Effective leadership strategies for managing a team with diverse skill sets

Jeff Bull: So first off, thank you. My name is Jeff Bull. I'm a senior manager of developer advocacy at Cisco DevNet. So that's our developer relations organization. Dad, husband, my pronouns are he and him.

I've been a teacher. I've been a people leader for most of my career or a large portion of my career in different roles. I used to teach the Cisco Networking Academy way back in the day, when I worked at one of my first technology companies. And I love to plan things. I love to plan projects and events and things like that.

I'm also a baker. I love baking. I love baking sourdough. I did that during the pandemic, and I kept doing it. I love to travel with my family.

My wife and I bought a trailer last year, so we travel. We just got back from Disneyland. As you can see, probably from this image, I'm a huge fan of Star Wars. My new lightsaber's on the ground here. I love tattoos.

I just I my my likes are kind of all over the place. And I think that really the reason I wanted to bring this up is it really plays into what I'm gonna talk about today, which is how do you be a people leader for a set of people that are so completely different? It's an important part of the role in being a people leader in general, and I think it's something that doesn't get talked about nearly often enough. So that's what we're gonna dive into in just a sec. Oh, and I'm on YouTube too.

I like to talk about all things Star Wars on YouTube as well. So today, in the next fifteen minutes or so, I'm gonna go through, a few tips for you on how to engage with a diverse team, how to work with those people, how you can support them. We're gonna talk a bit about that. What the outcome's gonna be, I'll talk a bit about my background, and then we'll have some questions hopefully at the end. What I want you to walk away with is pretty clear on the screen here.

I want all of you, anyone who's in a people leader role, looking to be a people leader or, you know, working with your leader to understand how better to make how to to better improve your team or have better interactions with those leadership that you do work with, I want everyone to walk away feeling like you can have these these conversations and then become comfortable for you. I'll get into my story in just a minute, but one of the things I think that is most important is to be able to have a conversation about what can make you successful, how you like to work as an individual person, and have that conversation with your boss. And as a people leader, being comfortable having the conversation with your team individually and as a team, how do they like to work? What do they need to be successful? And I don't mean that in a a sense of, like, placating them.

Like, what tools or what access to what products do you need? I mean, what do they need on a daily basis so that they can be successful? Fewer meetings, more meetings, more interaction. What does it look like for them so they can do their job and feel really good about what the work that they're actually doing? A bit about me.

This is where I just was last week. You can tell I'm very happy about where I was when I was there last week, and it's something that makes me exactly the person that I am. I'm a massive geek. And when I joined developer relations here at Cisco about a year actually, just over a year ago now. I had been at Cisco in sales for a while, and I'd

Speaker 2: been a network engineer for most of my career, people leadership, and

Jeff Bull: things like that. And I felt a lot of impostor syndrome when I joined this role because I've while I had been around automation and programmability and topics like that, for the latter part of my career and understood that those are important things, I've never been a DA. I've never I've never written code professionally for my job. I've done things as a hobby or as part of the work that I do, but it's never been the role that I've ever day. So you can imagine coming into a new position as a people leader, leading a team of people who do work that you don't already do or you haven't done professionally, it's pretty scary.

And I think that's something I I made a point of telling my team when I joined individually and as a team because I wanted them to know that I'm not trying to be something I'm not. I'm not here trying to be that other role, and I want them to be aware of that. And it's, I think, most of my career and I think there'll probably a lot of people here too. If you if you are a people leader or you're aspiring to be a people leader, something you've probably noticed is that what we've always dealt with in our careers is you get really good at the thing you do, and then you get promoted. But then no one really teaches you how to be a people leader when you're actually there, which a number of the sessions that have happened already have talked a bit about that.

When you get into this role, it is a different job. As Simon Sinek would say, you lead the people who do the things. You don't do the things anymore. Now as Perish mentioned in her the last presentation, that's that's not always exactly true. There's some nuance there if you have smaller teams, etcetera.

But generally speaking, your role is to not do the things anymore. That's what your team does. You're there to help them be successful. That's a totally different job than you used to have. And it's one you have to embrace because it takes a lot of different types of skill sets to do that.

And I I wanna call out that those skill sets, the people who work for you, their history, their background, that's what makes them diverse. We we think of diversity in these big words like, you know, what nationality or race or skin color, all the all these big things that make up diversity. And, yes, that is true. And it is also the word diversity is also so much more. It's people's history, their background, how they like to work, their mental health status.

