Sourcing And Your Bench

Summary

Podcast Summary: Manager Tools – Sourcing And Your Bench
Original Air Date: June 29, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode of Manager Tools, hosted by Sarah (A) and Mark (B), is focused on the topic "Sourcing And Your Bench." The discussion highlights the crucial but often overlooked role managers play in candidate sourcing—especially sourcing talent from their own “bench” of known contacts and internal connections. The conversation dismantles the common notion that hiring begins only when HR posts an open requisition, arguing instead that sourcing—particularly proactive bench-building—is a core managerial responsibility with significant impact on hiring quality, speed, and team trust.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Sourcing Starts With the Manager, Not HR

[01:18–03:14]

• Most managers wrongly assume that hiring starts with an open requisition managed by HR. In reality, sourcing candidates—especially from your bench—is an integral, early part of the hiring process.
• By defaulting sourcing to HR, managers risk missing top candidates who are known quantities within their network ("bench").
• Mark:
  "Hiring is a managerial process and HR is a valued resource in doing that. HR doesn't have to control sourcing." (08:46)

2. What HR Owns—And What They Don’t

[03:14–08:46]

• HR is typically responsible for opening requisitions, screening resumes, and conducting initial interviews. However, the manager must always know most about the role and must not fully outsource sourcing or screening to HR.
• HR can be a trusted advisor, but their role is to support, not to own, the hiring responsibility.

3. The Power and Pitfalls of 'The Bench'

[08:46–12:03]

• "Bench" refers to both internal and external candidates you know and have built trust with—those in other departments, former employees, or professional contacts.
• Reaching out to your bench can improve hiring outcomes and shorten the timeline.
• AI-driven resume submissions have increased the volume of impersonal, possibly exaggerated, applications, making trusted bench candidates even more valuable.
• Sarah:
  "Your bench is your best form of sourcing. Use it to both shorten your timeline and improve your results." (09:38)

4. Early and Transparent Engagement With HR

[12:03–14:25]

• Suggest your bench candidate early in the process and share their (improved) resume before HR begins their external search.
• Involving HR transparently prevents the appearance of unfairness and maintains a good working relationship.

5. External Validation, Internal Validation, and Fairness

[13:28–16:03]

• Two hiring process responsibilities:
  • Internal validation (hiring the best candidate)
  • External validation (ensuring the process looks and feels fair to the group)
• All candidates—including those from the bench—must go through the same rigorous process.
• Skipping this process risks being seen as nepotistic, demoralizing your team, and undermining the new hire’s legitimacy.
• Mark:
  "Your hiring process should have the equivalent of a moat filled with crocodiles, a drawbridge that is always up, high walls with archers on the par... protecting your existing team." (15:44)

6. The Value of a Rigorous Process—for Everyone

[16:03–21:43]

• Rigorous processes weed out weak candidates and attract strong ones. Strong candidates want to work among other strong team members.
• Stories from Mark and Sarah highlight practical ways hiring tests and pre-screenings discouraged unqualified applicants and revealed the truly skilled.
• Sarah:
  "This kind of rigorous process doesn't just discourage weak candidates from applying. It actually also encourages good candidates to apply because they don't want to work with weak peers." (19:49)

7. Don’t Rush to Relieve Team Burden—It Often Backfires

[21:43–22:05]

• Managers rushing to fill roles (to “relieve the team”) often create more work and frustration by introducing underqualified or poorly vetted hires.

8. How to Help Your Bench Candidate (Ethically and Effectively)

[22:40–29:24]

• Helping a bench candidate is encouraged—review their resume, do practice interviews, and prepare them for the process.
• However, it is critical that they go through the same interviews, with no favoritism or shortcuts.
• Be transparent with both your team and the bench candidate. Team interviewers must be aware of the candidate's relationship but should assess them rigorously and fairly.
• Sarah:
  "You want your bench candidate to go through the exact same hiring process as every other candidate." (14:25)
• Mark:
  "If a friend of mine coasted, I'd tell the team... we're not doing it. It was disrespectful to you to coast." (29:24)

9. Start Building Your Bench Now

[30:10–30:38]

• If you don’t have a strong bench, make it a point to start developing one immediately. This investment pays dividends for future hiring needs.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Managerial Responsibility:
  "You can't outsource the responsibility for hiring somebody else." — Mark (05:10)

