#358 Mary Shea: From Oboe Solos to Sales Strategy—A Career Reinvented — Part Three

Summary

Podcast Summary: Chief Change Officer #358 Episode Title: Mary Shea: From Oboe Solos to Sales Strategy—A Career Reinvented — Part Three
Release Date: May 10, 2025
Host: Vince Chan

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Introduction

In episode #358 of the Chief Change Officer podcast, host Vince Chan engages in a compelling conversation with Mary Shea, a dynamic professional whose career transition from a classical musician to a senior tech leader exemplifies the podcast's theme of outgrowing oneself. This episode delves into Mary's journey, her partnership with Higher Quotient in the HR tech landscape, and her insights on leveraging technology to revolutionize recruitment processes.

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Mary Shea's Diverse Career Journey

Mary Shea's career trajectory is anything but conventional. With a foundation in classical music, she transitioned into frontline sales and eventually ascended to a senior role in sales and revenue enablement within the tech industry. Vince Chan highlights Mary's passion for using technology to disrupt traditional work methods, emphasizing her commitment to driving positive change without adhering to the "standard rule book."

Notable Quote:

“Mary's all about making waves and driving positive change.”
—Vince Chen [01:07]

Mary's journey showcases her adaptability and commitment to continuous growth, aligning perfectly with the podcast's mission to empower listeners to outgrow themselves.

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Transition to HR Technology and Partnership with Higher Quotient

Mary shares her transition from an industry analyst at Forrester to her current collaboration with Higher Quotient, an emerging HR tech company focused on transforming the recruiting process. Her enthusiasm for Higher Quotient stems from its sophisticated use of generative AI and automation, which streamlines the recruiting workflow for organizations.

Notable Quote:

“The AI agent assists recruiters and uplevels the engagement process with candidates, which is absolutely amazing.”
—Mary Shea [05:03]

Mary emphasizes the importance of AI in handling the bulk of the recruiting process, allowing human recruiters to focus on more meaningful interactions with candidates. She underscores how Higher Quotient's technology addresses the bias problem by sourcing candidates from a diverse range of platforms beyond traditional ones like LinkedIn.

Notable Quote:

“We are seeing tremendous momentum in the market and incredibly positive responses from not only the tech but our team as well.”
—Mary Shea [10:19]

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Debunking Misconceptions About HR Tech for Senior Roles

Vince raises a common misconception that scalable HR tech solutions are only suitable for lower-skilled jobs, not high-end or senior roles. Mary challenges this notion by sharing her personal experiences where Higher Quotient successfully filled both mid-level and senior positions with exceptional candidates.

Notable Quote:

“Hire Quotient found several candidates that met all my criteria within two to three weeks, and we hired the role in four weeks, which blew my mind.”
—Mary Shea [18:12]

Mary recounts specific instances, such as hiring a Chief Customer Officer, where Higher Quotient's AI-driven approach not only expedited the hiring process but also enhanced diversity by presenting a balanced slate of candidates. She argues that technology, when paired with human expertise, can effectively handle the complexities of senior-level recruitment.

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Vince Shares a Personal HR Experience

In a poignant moment, Vince shares his own negative experience with a robotic and unengaged recruitment process conducted by a young HR professional. This story underscores the limitations of purely automated recruitment systems and highlights the necessity for human touch in the hiring process.

Notable Quote:

“It wasn't exactly the best first impression. I think in today's market where competition for top talent is getting more and more intensive, HR is not only for recruitment, for administration, for training.”
—Vince Chen [25:16]

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Mary's Response and Insights on Humanizing Recruitment with Technology

Mary empathizes with Vince's experience and elaborates on the importance of integrating technology with human elements in recruitment. She advocates for technology as an augmentation tool rather than a replacement, ensuring that recruiters can maintain meaningful interactions with candidates while leveraging AI to handle repetitive tasks.

Notable Quote:

“Technology should not be designed to replace human interactions. It should be designed to augment them or to make our lives better.”
—Mary Shea [30:34]

Mary stresses that while AI can handle data-driven aspects of recruitment, the final stages require a human touch to build trust and foster genuine connections with candidates.