All of these things is what makes up a team and makes them diverse. And being a people leader of diverse people is trying to understand and empathize with those individuals so you can better support them in the ways that they need to be supported as an individual. So my wife and I recently landed on TEDLAS. So a lot of people have been, telling us to to watch the show until we've been watching it. Many of you may have already binge binge this.

We have been catching up

Speaker 2: on

Jeff Bull: this. And I think this quote is something that has stuck with me above all their reading and books I've read or podcasts I've listened to in the last, you know, two or three years. All people are different people. There's a scene in the show when that gets said, and I think that is absolutely something that all leaders need to remember. All people should, but leaders, especially, you need to remember this.

All people are different people. You are going to lead them differently because they all need things that are different from one another. So a couple things that I want you to remember is you need to embrace your own self awareness. Be aware of what makes other people comfortable, but also know that that's probably gonna make you uncomfortable to some degree, not because it's bad, but because they're not something you're normally used to thinking about. You think about yourself and how you deal with that.

But now you need to think about what do they need. So you have to remember things like they're individuals. They have their own likes and dislikes, their own passions, their own priorities. Most of them do not think of work as their top priority, and that's a good thing. You want people to feel like their life is their top priority.

How can you help them with that? How can you let them bring those passions with them into the work they do every day? You've also gotta recognize those people for their their own uniqueness. Do they like to talk a lot like me? Do they not?

Are they kind of some mix of introvert, extrovert? Do they like to be about public speaking? Do they like to write blogs? I work with a lot of people. We all probably do who have varying degrees of comfort in those different areas.

That's okay. You wanna understand that so you can help them be successful in the things that they want because we don't we don't gauge in DevRel from what I can tell. We don't gauge people's success in this job by, did you write 10 blogs this month and two presentations? That's not an accurate gauge of success. Gauge of success is gonna be different per person so long as we're reaching the goals that we wanna hit at the end.

How we get there, it can be very, very fluid in that path. One other thing one the two other things, really, but one thing I really wanna call out is employee well-being is no longer a benefit. It is an absolute necessity. People's mental health, their well-being every day at work, their well-being as people and as human beings is paramount to them doing a job well because it's paramount to them feeling like a real human being in the work that they do every day and as a person every single day. You need to be aware of that and embrace that and try to stoke that as much as you can.

Make sure they know they can take tame off. Make sure they know that they can do whatever they need to be healthy. Like, go take a nap. You know? We're not here to make sure they're working nine to five.

That's not what we're trying to do. Employee well-being is a necessity. And then lastly, relating people without sounding like you don't know anything. It's okay. I just admitted.

I have never been in developer relations board. I've never written code as a profession before, but that doesn't mean I can't lead a team well. I understand the work that they do. I empathize with how they do it. My job is to let them know that where I don't understand something, I'm gonna ask questions, and we'll have a conversation about it.

And you could they can teach me and help me understand so I can better help them with the things that they do. But it's not about pushing through and just doubling down on something just because you don't understand it. Listen to them. Number two here, this is the second big tip I wanna kinda go through is you need to listen to your team, and you've gotta remember what they say. Now I have a terrible memory.

I know that. That's why I got my phone, and I dictate notes to my phone all the time because I'm not gonna remember it. I'm not even gonna try to remember it anymore. I'm just gonna write it down, and that way I can come back to it later. And I have to hold myself accountable to make sure that I do that.

But that is an important thing that you need to remember because listening to them, writing down what they say, and coming back and reflecting on on that is an important part of the work that you are doing with them on a daily basis. They need to know that you have heard them, you have processed that, and you're going to do something with them. You know, conversations with your employees used to be when I when I was in my twenties and I was first coming up and the first people leader job I had, the questions you were supposed to ask your team was things like, what are you pushing on? What's blocking you? How can I help you?

Great. But that's what you ask a computer. That's what you ask, you know, a script to someplace. What's preventing the script from running properly? That's not what you ask a person.

What you ask a person is, how are you? And probably more specific than that, how did that thing that you told me about last week go for you? Did it go well? How'd you feel about it after you're after you're done? Have you taken some PTO recently?

Questions like that are what you need to to to ask them, and you need to give them the space to feel like it's okay to talk about those things. Don't talk over them. Sit back and listen and absorb. Don't take it as negative. Don't take it as attacking you.

You're giving them the space to talk, so let them talk and take that information and then do something with it that is meaningful. This is a big deal. Allow everyone to speak up during meetings. I wanted to call this one out really, really specifically because allowing people the room to be able to speak in meetings is huge. And I don't mean by saying this, I don't mean everybody.