• On Sourcing Ethically:
  "Letting [HR] know early is the best way to do that." — Sarah (12:03)

• On Team Impact:
  "A slap in the face... Their performance will actually decline because of this, not just because they're demotivated by the process." — Mark (20:33)

• On Preparing Candidates:
  "You should also do nothing to hide from your team who your bench candidate is..." — Mark (25:37)

• On Bench Candidates’ Expectations:
  "Tell them literally, like, you're going to have to work as hard as a complete stranger because there's no, nothing comes free over here." — Sarah (28:43)

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:18] – Defining sourcing as the start of the hiring process
• [03:14] – What HR owns vs. manager's role in sourcing
• [08:46] – Why managers, not HR, should control their bench and sourcing
• [12:03] – Importance of introducing your bench candidate transparently to HR
• [13:28] – The concept of internal and external validation in hiring
• [15:44] – Why the process must be rigorous for all candidates
• [19:49] – Encouraging strong candidates through process rigor
• [22:40] – How (and how not) to help your bench candidates succeed
• [25:37] – No favoritism: team should see and assess all candidates equally
• [28:43] – Setting expectations with bench candidates
• [30:10] – Final summary: the case for investing in your bench

---

Final Takeaway

Sourcing is not a pre-hiring formality, but a foundational part of great management. Managers should actively source and nurture benched talent, involve HR transparently, maintain a rigorous and fair process for all, and remember that strong process not only delivers better hires but strengthens team cohesion and trust.

Start building your bench now—you’ll thank yourself later.

---

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to Manager Tools.

[B]

This is Sarah and I'm Mark.

[A]

Today's podcast Sourcing and you'd bench part one of one.

[B]

As always, our content has been crafted by humans and we're now certified by proudly human Questions. This cast answers are what should be my role in sourcing candidates for my hiring openings? How can I increase the chances of hiring from my bench? And how can I help a bench sourced candidate be successful in my hiring process?

[A]

If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening.

[C]

Once you're leading a team of managers, you're no longer close to the work or the people doing it. And that distance is where problems go undetected. The effective senior manager conference teaches skip level meetings, communication plans and the executive rhythms that keep you genuinely connected to what's happening at scale. For senior managers and directors, look for upcoming events and virtual dates available at manager-tools.com forward/ESMC.

[A]

This is about hiring, the hiring process. But we're actually talking about the pre hiring process if you will. Because most managers forget that, that sourcing candidates is actually part of the process. Right. They think of it as the, the before time instead of thinking about it or including it in the process itself. And what that means is that that that forgetting that it is part of the overall process means leaving it to HR to source candidates. Which is just a huge mess because some of the very best candidates for any job you might have would be people that come from your bench. You know them and they know you and you can give them special preparation to help them succeed through the interview process in ways that a stranger candidate never would have. So yeah, hiring from your bench, that's what today's all about.

[B]

Yeah, most managers think the hiring process starts with getting an open requisition, which we'll talk about in a second. And they don't realize that sourcing is part of it. In fact, you, your bench is really part of the hiring process. Your network is part of the hiring process. And it certainly becomes so when you become an executive. Most people think of the hiring process just interviewing. But interviewing is only one part. It's a critical part, perhaps the most important part. But the hiring process goes all the way from your bench, your network, all the way through sourcing, all the way through interviewing, interview results, capture, meeting, onboarding until they're effective on your team.

[A]

I was going to say like 90 days into the job.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Okay, so our outline has three parts. First, HR doesn't completely own sourcing. Hopefully we've already made, we've hinted at that. But hopefully we've made that clear. So that means reach out to your bench early before you get an open requisition and then last, yes, you can prepare your favored bench candidate.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. So starting with the HR doesn't completely own sourcing, folks. Most managers think of the process of filling a role as one that starts with HR in, in their purview. And it's an easy mistake to make. HR will likely be involved in getting approval to hire. I mean, they create what is known in organizations as the open rec, which is short for open requisition. And generally, no matter how serious your need, you can hire without an open rack, which means you can't hire without hr. Thus it makes it feel like they're the start.