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Advice for Job Seekers in an AI-Driven Market

As the conversation shifts to job seekers, Mary offers practical advice on navigating an increasingly AI-driven recruitment landscape. She emphasizes the importance of detailed resumes, comprehensive LinkedIn profiles, and the cultivation of professional networks.

Notable Quote:

“Be very detailed in LinkedIn and then it comes down to your community and your network.”
—Mary Shea [37:42]

Mary advises job seekers to provide exhaustive details about their skills and experiences to ensure that AI algorithms accurately assess their qualifications. Additionally, she highlights the critical role of human connections, noting that many positions are filled through networking and personal relationships.

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Evolving Networking Strategies Across Generations

Vince introduces the topic of networking, contrasting traditional methods developed before the digital age with contemporary approaches adopted by younger generations. Mary responds by advocating for a hybrid strategy that combines digital tools with personal interactions to build and sustain meaningful professional relationships.

Notable Quote:

“Technology should not be designed to replace human interactions. It should be designed to augment them or to make our lives better.”
—Mary Shea [41:56]

Mary shares her initiatives, such as bilateral mentorship programs, which bridge the gap between digital natives and seasoned professionals, ensuring that both technological proficiency and interpersonal skills are honed.

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with Vince and Mary reinforcing the podcast's mission to empower listeners to embrace change and leverage both technology and human ingenuity to advance their careers. Mary Shea's insightful perspectives on integrating AI with human-centric recruitment strategies provide valuable takeaways for both employers and job seekers navigating the evolving job market.

Notable Quote:

“If you're not connecting with people at a certain point, you're not going to feel good.”
—Mary Shea [45:17]

Vince expresses his appreciation for Mary's contributions, highlighting the importance of building a global community that fosters continuous growth and transformation.

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Final Thoughts

Episode #358 of Chief Change Officer offers a rich exploration of the intersection between technology and human elements in career development and recruitment. Mary Shea's experiences and insights serve as a guide for individuals and organizations striving to outgrow themselves and thrive in an ever-changing professional landscape.

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This summary captures the essence of episode #358, providing a comprehensive overview of the key discussions, insights, and conclusions drawn from the conversation between Vince Chan and Mary Shea.

Transcript

[Business Owner]

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[Vince Chen]

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show. Chief Change Officer, I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change. Progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today, I've got a treat for you. We are welcoming back a familiar voice to the show, Mary Shea. If you caught our first season back in March, you might remember her from episodes three and four. If you missed those, don't worry. They're still there if you want to catch up. But we'll cover plenty of ground today. Now, let me tell you, Mary's career path is anything but ordinary. We're talking a journey from classical musician to frontline salesperson, all the way to senior tech leader in sales and revenue enablement. Talk about range, huh? But here's what really makes Mary tick. She's all about using tech to shake things up in how we work. As she put it in our last conversation, she's not one for playing by the standard rule book. Nope. Mary's is all about making waves and driving positive change. So it's no surprise she's now teamed up with a rising star in the HR tech world. Let's talk about why this matters. Our job market right now is like a roller coaster. We've got layoffs, downsizing, companies flipping their business models on their heads, and AI stepping into the ring. Throw in some political and economic curveballs and you've got a recipe for a lot of people hunting for jobs. But it's not just about finding work. Isn't it? We are in this fascinating era where you might have four generations of working side by side and AI is like this double edged sword opening doors for some while others are wondering if it will show them the door. So where does all leave us? What's the future of work looking like? That's exactly what we are diving in today with Mary. She's going to give us the lowdown on what's happening in HR and recruitment. Ready? Let's jump in and hear what Mary's got to say.

[Mary Shea]

Foreign.

[Vince Chen]

Welcome back.

[Mary Shea]

Thank you Vince. It's wonderful to be here.

[Vince Chen]

You've had a deep career journey from being an industry analyst at Forester to now collaborating with a rising star in HR technology. What drew you to this HR tax base? What makes you believe we are at a tipping point for accelerated growth in this sector?

