think there's maybe this stereotype, of the extrovert recruiter, but actually I do think the introversion helps a lot in that when I was a hands on recruiter, I was able to really go deep with people. And I was deeply interested in the human and I was very good at particularly the sort of senior level hiring to the executive level hiring, because even when I was quite junior, I think I had quite an old head on my shoulders. And years ago, a client that had a CEO of a very big metals recycling company and I was recruiting his CFO for him and I was literally 22, I don't know how I don't know how I got this thing on. But anyway but he said I was like Kojak, and because Kojak's ' and one more thing'. I suppose now when i'm like interviewing for people I hire lots of extroverts and there are lots of great extroverts at Talentful. But I also warmed to these people that I think are, they're thinking and they're listening a lot. And I think, because I actually personally think for recruiting that the listening skills are the most important part. And I think actually in general, in any kind of sales job it's really the best salespeople are the best listeners. They're not the ones that just talk and tell you solutions. They're the ones that's actually listening to the pain points of the client and then is able to sell back the solution to them. So, introvert, I would say.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think, great that you see that in yourself I think I would identify myself in almost exactly the same way. I feel like i'm a bit of a learned extrovert because my job requires me to talk to large groups of people very frequently. But my default state is sat in a dark room with a book on my own and that's where I get my sort of energy and recovery from as well, and I think it's interesting how you identify how those introversion approaches play out across the culture of the business and the way you tackle recruitment, because I think it's much the same here. We are much more consultative. We like to use our ears more than our mouths and all these kind of things. And I think, yeah, you can see that play out from the founders down in a business especially at the scale of our respective companies. No, love that. What's the biggest challenge facing the recruitment industry in 2024?

I think there are lots of challenges right now. There's been such a change. I've been working in recruiting for 20 years, I think now. And so I've seen quite a lot of different changes and was working in recruiting in the 2008 great recession as well, which obviously was pretty, pretty terrible. I guess what's happened is that internal TA has become much more of a big thing. And even when I started in internal TA, which I think was 2011, I think it was something like that. Certainly in Europe, there wasn't a huge industry doing it. There wasn't many internal recruiters in London at that point in tech. And over that period of time, it's really grown and grown. And then, through sort of 2021 was probably its peak, really where, certainly big tech companies were harvesting huge amounts of people on huge salaries coming out of agency with no real in house experience, but paying them really top dollar. Yeah. And then I suppose a lot of people have been unceremoniously dumped back out onto the job market. And many people that I know, who are genuinely fantastic are out of work, been out of work for six months or so, which is crazy. And I think it's the perceived disposability really of the TA professionals. I think that is the key root challenge right now. And that, the mission of the HIGHER community is to put a CTO, a chief talent officer on every board and really the industry is going the other way at this point. And it's really interesting because there are lots of companies that do the same thing ostensibly in every market. There's lots of food delivery companies. There's lots of, hotel groups. There's lots of all this kind of stuff. And I think that fundamentally, particularly in tech the difference between those companies is the people. And I would think that obviously I'm a people person and, I've got to fight for the rights of the people, but I think it's true. You always see when these new markets pop up in tech. And so the the 10 minute delivery market was like one of the markets that popped up during COVID and the Gorillas and all those, but really the key differentiator, if you're extensively doing the same thing is how good your people are. And it doesn't really make sense to me and I suppose maybe I've got this bias about TA, but your TA leader and your TA leadership team are the gatekeepers. They're the people that they determine the difference between getting amazing people and just great people. And so how can that department not be powerful in a business and how can you treat a department like that as a disposable kind of thing and it's really odd. And I think, companies have moaned for years about contingent recruitment agencies. And one of the reasons why you don't get great service from those companies is that you're not paying them anything upfront. You're not paying for their service. You're just paying for the result. And so internal TA pops up and it's a cheaper option to an extent, but also gives great candidate experience and probably gets you better people. But then you just dump it out because it's more fixed costs than using contingent recruitment. I feel like it's going to come back in a cycle again, but I think that's the problem. I've seen quite a few actually good people going out of recruiting out of internal TA into sales. And I suppose when the market goes down, maybe you might drop a few people out of your sales team, but really you shouldn't do that because you've got to work harder to make the revenue. And yeah, I think it's a real shame. We've got a lot of work to do.