What I mean specifically are those those people who come from marginalized communities, underserved communities, people of color, women, all these groups that typically don't feel like they can have a voice. There is a whole body of research, a massive body of research that says that group people of groups who are not cisgendered white males in a in a broom on a team don't often feel like they have the the capability of or the the space to be able to speak up and voice their opinions because they'll get talked over or shot down or they're devalued. Now that's not universal, but I think we can all probably agree that there's a lot of research and a lot of history behind this, and it's terrible. We don't want it we don't want that to happen. And as a people leader, it is absolutely incumbent on you to create a space for the people on your team, all types of people on your team, matter what they look like, their age, where they come from, that they all feel like they get a chance to speak up.

They can be heard. They are seen, and their voices are meaningful to the decisions you're making as a leader. That is so, so, so important. I would spend all my time on this slide if I could, but I think I wanted to make sure that this was stated out loud. There's actually a really good article by Stacy Stacy Smith, NPR, one of my favorite podcasts, actually, the indicator by Planet Money, that talks a lot about, how to stop from get people getting interrupted, how to give them space.

I'll I'll post a link in Discord after after my session. But it's something to remember as a people leader that meetings going long or one person talking too much. Sometimes that makes sense. There are certain types of meetings where that needs to happen, and that's okay. But it's up to you as the people leader to make sure that everyone is getting a chance to speak up and they feel like they can be heard, and no one person is gonna overrun everyone else.

That comes down to media management. That's probably a whole they're talking of itself, but something to definitely remember because it is really important. Alright. Change your strategy. As a people leader, when you come into a new team, just like doing any job, you might have a plan for what you wanna do, go on a bit of a listening tour.

My VP, when she came on board, that's what she did. She did listening to her, talked to everybody, listened for a while, and then her strategy started to develop. And she had one, and then she started to explain it to us. I'm sure she evolved that as she came into the role more. I do that as a people leader.

I come in. I think I'm gonna do these five things. And then as I meet people and I talk to them and I'm in the job for, you know, four or five minutes, whatever it happens to be or sorry, four or five months, not minutes. Whatever happens. That'd be way too short.

When I happen to be in the role for a while, then I start to evolve that. I am a big proponent of this idea that strategies are tools, and tools are replaceable. They are super important. You need a tool to implement anything that you wanna do. To get anything done, you need to have the right tool to do the job.

But at the same time, tools are almost completely unimportant because you should be able to change that tool whenever you need to to make that job more efficient, to make that work more efficient, to make it move to the next place. I see strategies in the same way. Bring a strategy in. Best laid plans. Bring them with you.

Figure out what you think you wanna do. And then as you learn, change it. Don't sit back and feel like, well, I've had this plan, and it's what I've been taught to do by eons past mentors or the way things just kind of were always done. You don't have to hold on to that. It nothing has to be sacred.

If something needs to change because your team needs something different, great. A great leader is willing to change to support those people on the team because they need something different. And that's a learning journey I've had to go through in the last six years as a people leader in trying to better understand what my team needs. And I've learned a lot from the last couple companies that I've worked for as a result of that. I know this was mentioned in the last session.

I know others have probably mentioned it as well, but I definitely wanna make sure to call it out. Practice and admit when you make a mistake. It is totally okay. As a matter of fact, it's almost imperative that you do this. I make mistakes all the time.

I I know all of us make mistakes all the time. That is okay. You can you're you're a human being. You are going to make a mistake. It's alright.

Make a mistake. Here's a great example of this. I've done this numerous times as a a people leader, I'm still trying to figure it out. How do I have team meetings? How often should I have them?

How long should they be? What do we talk about? We just do a top of mind every time, and we do the same structure. I don't know. I still haven't found one that is just universally good.

So I try something different each time I lead a new team. And I start off one way, and within a few months, it changes to something completely different in a different schedule, and we do two or three iterations because every all people are different people, and they all need something different. They don't all wanna meet every week. I have one person on my team now, and if he's watching, he would definitely tell you this. He is a big he pushes back heavily on interrupt driven work.

He doesn't wanna just meet for the sake of meeting. And I've had to remember that because my first thought would be like, okay. We gotta have a meeting. Right? We gotta have this team meeting.

But then I sit back, Adam Grant's book, think again. I sit back, and I'm like, wait. Hold on. Do we? Is that something we actually have to do?

So I sit back and, okay. You know what? I've maybe that was not the wrong approach. Maybe that wasn't the way to go about this. Let's try something different.