[Mary Shea]

Wow, that's a great question and there's lots of questions within the question. You're so wonderful at what you do, but thank you for asking. So yeah, I won't go too far back in time, but I was an industry analyst at Forrester for seven years or so. It's one of the most wonderful jobs that you could ever possibly have. You are working with some of the most intelligent, creative, forward looking colleagues and the clients are the same as well. At a certain point in life I decided to go back into industry and I worked with a unicorn out in Seattle and was CEO of a RevTech company based in Chicago recently. And I've absolutely fallen in love with with not only the technology that higher quotient has but the leader of the company who is Smart Siddhana. He's a founder entrepreneur based out of India. The company's based in Singapore and San Francisco. And I met Smart at Saster, probably about two and a half or almost coming up on three years now and I was a keynote speaker and he and Aishwarya, one of his colleagues cracked me down pretty much the whole time I thought I was at Saastr and they just wanted to talk tech and introduced me to the burgeoning company and build a relationship with me because I'm fairly well known in the industry and have a nice following. Gratefully grateful for that. And we had so much to talk about that I invited him to come have breakfast with me at the hotel the next day. And you probably know me a little bit, Vince. I'm a bit of an introvert even though I'm out there in the digital world and speaking, but I don't typically invite people I meet for breakfast and so that was a strong indicator of my interest in Smart and The company and its vision. The company essentially is HR tech, as you mentioned, with a focus on recruiting. And it's a software company, it's not an agency. I just want to be really clear. And the software really takes some of the most sophisticated uses of generative AI and also automation. The company has built rich ecosystem partnerships with a range of data providers that you would know. And it can essentially offload the first three quarters of the recruiting process for the recruiter. And why is this important? It's important because everyone's doing more with less these days. Many of the recruiters that I talk to, whether they're external or internal, are one human band, so to speak. There's not a lot of them. And so having an AI agent, that's how I like to refer to the technology EasySource to assist them and up level the engagement process with candidates is absolutely amazing. The company takes a wide swath looking at candidates across a range of platforms, not just LinkedIn. And I know you and I will talk about that because there's some challenges with just focusing on LinkedIn naturally. And it can go out and find very specific candidates with very specific skills, but not limited to just one or two sources. And so that really helps the recruiter manage against the bias problem that I think sometimes we think about when we think about technology and automation and AI. And so I'm just blown away. The technology is elegant, it solves a timely real world problem and the team is there to support every single customer 24 7. And it's a really special company. And I'll just say one more thing and then I'll pause because I know you mentioned why is it the moment for HR tech? I've been following tech for close to two decades now. I started at Forrester back in the mid to late 90s and we saw the emergence of. I'll skip CRM, but we'll start with marketing automation. Right. Which we saw some amazing innovation in the 2000s, some consolidation around 2009 and marketing automation really transformed the way marketers communicated with their total addressable market in a one to many setting. That was so successful, in fact somebody argued too successful, we got too good at that game. But that's another podcast. Then you saw the emergence of sales tech in 2015 where many of these founders took some of the principles and approaches that marketing automation showed us and applied it to a one to one scenario with the sales individual sales rep allowing them to offload some of the downstream activities, engage in more personalization and share digital content and Then we saw some consolidation around 2021 and we're still in a period where we're waiting to see what's next there. As a former analyst and evangelist at multiple companies, I really had the strong sense that we were on the cusp of really being able to transform how recruiters did their jobs and their activities and their day to day activities and processes exactly the same way that we were able to do that in marketing and sales digital transformation. And so I know the timing is right and we are seeing tremendous momentum in the market and incredibly positive responses from not only the tech as I mentioned, but our team as well.

[Vince Chen]

Let's talk about higher quotient with which you are partnering in the US market. I check out the website. They offer a full suite of solutions and products for businesses and enterprises. I'm intrigued by the idea of uncovering hidden talent pools. Can you walk us through how this actually works in practice? I believe this is the. This is what you call a differentiation or differentiation factor in high quotient.