I just wanted to say that I, again, as a bit of a theme for today's conversation, completely agree with you. I think like your underlying kind of mission at HIGHER aligns really closely with ours here at Pinpoint. Obviously we tackle that challenge in different ways, but I absolutely firmly believe that we need a TA person at the board level of every business. I always make this point that if I was an investor and I had significant amounts of personal capital to deploy into companies, the first thing I would be doing is speaking to their TA team and understanding how does that work? What's the composition of that? What's the talent strategy? How is talent underpinning the strategic goals of the business and actually are the strategic goals of the business determined by the talent? Because oftentimes that is the reality. As you say, they are the gatekeeper or talent is the bottleneck for these businesses, and I think more and more, you're seeing the underlying product delivery thing become increasingly commoditised and it's actually just about what's execution? And execution in any knowledge economy business is fundamentally just the quality of people, as you said, and so I couldn't agree with you more. I think that the most important thing you said is we have a long way to go which is 100 percent correct. And it's frustrating and it's sad. I speak to all these CEOs all the time. And it annoys me when I speak to people and they'll say like the barometer of success for your business is what's your head count. What's your head count? How many people do you employ? It's very transactional, right? We always talk about hiring as a sell side exercise, not a buy side exercise. Perspective is so warped and my hope is that we get there quite soon.

Yeah, that's one of the things actually interesting thinking about from an investor perspective is that if you look at the reject reasons for companies there is such a gold mine in there that's often not looked at. Certainly if you're like a consumer facing company as well there's so much good data in there because so many people reject things on the basis of they just don't like this brand for whatever reason and it's almost like a little bit of a bellwether. I think you could probably track that more early than you would get bad PR out there in the wider.

That's fascinating. I love that. To be honest Pinpoint as a business a significant portion of our revenue is retail, hospitality, consumer goods, very consumer brand driven recruitment experiences. It's interesting speaking to the folks that do that and they'll all talk about, basically, I want the guest experience to be the same as the recruitment experience and if the two misalign, we're doing something fundamentally wrong. And great brands will have the actual, like they'll have goods in the interview process and they'll talk about it and they'll talk about how the brand makes people feel and people make that connection, but I don't think they're making the connection you're making, which is if candidates are shying away from an opportunity with your organisation maybe it's on account of the brand. Then what could you learn from that? And how does that reflect your consumer brand experience? I think that's super interesting. You led to the question yourself, right? But we've identified the problem here and now. What does the future look like? Do you think this pervades for a very long time? Is there light at the end of the tunnel here?

I think there's some light at the end of the tunnel. I think that probably where we go, and I think this happens every recession cycle actually is that outsourcing becomes a bigger thing. And so you still get the quality of service, but you don't have to make layoffs essentially, you can terminate a contract of a supplier. And I think that's what we're seeing. That's certainly my conversations with the largest enterprises and they're happening at the moment. I think one of the things that the reasons why it's happened though, in my opinion is that because both the Talentful business and the HIGHER business are both sort of US and Europe equally split, I talk to talent leaders across the US all the time and also my European kin as well. But one of the things I notice is that in the US there is a slightly more business strategy focus to TA, I think. And I feel like teams are a little bit more business aligned than certainly a lot of European teams that I see. And of course this is not everybody. There's some great leaders in Europe who've really nailed this. But I think the one thing that people should be doing is they're coming up through the TA profession, as you're hitting like manager level, is start to invest more time in business strategy. So it doesn't necessarily mean you need to be an MBA, but there are some quite nice lite MBA books out there and there's also some lite MBAs that you can do. And I do think, I've certainly seen this actually in individuals that I know that going through that kind of education, it just really helped them understand like where TA actually fits into the organisation and how to articulate its actual value rather than just, we got 20 bums on seats this quarter. It's, this is the value that we're driving here and they can articulate it largely in the same way that other VPs in the organisation are doing it and I think that's why other teams have been able to maintain more folks in their team, because it's easier for them to articulate, alright this person is doing this thing and if we stop doing this thing then in 12, 24 months time, we're just not going to be able to achieve these goals. I think TA has struggled to really articulate what turning the taps off does. If you cull a lot of the TA team you will struggle to hire long term like you cannot just turn these things back on again, and it just operates like that it's a momentum machine and you have to keep it going you stoke the fires. And I'm not saying that would have stopped all of the TA layoffs because I just genuinely think recruiting volume dropped massively. And it doesn't make sense to have massive fixed TA teams. Yeah, the whole TA world would probably benefit from more education in business strategy. It's actually one of the things we're working on from an executive level at HIGHER as well. We're going to start a series of events where we bring in other business leaders from different departments. So we bring in CFOs, we bring in VCs, we bring in sort of marketing leaders, sales leaders, just to talk about how they run their departments and try and find some alignment with how, TA does this thing. How does that align to what sales does? Okay. How does sales articulate the success of this? How does it defend against, negative results, et cetera. And so we'll be running those across the US and Europe. But there seems to be a lot of appetite from the people that I'm speaking to about. That's really what we see our role as in HIGHER is that whilst it is for everyone in TA, it really is about that executive level and how do we level up TA and how do we change it from being you know a VP function that maybe isn't seen as the most important VP function, to be a genuine C-Suite absolute strategic leader function.