Ask the team. What do you think we should do? How should this go? Practice this. Admit if you've made a mistake or admit when you tried something and it didn't quite pan out the way that you were hoping it would pan out.

That's totally fine. Let them know and ask for their input. Ask for their feedback. Go from there. It it it shows your team that you are a human being just like them.

You're not true. You're not infallible. You don't even believe you're infallible. You're just trying to do a different job than they do. You're there to support each other, and you move on.

And I apologize. Can I get a quick time check? The the time I wasn't quite sure what time we started here, but I'll keep going. Alright. So I'm just listing this here as kind of a wrap a closing sort of a wrap up slide that I wanted to list for for everyone.

Stormtroopers after a fun day paintballing. The reason I wanted to show this is it kind of reinforces that all people are different. People are not stormtroopers on the death star. They don't all look the same. They don't talk the same.

They don't all behave the same. They're not following the same rhythm. Everyone is different. I have four people on my team right now that work for me. I've had varying degrees and varying numbers of people on my team over the many years.

And I have to say that every single time I have led a team of people, no matter what they look like and no matter what my assumptions are, every single one always ends up challenging me in some way that I have never expected because they are just different. They think about problems differently. They approach situations differently. Their lives are completely different. What they prioritize is 100% different from one another.

And if I don't allow myself as a leader and if we don't, as a group of leaders, allow ourselves to do that, we're never going to be successful. We're not gonna be happy. What I something that I try to aspire to is, and I help my team as much as I can try to aspire to this, is creating a rhythm between life and work. I don't like the idea of balance. Balance to me is kind of a a fake goal you can't ever reach.

The skills of theme is balance. That's not real. It doesn't ever happen. What you can, though, create is a rhythm. And what I wanna help my team understand is that I see all of them.

I know they're all different, and I wanna help each one of them create a rhythm in their life and work so that work is not their only priority. Life is their priority. They get to do the things they love to do. And then when they that way, when they come to work, whether that's taking a break for an hour and coming back, their minds can be completely into the thing that they wanna get done, and they can feel great about it and walk away and feel amazing about it. I don't just want a group of people who are on my team who feel like they have to work nine to the the nine to five.

And at the end of the day, they're exhausted, and they can't find the energy every day. That's no fun. Nobody wants to be a part of that. So the purpose of this is see everybody, understand them, understand their differences. Try to embrace those differences, and then talk to them.

Give them space to let to tell you what they need, and then do something meaningful with that. And so I apologize. I didn't see a timer on my screen here, so I wasn't exactly sure where I'm at in the fifteen minute window, but I will open up for questions. I think we have some time usually left over for some questions. Hopefully, there's enough, and hopefully, I didn't run too short.

Thanks, everybody. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. No problem. So we'll have our next speaker, and we'll do q and a together after that. So looking forward to that. So with that, we'll bring our next speaker up, which I wanna make sure I'm pronouncing your name correctly.

Dana, we can switch slides. Oh, did we lose?

Jeff Bull: It

Speaker 2: disappeared. Uh-oh. I think there might be a connection issue. So let's see if we can get our speaker back. And, while we're at it, why don't I check the Discord to see if there are any questions Well, we're yeah.

I saw saw the conversation on discord, but see what happened. Well, while we're waiting, I will jump in and maybe I'll pull in one of my co m c's. I know Mara's here. Mara, heads up. I'm gonna add you.

And thunderstorm. Thunderstorm's in the area.

Jeff Bull: Big thumbs up.

Speaker 3: Awesome. I'm, like, heavily multitasking here. So it's I'm I'm very appreciative that you said something because you could've pulled me in, and I would've been doing, like, seven different things at once.

Speaker 2: Speaking of all the different things that we have to do.

Speaker 3: Okay. Literally.

Speaker 2: Yes. So, yeah, I I had some questions. Oh, and I see people typing now. I don't know if this is controversial, but

Speaker 3: Can I cut you off just a second?

Speaker 2: Yes. Go ahead.

Speaker 3: Yeah. It sounds like her power and Internet are now out, and she's not gonna make it. We're getting, like, live updates in the speaker lounge.

Speaker 2: So Oh, okay. I see. Yes. I should look

Speaker 3: at continue with your questions. I can also come up with questions because I feel like Jeff is fully capable of of answering them and filling time.

Jeff Bull: I always have answers to questions. I can't get her till they match, but I always have answers to questions.

Speaker 3: I will answer the questions you didn't ask. Right? Yes.