[Mary Shea]

There's a couple of differentiating factors and many really. One is the level of sophistication and quality of the AI and the ability to use very sophisticated prompts. The second is rich external relationships with database companies. Whether that's Apollo, Zoom, Navigator, Crunchbase and I won't list them all out. But there's a very rich ecosystem which allows clients to minimize their spend and focus on consolidating all of their tech providers. But what this does is allows us to the recruiter will have a search and maybe it's I'll give you without recruiter revealing the name of the soon to be client. I'll give you an example. We were doing a search on the technology for a database company that's soon to be unicorn closing a round of funding and they wanted to hire a principal engineer and that engineer had to have 10 years of experience in engineering. They had to have the ability to understand Java C, a range of other different code they needed to work at a database company. So they were looking for some, someone that had come from a competitor, understood the space and there were several others as well. This is very detailed and so what we were able to do is enter in the prompts around where we wanted this person to be located. The amount of experience that they had to have in not only database company but in their coding languages because the experience was different in either. And we went on and on. It was pretty deep. The recruiter had been having lots of challenges. We immediately entered in the prompts and the System went to work and identified in two to three minutes about 50 candidates. What was interesting was the response of the recruiter was blown away who said, I've seen hundreds of tools like this over my last 12 years in business. I've seen nothing. This happened before. We looked through and we found the top candidates. The system ranked the candidates based on the must have and nice to have skills. We only looked at the five star candidates and oh by the way, we found out they were only male candidates. I'm sure you're not terribly surprised. And so we said maybe your hiring manager wants to bring a more diverse set of candidates to the table. Let's add in another prompt and let's look for some female candidates as well. And we did, we found someone and this person was not what we would call a five star candidate, but a four star candidate because she didn't have every single must have aspect. And we said to the hiring manager, okay, let's take a look at this. The skill set, the resume. And the other thing the system does is it automates out the beautiful profiles of each individual candidate. You can see at my blog what it looks like which allows the recruiter to share that with her hiring manager or client. And we said to her this is a case where candidate may not have put on her LinkedIn and other social profiles that she had C, that she had Java, that she had some of the other elements. So we recommend you reach out to her, talk to her and see if that was just an omission. This is how many underrepresented candidates, female and others, get missed by bots. Evaluating bots. There's a human component that needs to be brought into this. And so we're not trying to take the job away from the recruiter, but rather augment the things that the machine is good at and let the human have more time to do the things that they're good at. So the recruiter went out to speak with that candidate. I don't know what the outcome is, but that gives you an example. And then I'll give you one final point. We're focused on outbound. So if you think of applicant tracking systems that just evaluate rank candidates and then track them through the back end process. Our differentiator is that we will go out and actively find passive and active candidates from a range of sources, cross check them their experience. Maybe you want a sales leader who's grown a SaaS business from 5 million to 100 million and they don't have that on their LinkedIn. We'd cross. The AI will cross quickly, cross check their experience and time with crunchbase and come back with a recommendation. So then what happens is the AI will create outbound messaging through a range of different omnichannels, whether it's text or LinkedIn or email. And the recruiter can go out and have the email automate and reach out to all of these candidates. And the AI also picks based on each individual candidate very specific aspects of their qualifications to excite them about how qualified they are for the role. So automation, sophisticated use of or robust use of generative AI, and working in concert with the recruiter. Those are the big differentiators I see.

[Business Owner]

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[Mary Shea]

Easy.

[Business Owner]

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[Vince Chen]

There's a common belief that scalable HR tech solutions are best suited for lower end, less skilled jobs versus higher end Highly skilled and senior jobs. I know you have some strong views on this. Can you share your perspective and perhaps debunk some of the misconceptions around the topic?

[Mary Shea]