No, I hear you and I think that's commendable. Everything you said again is on the button. I think I my perspective is also just trying to encourage TA leaders to think about business strategy in the way you're talking about, but also to try and shift the focus from a reactive one to more of a proactive play, right? I think I speak to a lot of TA leaders at events and other things and they're awesome at their job and they're smart people and they'll do very well, but they don't know what's happened to them. They don't necessarily have this macro picture of why did the team look like this and why have I been let go and what are the ramifications of that? And what could we have done differently and that debrief hasn't seemingly happened to everybody. And I think what you want is instead of people going oh I've been given 10 recs from the top down that I need to go fill this quarter or this month or whatever, instead go what does the business need and what are the broader business focuses and strategic goals? And actually I'm being told to do this, but do we have a different perspective? Do we have data that validates that there's an alternative approach? That conversation is often just I'll take my order and I'll go deliver that and that context doesn't happen. And I think it's interesting because I spent a lot of time talking to recruiters about where they learn. As in like, where are they going to get better? And obviously communities like HIGHER are a central part of that, but when they're sat at their computer, where are they getting their resources from? And a lot of the answer seems to be like quite consolidated recruiter groups that are a bit of an echo chamber. And I think sometimes great content finds its way in there. Whereas I think when you speak to sales folks or marketing folks or otherwise, they much more proactively hunt for that exposure to new information.

Absolutely. Yeah, I completely agree with you There is very little TA education out there and there are a few little companies that are popping up and that's you know great and commendable that they're doing that. Yeah, but you know when I speak to leaders in very big tech companies And their L&D provision for TA folks is basically non existent. And, there are a few companies that kind of do it, but I think those companies are quite good at the 0 to 1, I think, of TA, but they're not really, like, how do you build a strategic leader in TA? I actually think that there's a lot of luck involved in how people get to those big roles and that's not to do down their capability but typically it's just they've landed somewhere really good, and they have a great leader themselves. And I think maybe that happens in other disciplines as well but I think in TA it's massive. So it's very interesting.

That makes a great deal of sense. Okay, wildcard question. You've got two great businesses under your belt and you've done a bunch of other cool things in the past. We've talked about archaeology being like a passion if you were completely leaving the industry and doing something else. But if you sold up and next year you go and start something new, what would you do? What business would you start today?

It's interesting.Um, we we're sort of working on it's a, like a wellness members club. We live on the coast and trying to build something that is a center for people to go to so include restaurant, bar, but also, various different sort of yoga, Pilates, ice baths and all that kind of stuff. Not a particularly expensive members club, like not a sort of Soho house kind of thing, but just the vetting process so that you know who's there kind of thing. But yeah, that's what we're working on at the moment. My wife is from a sort of brand wellness kind of background. Yeah, we're working some concepts on right now at the moment.

Love that. I think that's super cool. And I think there's probably a surprising amount of commonality between what you're doing with HIGHER and that sort of curated wellness experience in that arena as well.

So yeah, definitely the community part is a huge part of it really. Cause I think it's about, I think people struggle for belonging these days, actually. I think that's part of the reason why people like communities is that, frankly, a lot of people are working from home. Lots of people just working on their laptop all the time. And you don't have the sort of human connection that we had pre-COVID, I think for a lot of people. So it's almost like going, it's quite a long sort of philosophy topic, but like the way that communities used to be, maybe that's 50 years ago, a hundred years ago, you just don't have that where children were raised by a village and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I think trying to move back to that kind of thing where people do feel like they've got support networks, even if they haven't got family in the area. Yeah. Build that around. thing. So a wellness is definitely like the mental wellness side of it is a really important part.

I couldn't agree with you more. And I think again, like off topic, but I think there's a lot at the macro level that informs that. Like I think, you can talk about raised by a village. You could also talk about this notion of like factory towns where everybody in the vicinity of each other has a somewhat shared common mission. They do similar jobs. They're in a similar place. Like I live in Jersey, which is a tiny island of nine by fives, 100,000 people. And I got invited to this like mythical WhatsApp group, like two years ago, full of geeky, weird, businessy people like me, or all at very different stages of the journey. And it's my happiness is 10 times what it used to be because I found people that I didn't know existed even in a tiny community where everybody knows each other's first name. Do you know what I mean? It's like actually that sense of belonging and the access to people on a similar journey to you or with similar value systems is really interesting. And I think even in small communities that's been lost. And I totally see the value prop of that. Two more questions. I think we talk about HIGHER's goals as being getting that sort of you called it a CTO, a Chief Talent Officer on every board. We all understand why that's important at this point in the conversation, hopefully. But we've talked also a little about this kind of lack of strategic business talent and MBA lite type thing for talent leaders. What's the piece of advice you think you'd be giving middle to senior level talent folk right now in that aspirational step up to the board?