Speaker 2: So I'll put it out there. I was in an interesting situation where, of course, you know, diversity inclusion was talked about company wide. It was very important. It's I think I don't know if there's a company in tech out there where it isn't something that we have to actively work on, unfortunately. Right?

It's just I'll say for DevRelCon, I think there's a positive experience that when we go through the CFP process, it's completely blind, especially through the first run. You know, we just look at the title and the abstract, and we we go through that. And I I feel like it's very promising in the DevRel space that we have quite a bit of diversity in the in the outcome when when when you go through it completely, blindly. You know, there's a feeling like, okay. Well, we gotta go and, like, rethink certain people because, it it looks too, homogeneous.

However, I've been in companies, like I said, where there was a lot of discussion about diversity that we wanted. And I kind of challenged my team where we were looking at certain candidates. And I said, well, if you look at the surface, right, of skin color, whatever background, you know, we might have a candidate that kind of fix you know, addresses addresses those concerns. But we also had a candidate who, on the surface, you might say, like, you were using terms like, you know, cis and white and all that, that I felt like would have actually challenged us a lot more, because was quite diverse in terms of background and approach and, you know, what things they would bring. And so, you know, I I I wanted to challenge the team to say, I I know that we have good intentions, but, you know, let's talk about what diversity actually is and how we'll we'll make our our team diverse.

So I was curious if you've come across that as well where people are kind of, you know, looking at the optics, and that's also very important. But, like, are are we going too far sometimes?

Jeff Bull: That's a really good question. I would say, at least today, I don't think we're going too far. But here's why I say that is I don't think you can go too far. I think too far would be if it's only on paper, and we read off a list and say, did we check all these boxes? Groovy.

Hire the person. That I would think that's taking it too far. But because it's making that's that's the type of automation for me that is not that you don't want that automated. But I think in general, it is always good to be challenged by the be keep looking at be challenged to go back and kinda think again about that person that you were looking to hire or the candidates that you're the candidate pool that you have in the in this example. Because sit back and say, why is it?

You have to kinda constantly ask yourself, why is it I was gonna pick this person over this person? And was how they visually look or some other attribute like that the thing that was actually changing my mind? I'm not gonna say that you shouldn't hire a person because of one of those things, but I think it's really good, especially on a hiring manager, to be challenged to actively think about that. Because make sure that if you're gonna make this decision, be aware of why you're making that decision. And if you're okay with it, good, bad, or indifferent, then make the decision, but you need to be aware of it.

But walking into it, we're like, it's totally fine. I I I put out there and the recruiter gave me a list, so it must be good. Right? No. No.

That's not okay. It it never was okay. And now we realize that, like, no. We like, we can do better than that. It's not hard to do a lot better than that.

But I think there are some tools and probably a whole other session to talk about. There are ways to make sure that when you are looking at that list of candidates, you are being you're being as objective as you can, and it's the way that you do really do that is not through just doing it yourself. I have a a particular way that I like to when I approach hiring, I do wanna make that do that first screen, preferably a phone screen. And then I like to hand it off to a team of people over a course of a couple of rounds to do the meetings and the interviews, and then I come back to do a video at the end because I kind of wanna wait to see who this person is and how they behave on screen and hear the feedback before I wanna wait to that until everyone else has done that, and then I get input. And then I wanna see how this person does.

One, because I wanna see I wanna try to remove my own sort of, like, decision making biases from the process whenever I can. But I also want to understand this. Is their perspective from my team when they look at this person, when they hear this person, is their perspectives and their perceptions of them coming from how they view the person behaving on camera, and do I see the same thing, or is this person just nervous? They can just be really nervous. Like, that's entirely that's, I mean, that's, I think, for general interviewing anyway, but I think it can really help with a lot of these sort of cognitive biases that we end people deal with in these processes.

I don't know if that quite answers your question. But

Speaker 2: Yeah. Definitely. And I I think I, I, added to one of the questions we have, which is, similar. Maybe there's more more things to add. You know?

How do you ensure diverse points of view in your hiring process? So maybe the same question.

Jeff Bull: Yeah. I I would say it's it's very the my answer is very similar. You do the best you can. Yeah. I think that's really what it comes down to.

And if you have a good process that you establish before you start high the hiring process, that's the way to do it. Have that rechecked by your recruiter. Have it checked by other people in your organization. Don't just well, here's my boss and my teammates. I'll ask them.

Right? The other people, the leaders on my, you know, my leadership team. Good. And, also, go find somebody who's not in your group who is probably one of those categories. Don't call somebody out, but, like, ask for other opinions.