Yeah, that is so true, Vince. I think there is and I've had this conversation with some of our business partners and with other folks and there is this misconception. Yes, this is great for the transactional roles. Look, this is great for any role. I think maybe the best way for me to answer the question is to just give your audience an example of When I was co CEO at a revenue enablement company, I just raised 50 million in funding but simultaneously we had to really streamline and restructure the organization multiple times. We had a new VC partner and they wanted us to be able to be cash flow break even on a dime within two quarters to be frank. And we needed to really make the company smaller, which is difficult obviously on the human and personal side, but it's the reality of business and where we are in the world right now. And then simultaneously I needed to upskill several very key roles. I had about 10 roles to fill and I had one internal recruiter. That's a lot Vince. That's a lot for one individual. And he wasn't just sourcing after my go to market roles, he was sourcing engineers and a range of other roles that I wasn't intimately involved in at the time. And I couldn't afford to hire an external recruiting firm which could have cost me 80 to 100 grand a role. You know that I've done it many times and it's great but again, it's just not the reality, the business reality that many of us are in today. So I didn't use hire quotient for every role. I hired them and I said look, I can't, I don't know how I'm going to fill these roles in the time fashion in the time that I need to do it with the highest quality candidates. And oh by the way, I have a personal platform around elevating and amplifying the voices of underrepresented in business. So on every single role for my credibility within the organization and externally outside of the firm, I need to bring in a diverse set of finalists. That's no joke. I can't say one thing and then do another when the rubber meets the road. And without higher coach I never would have been able to do it. So I didn't use them for every single, every single search I had. But there were three that I used that I needed to. One was I needed a demand gen manager and as your listeners know, demand gen is really hard right now. Now that's not a senior role but what we couldn't fill it. And Harvard Koshen did an amazing job of finding someone that had three different degrees, two masters, data science, phenomenal. The other role I had to fill was a sales rep based in Europe in the continent. And as you probably know, all my contacts are pretty much in the uk but we needed someone in the continent because we had a deep partnership with SAP and we needed that person to speak German, English and at least one other European language. We needed them to have worked at or understood or have relationships with SAP and we needed them to have come from a revenue enablement company and there was no way I could find that person. Hire quotient found several candidates that met all of my criteria within, I don't know, two to three weeks and we had hired that role in four weeks which blew my mind and exceeded all my expectations. Those are two, I think pretty inspiring examples. But to directly answer your question about senior level talent or C suite talent or talent where you need a white glove experience, this was the most eye opening for me. I had to hire a chief customer officer. This was the most important role that I needed to hire at the company for a range of reasons that SaaS companies have been struggling with churn over the last 18 to 24 months. It's been a very tough market and so in order to grow your businesses you need to first stop the leaky bucket. So I thought this was an incredibly important role. I had a board member refer a candidate to me. I also found a candidate that I'd worked with in the past, someone who had grown a business to about 100 million and a very strong candidate. But to be frank, those were folks that they were both. One was a man, one was a woman. They weren't people of color, they didn't, they didn't really feel my deep need for more diverse candidates. I posted online, I got 100 applicants and higher quotient went through and found the top 1% on a daily basis surfaced those to me and I was very actively involved in this along with our recruiter and he did an amazing job and we found this amazing diamond in the rough. We found several candidates that had scaled customer success organizations to 100 million that had been in SaaS businesses that had experienced M and A because we were a highly acquisitive company that was important, that had managed multiple SaaS products and so on and so forth. And we interviewed those folks and they were great. So what happened was we dramatically reduced the time that it would have taken me and other executives on the interview loops because by the time Higher Quotient had surfaced, the candidates, they were really good. I was able to put four finalists together which also included the internal referrals. And I, I'll tell you personally, I fully expected to hire my former colleague. And as we went through the interview process, I was becoming more and more taken with the two candidates that Hiero Quotient found. My final set finalists was two women, two men, two people of color. And honestly, I would have been happy to hire any, any one of them. They were all so strong. Everyone at the company thought it was an incredibly fair and well run process. And I hired an amazing person who is now doing a tremendous job in leading not only her organization, but as a strong number two for the current CEO of that company. And I get it. I understand. Maybe I'm not going to change the hearts and minds of die hard recruiters who truly believe that the C suite needs to be handheld every step of the way. But I will say because the AI can customize the external messaging so much and because that's automated and omnichannel, it allows the person to stay in contact, the recruiter to stay in content, constant contact with the candidate. This is a whole other topic, but how many times have you been ghosted and I've been ghosted by HR folks? It happens. So it created a better brand experience even for the candidates we didn't hire. And ultimately once that three quarters of the recruiting process was handled by Higher quotient, we did White Glove internally. I was involved in every interview. I was talking as was our recruiter and I was texting, talking with our finalists on a regular basis. So just because you're augmenting a part of the process doesn't mean you walk away from a White glove or blue chip experience. And so I really hope this, these stories help come to life. Why I am debunking hopefully that theory and I know you have a different perspective so I really want to hear your thoughts.