Yeah, I think it's probably like being, this is not to say that people aren't curious, but I think the curiosity around what other people are doing, what other leaders are doing in the business, I think is really helpful. I certainly found when I made the transition from working in a recruitment agency to working in house, I got some of that stuff where, I'd spend most of my days actually out there in a real physical office, chatting with people, finding out what they do so that when it did come to hiring for their departments, I knew the basics and I understood what the challenges were and what's weird about that department, et cetera. And that networking with your peer group, I think. So if you're say, if you're a director, other directors of other departments or senior directors or whatever it might be, other VPs, if you're a VP and just developing that holistic understanding of what this business does. One thing I quite find quite interesting about leading a company is that I've certainly at points thought everyone must understand all of this stuff because I can see it all but actually if you are in a department you can be really quite siloed and I'm not saying it's easy to break out and go and speak to other departments but I really think that effort is really worth it. And so you know maybe if you're at some kind of company social event, go and speak to other senior people that you don't actually know rather than maybe staying in your own group, I think it'd be really valuable and then it's that sort of that business education. I think it's all basically the same thing It's just the more you can understand about it's this I suppose advice, know your boss's job really well help your boss do their job, and I think you can do that better if you do have a more lateral understanding of the business.

To me context is everything and a big part of what we try and do here well, hopefully operationally we've got a great team supporting all of this stuff is just transparency and context for everybody and actually understanding that everybody wants to assimilate context in a different format with different mediums in different ways at different times, but actually putting the effort in to give that to them how they need it. It makes a huge transformational difference at scale Cool. Look, final question. What are you hearing a lot in the HIGHER community at the moment that you think everybody in TA should be talking about?

I'm going to take this question in a slightly different direction. Cause one of the things I thought that was just the most interesting thing and the most worrying thing actually that I heard recently, I haven't heard from a lot of the community, but I'm hearing right at the apex of the community at the moment is obviously everyone's talking about AI at the moment and, so a couple of companies that I speak to the VP fairly regularly have discovered that they've got ghost employees in the company, that have passed full assessments and these are US companies as well, so they've gone through the sort of i9 employment verification all that kind of stuff, but actually turned out to not be real people. So obviously someone has done the interview, and these leaders have obviously gone back through their records, I think they've even quite sophisticated teams where they've got recordings of interviews, they've got, interview notes all that kind of stuff and found no problems at all with the interview great answers, you know all that kind of stuff, all the documents check out. But actually these people don't really exist or then, you know working two jobs or whatever it might be. And you've got like VPs of talent from very major tech companies, some of which have just discovered it and others are like open mouthed like oh my god I've not even thought about this happening, and i've probably you know gone back the next day into their sort of wider people teams and gone we need to audit all of this stuff and I just I think this is probably going to become quite a big problem basically with my thing. So I suppose what i'm saying to people is, have a think about it, if you've got an audit process if you've got compliance teams all that kind of stuff, let's just wake those guys up and and try and get a review of it, because the most extreme end this could be corporate espionage it could be you know, whatever it might be. Even if it's not that you're paying people that aren't doing any work. So it's not something that lots of people are talking about at the moment in the community but I think it's probably something that people will be talking about a lot over the next 6 to 12 months. Really wow.

Yeah. No, i've been hearing about this for a while. I think this is a fantastic answer to the question to be honest because I don't see a lot of people talking about this, but I think again i'm mainly in the tech community personally, and I remember reading stuff two years ago on Hacker News and in Reddit sub forums about people working six jobs simultaneously remotely And earning a million and a half pounds a year in salary and just doing nothing, they'd organise the stand ups at different times as engineers and they join in and the camera's always off and so on and so forth. Obviously people are getting better at that and then they're now turning into these ghost people because everyone's checking LinkedIn and you can't have six concurrent LinkedIn jobs. Now you just create fake six people and like it's fascinating and I think yeah It is a significant problem that I think people do massively under appreciate but it's interesting to see the reaction because as you say, it then scares people and people make rash decisions when they're scared and then you see culture shift and people change and this culture of trust dissipate very quickly and it's a tough tightrope to walk, isn't it?

Definitely, I think one of the companies in question is maybe a five to seven thousand headcount type of company. And I think they found two people, which is, in percentage terms is not that high, the problem needs to be solved, but it doesn't mean that you should make everyone go back to the office.

Exactly. But often that will be the approach folks take though, and it's the very kind of cut and dry. We can't have this cause it's embarrassing. So we need to go do whatever we need to do to nip it in the bud quickly. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Scary stuff.

And on that note. Yeah look Phillip this has been awesome. Thank you so much. We got through 10 questions that I think turned into 35 or 40, but it was an awesome discussion. I learned a lot. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Everyone, you can follow Phil on LinkedIn. If you want to stay up to date, we'll put his link in the show notes. And if you want to join me on Talent Talk, please do get in touch.

Thanks very much.