Give them say, here's the process I'm looking at. Is what do think? Or are there any are there any gaps that I'm missing here, things I should address that I'm not addressing in this process? And then take that input and go do something with it. Don't just listen to it and go, okay.

That's not really what I wanted. Do something with that input afterwards because it's all designed to help you, like, try to close your blind spots as much as you can. You can only do it so much, and you're never gonna be perfect at it. But I think if we're always just trying to be intentional about what we're doing, we're gonna be on the right path.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah. This has come up a couple times throughout the oh my gosh. It's just Tuesday. Was gonna say the past couple of days, but it's, today and yesterday. And I was curious, is the process that you have for hiring similar to other hiring managers at your team or company, or is it something that, like, you defined kind of socialized around for a gut check and then you you rolled with it?

Jeff Bull: That's a fantastic question. I think every time I've done a hiring process in my entire career, let alone at this company, I've done it differently. Every single time, I almost do it completely differently than the last time. One, because I like just to try new things. I wanna see how something else is gonna work.

I listen to a training. I listen to a podcast. I read a book. I actually just finished reading the out of grants. Think again.

So, like, I'm in this whole mood of, like, how do I rethink the things that I've already been doing? But I like to do that because I wanna challenge myself every time. Like, I've learned something new. I don't hire people all the time. It's not a it doesn't happen frequently or that frequently.

Okay. Well, I've got a plenty of space here to try something different. I have some core tenants that I like to I like to include that are sure there's multiple steps in the process, make sure there's multiple people people from my team that are interviewing the people people from without my team. But other than that, no, I like to I like to I like to bring in something new every time. I don't know if that's quite how every part of Cisco does it.

Cisco is obviously relatively a large company, and DevRel within Cisco is much smaller than that. But I think from what I can tell, our group kind of experiments. So we like to try new things and see what we can do that is a little bit different for the position that we're hiring, especially as a DA because it's such a different job. Like, you know, when I used to hire networking engineers, most of my career was in network engineering. You know, I ran cables.

I configured switches, all that type of stuff. How I would hire somebody that way was kind of prescriptive. I look back on it now. I'm like, yeah. I could have done better, but it was it was relatively prescriptive.

Or when I ran a help desk, it was the same sort of thing. The job was kind of the same for every person. This job as a DA, they're creatives. They're artists. They that that's not you know, they're not they are unique people in and of themselves.

So I like to try something different each time I go through the process. I wanna include some sort of, you know, some sort of, problem solving situation where they write some code or solve a problem, they have to present on it. The presenting part of it is the biggest part to me. I wanna see how somebody great if you can write code. You should be able to do that if you're gonna come into this, if you're gonna come into this role.

Yeah. That's kind of you kinda need to do that. That aside, I wanna see how someone can communicate verbally and on camera in front of other people given all the home I like to give people all the answers to the questions. I tell them, here's the situation. This is what I'm testing you for.

This is what I'm looking for. Here's all the answers I can possibly give you because I don't really care so much if you can go research all this stuff and put it together better than the other person. We can Google. You can find people to help you in the role. I don't care about that.

What I care about is how do you compose yourself and how much time do you put into practicing that and preparing yourself so that you can be yourself in front of these other people? That's what I'm really interested in. I wanna give people a space to be able to do that. So I try as best as I can to give them all the information possible, make myself available to answer questions as they're preparing for those interviews. Ping me on Slack.

Ping me on whatever. Let's have a conversation. If you have other questions, I will clarify that for you because I want them to feel like they can just be themself. My hope is that what we walk away from is from that interview with is this is the person in their best possible situation, so how did they do?

Speaker 3: Right. So it removes that, like, did you answer the question the way that you think you want the hiring manager to hear, or did you answer it authentically, and did you come prepared to, you know, answer the question in a way that maybe the hiring manager would be like, oh, I never thought about it like this, or maybe I thought negatively of it. I don't know.

Jeff Bull: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, much as I can. And I'll and when we walk away from it, I like to do sort of a debrief. I want my recruiters to go do a debrief with those candidates and get any like, how did they feel?

Did it make them feel good about themselves? Did it make them feel bad? I've actually had that before where someone said, no. That actually made me feel really bad about myself because I felt that it was this weird kind of pressure. I'm like, oh my gosh.

I terrible now. How can I do this differently the next time? Because I don't want someone to feel bad about themselves when they come into this. That's everybody should, in my opinion, should walk away from an interview feeling like, I got to be my best self. And if this doesn't work out, it's not because I failed.

It's because this just wasn't the right time for me.