[Vince Chen]

I can appreciate that if I were one of those candidates. By the way, in your process. I totally appreciate the fact that someone senior like you and your colleagues got really involved in the process process. Because if I join, if you offer me a job, I will be working with you. How you treat me is indicative of how I will be treated as a. Okay, so yes, I do have a story to share. I don't usually share a lot of personal story, especially if I do interview because I want the focus to be on the guest. But this time for this topic, I do have a personal story. So if you you could allow me. This recent experience of mine really got me thinking about the challenges and opportunities in the HR space today. So I was up for this senior position at a big international brand. You know, one of those roles that asks for over 20 years of work experience. Exciting stuff right? Now here's where it gets interesting. The person interviewing me, a young HR professional, maybe two or three years out of college, and she asked me to join her on a zoom call. She sent this request through an automatic recruitment system. So I replied. I said yes, I pick a date. And now keep in mind this isn't during COVID and we are in the same city. So I offered to pop into the office for face to face conversation. Well, she did not come back to me. Maybe it's because of the automatic system. Then when we got on the call, I once again mentioned to her that I would love to meet her in person. I reached out to her before a call and her response was, oh no, Friday is work from home. We just do the call. All right? I thought, let's roll with it. From the moment we started, I can tell she's just reading questions off a screen next to her computer. It felt like I was in some kind of robotic interview simulator. The questions were all over the place, barely touching on what the job was actually about. And I can tell you some questions were inappropriate touching upon age and generation there. I'm thinking, where is the human touch in all this? It really left me wondering about the company's culture, if this is how they treat potential candidates and executives. What's it like to work there? It wasn't exactly the best first impression. I think in today's world where competition for top talent getting more and more intensive, HR is not only for recruitment, for administration, for training. What sets one employer apart from another employer for recruitment of top talents? HR plays a very, very crucial role in the whole process. HR is the frontline ambassador for the company. My experience felt like a missed opportunity. It made me wonder, in today's market, do you think advanced tech and AI solutions might actually offer a more personalized and effective experience than human recruiters? Especially when there is a significant gap in experience or multi generational understanding. How do you see technology potentially bridging these gaps?

[Business Owner]

I'm not exactly a tech genius, but I knew one thing for sure. If I wanted my small business to crush it, I needed a Website that worked like a pro and I needed it yesterday. Lucky for me, bluehost made it ridiculously easy with their AI design tools. Building my website was a walk in the park. I could customize, optimize and monetize everything exactly how I wanted. In just a few minutes I had a secure site up and running. I couldn't believe how straightforward it was and getting found online. Bluehost helped me with that too. I perfected my keywords and meta descriptions with their search engine tools. The AI even gave me suggestions to improve my pages. Now I can sit back, relax and focus on my customers while my website continues to rank higher and higher on Google with their 30 day money back guarantee. I wasn't worried about taking the plunge. And now I'm so glad I did head over to bluehost.com and build something special today.

[Mary Shea]

Wow. There's so many layers to unravel here. As it always is with you, Vince, which is why I just cherish speaking with you. First of all, I'm so sorry that you experienced that because no one deserves that and it's a very poor experience. I think I will get to your question about technology helping and having potent bringing more humanity into the process. But in this case, to me I think this was just a miss. Right, you said a missed opportunity. Unfortunately, someone that early in their career, in my view, should probably not have been running the interview search for a 20 plus year veteran at a big international brand. And so to me, I don't know if you reached back out to the Chief HR Officer Chro or Senior executive there, but I think you would be doing them an incredible favor if you just let them know what your experience was like. And maybe once you package up this podcast we can, you can send them the podcast and they can listen to it and hear the impact of someone who's just simply not ready in their career or has not had the appropriate training or support. I don't want to be ageist against someone who's new in their career. Unfortunately, that was just a miss and I don't think that company would want that to happen. And I think the onus is on us to tell the executives. The other thing I think is when you think about everyone always talks about how pricing is so important and pricing is always inextricably linked to your brand. And we talk a lot about that at Booth. Right. And JP Duvet has a class on pricing and we know how important pricing is. But I think you bring up another really important point, which is the experience in the Recruiting process is also linked to your brand. And whether or not you hire someone in some ways is irrelevant from a brand perspective. You've got to deliver consistent professional experiences and you've got to weave some humanity into the process, into what is quite, quite a challenging process, particularly for a range of different people out there looking. And it's not just not. You're going to get a bad review on whatever the HR site is. You want to make sure that every candidate has a stellar experience. And I'll just give you one really quick experience of mine and then I will, I promise I will directly answer your question. But I interviewed partner a little bit ago and like you, I'm deep into my career. I'd done the job many years. I think they had a more junior candidate in mind, but they were incredibly professional and kind to me. I worked with a recruiter and I also reached out to an executive three or four or five levels above the recruiter to introduce myself and ask her to look after the process. And she did. And every single executive that I talked to treated me with the utmost responsibility, respect. So sorry. I don't think they ever intended to actually hire me. They had a playbook and I didn't fit into it and I was probably too expensive, Vince. And you can say two, two, two, and it's all fine. It turned out great. But I had an amazing experience in working with them and I did a lot of work for the interview. I wrote a report, I did a presentation. Like, it's no joke when you interview for these senior level positions. I walked away, sad that I didn't get the position, but I was like, you know what, it's probably for the better. And now I'm a Gartner client. I mean, the way Gartner looks at it is everyone they interview, this is how I. Everyone they interview is a potential client. And so I think that's how this international brand should have looked at it. All right now, to answer your question, I don't think that technology can overcome some of the limitations that you described because the technology is designed to be that agent or a partner, not to disintermediate the recruiter. And I think that's where a lot of people get confused. So you have to have a strong professional in partnership with the tech. Just like you need a strong sales rep in partnership with the sales tech. Right? Sales tech's not going to close the deal. People buy from people they know and trust and they want to look someone in the eye at that final moment and they want someone's throat to choke if something goes wrong. So it's not going to solve for the kind of problem that you described. But what it will do is let someone who's very talented, who's maybe overloaded with work, who can't respond back or can't meet you for coffee, it frees them up from the downstream activity so that they can interact in more meaningful ways with a candidate like yourself. And so that's the way I see it. Sure. The fact that we have an automated communication system that's on a workflow cadence helps because we're constantly folks who use our software constantly in communication with that candidate. And I think that helps. But it won't take away a problem of someone who's simply not qualified or trained to do their job effectively. And I hope it's very long winded. But I hope that gets to the crux of looking for wow, this is all good.

[Vince Chen]

It's really good. As we speak, a lot of the issues I've raised, the solutions to these issues, the approach to dealing with and managing the risks of what AI technology can and will bring to the table, are still being developed and explored. That's the beauty of change. Change is changing itself. We'll come back to this in our next episode together. Before we wrap up, I have one more question for you. We've talked about a lot of technological potential and advancements in HR for employers. Let's flip the table and talk about job seekers. Given your experience in this area, your read on this industry, what advice would you give to job seekers in this increasingly AI driven market? How can they position themselves better and stronger in the AI driven recruitment process to become a standout candidate, for example, and effectively communicate the value, the real value to the employers? For this question, you and I know very well that using chat, GPT or any AI tool to create a 100% polished resume and cover letter is not the answer. So what's your advice?

[Mary Shea]

Yes, Dear Vince, I hope this email finds you well and in good health. No, we can't do that. That's not going to help you get a job. Sure. And I want to acknowledge that it is so difficult out there right now. I know so many wonderful folks who are on the beach who are job seeking right now who are at Salesforce, Zoom Info Forest are super high quality companies and it's tough. For every search you're getting hundreds if not thousands of applicants. I applied for a servicenow position and there were thousands and thousands of positions or applicants rather, there's a couple of things and I'll go over some of the basics, but I think again, it does come back to your humanity and your network and your community really. But sure, you've gotta make sure you've got a resume that is going to signal or provide the right triggers to whatever AI is evaluating your experience. The biggest thing you can do is be provide excruciating detail whether you're a software engineer in terms of all of the skills, language development, languages, certifications, or if you're in sales or sales leadership or some of the other roles, like you've scaled businesses from 5 million to 15 million or like you need to be super specific on exactly what you've done. Be very granular there. The next piece of advice I would say is make sure that your LinkedIn really matches that level of detail. Because LinkedIn, for better or for worse is the primary source that a lot of internal and external recruiters use. And so what I see is LinkedIn profiles are typically have a lot less detail, right? And if you have less detail on your LinkedIn you could be completely looked over even though you might be perfect for the job. And so that's where you see this is advice I give to a lot of underrepresented folks who are job seeking. Be very detailed in LinkedIn and then it comes down to your community and your network. I don't know if this is true for you, Vince. Even in the post digital age, every single position I have had comes from a relationship. And I don't know if I shared, maybe I shared on this, this pod or you and I spoke about it before. But I met Smart Sedana close to three years ago at Saster when he came up to speak with me after I did a keynote speech and brought one of his colleagues and we became professional friends through that interaction and we stayed in touch even though we didn't work together. Even though I wasn't a client for years, I eventually became a client and then I eventually became a customer, an employee. So focus on your human connections. Have community. If you don't have a community or a personal board, use some of the communities that are out there. There's Wednesday's women, there's sales assembly, there's a range of different women in revenue. I skew a little bit more to the go to market, but I'm sure there's many other communities for HR and technical professionals pay to be involved in those and get the advice and build that network and network like hell, don't stop doing that. So that's. Those are the pieces of advice I would give folks, you answer.

[Vince Chen]

One of the questions on my list is about networking. You and I started and built our careers before the digital age. So our training, our experience involves a lot of human touch, a lot of personal touch. For example, cold calling, industry event, socialization, face to face, keeping in touch, in close touch with people. Before we had LinkedIn, the gesture of reciprocation. Yet the younger generations, they've grown up in a digital era. So the definition of networking, the approach to communicating with people, to building and developing, developing sustainable, meaningful relationships, so much different from ours.

[Mary Shea]

Yeah, thank you for bringing that up because I think, you know, it wasn't exactly top of mind. And you're absolutely right. And I've had, you know, bringing that analog to the sales world. When, you know, when I was an operator, what I saw from digital natives would be, you know, they were really great at many aspects of the sales process. But when it came to asking the difficult questions, when it came to looking someone in the eye and being a little uncomfortable, when it came to closing, some of the folks that were early in their career just were lost in space. They couldn't do it. And I instituted bilateral mentorship programs, so that would help I get more tenured folks with more junior folks on the sales side. The junior ones would help the tenured ones be more effective with technology and using it for greater efficiencies. And the tenured would help them really understand some of the nuance, nuances of reading the room, eye contact. And with. In sales, as Vince, if you're not making someone feel a little bit uncomfortable at some point in the process, you're not selling. Right. There's always that moment. Yep. And yeah, it's. That's such a great point. I think technology should not be designed to replace human interactions. It should be designed to augment them or to make our lives better. And we know from social media and some of the terrible horror stories we've heard and the impact of younger folks and preteens, that's not always the case. And so we're struggling with that at a societal level. But for some of these folks that haven't done it, I'm not saying you need to go to the old Dale Carnegie meetups or whatever. I don't want to disparage anyone. You've got to morph sort of these networking opportunities into what's relevant today. So Women in Sales is a wonderful community that Alexine Mudar has built, and I love what she does. She takes her team and she goes to different cities. And she does regional dinners with women in sales who are climbing the corporate ladder. So only a third of women, a third of B2B sellers are women. She has lots of classes, courses, certifications, a range of things that can be done digitally. Right. But she does smaller group formats where these folks get together. We see all kinds of industry events and even just anything as simple as virtual coffees and virtual. Virtual wine tastings and things of that nature. So put yourself out there. I'm not saying you have to go to some old school awkward job fair to. I would never do that. But you've got to use an omnichannel approach and you've got to rely on the human connections. And you're right, if you're not connecting with people at a certain point, you're not going to feel good. I started my day on the deck, looking out over a meadow in a stream, which is my backyard. I'm fortunate watching the birds and I take 20 minutes each day to do that, to level set and to practice gratitude. And then I'm on Zoom like everyone else, and I take breaks. But I guess the big piece of advice is transfer yourself to the right formats and lean in. Don't lean out to the human connections, and those can be omnichannel. But don't forget in person, because that's what feeds us, that feeds our humanity.

[Vince Chen]

100% agree. That's why I never see myself building a podcast, a show. I am building a community, a global community involving minds like yourselves, who is progressive about developing, evolving, and revolutionizing their careers, their future with that. Mary, thank you so much for your time today.

[Mary Shea]

Thank you for having me, Vince, and thank you for all you do.

[Vince Chen]

Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, Leave us top rated reviews, check out our website and follow me on social media. I'm this Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time.

[Mary Shea]

Take care.

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