[B]

The reason I wrote this cast is I had a conversation two weeks ago, three weeks ago, maybe with a manager in our community and I said, well, you need to go through the process of getting a rack. And he says, do you mean an open rack? I said, no, you need to create a requisition. The requisition goes to HR and then HR officially opens it. In most companies, that's why people, they say, I want an OpenRec. Actually, you need to create the requisition. You need to make a case for why the organization should hire. In fact, HR uses the process of requests and approvals of OpenRECs as the start of their process of filling your position. Approving an open rec for them means that they have to go through their processes for finding candidates and screening them before they send you a pile of resumes to review.

[A]

Exactly. Now folks, the. The degree to which HR is involved in the process does definitely vary. But in some cases, HR also has the responsibility for screening those candidates, usually with a phone screen or a small video interview before they actually send you the narrowed down list of candidates on which you will conduct your final interviews.

[B]

Yeah. Now, because there's always new managers joining us, even though we've said this probably 10 or 20 times in the last two decades, we just want to make an aside here. Just because HR naturally does all this work doesn't mean you can't be heavily involved yourself. Do not outsource hiring to hr. In fact, we link at the bottom of this cast. There will be a link to it on the webpage. If you're not a licensee, by the way, if you're not a licensee, you should become a licensee. And if you're a licensee, you can click the links in the show notes themselves. But we talk about the first rule. I think it's chapter one of HR is not a hiring process. It's about the fact that it's a managerial process and, and HR is a staff organization that does a lot of good work for you. This is not an anti HR cast at all. This is helping you understand as a manager that you're ultimately responsible for the people you hire. So you can't outsource the responsibility for hiring somebody else. They're just going to be a resource in some ways more than a pair of hands, hopefully a trusted advisor to you depending upon your relationship with them. So if you have a good relationship with your HR resource, you can rely on them to screen those resumes. But if you don't yet have a good relationship with your HR resource, and again, we encourage you to get there because it's a powerful thing to have. We talk about having friends in HR and finance and accounts receivable and accounts payable and so on. You can ask when they start getting resumes to screen the same resumes they do and then compare results with them that will improve their resume review in the future for you. Now you might say yeah, this is more work for me now, but it's one of those cases of pay me now or pay me more and more over and over again later in terms of getting bad resumes from an uninitiated HR resources or potentially missing res resumes that you would have said yes to. And it's okay to have some slight disagreement.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. And you know Mark, I that one of the things that I, in my experience, I hear more than any of the, of the other, I'm going to say complaints from hiring managers about the hiring process is the amount of time it takes. And folks, we understand how you are busy and you already think it's a very time consuming process and because of that you want to outsource as much as possible. But to Mark's point, you can't do that if you're not willing to educate your outsourced resource. Now you can also conduct your own screening interviews. I mean, some of you listening to this are like, no, I've got, I've got the time. I want to dedicate the time and kudos to you. And you can do this in the beginning to teach yourself how to screen, how to get your HR resource aligned with what you're looking for. Because folks, above all else, remember now and forever, no matter how much time you spend with your HR business partner, you're going to know so much more about the role than HR ever would or could. I mean, they've, they're, they're, they're sourcing for all of the roles in your organization. They could never know as deeply as well as you do what you're looking for. So you've always got, even if it, even if, let's say you have a, an amazing HR business partner and you've, you fully outsourced that to someone you trust, you also still have a hand in it because there's no way anyone besides you could know nearly as well as you do what you're looking for.

[B]

Exactly. But all of this conversation we're having is basically assuming that HR controls sourcing because managers don't think that they're in charge even though in fact they are. Hiring is a managerial process and HR is a valued resource in doing that. HR doesn't have to control sourcing. They do so with the best of intentions. They want to take the workload off of you. And most managers don't have their own bench. But you reaching out to your bench is a completely different and usually better form of sourcing for you. Okay, you already know the people on your bench, as Sarah mentioned, you know their professional and personal backgrounds and you have already built trust with them. Someone you hire that you've never met, they won't have a lower trust score with your team, but they'll have a much lower trust score with you.

[A]

You're starting from scratch.

[B]

They will. Than starting from scratch. Yeah. Folks, your bench is your best form of sourcing. Use it to both shorten your timeline and improve your results.

[A]

Absolutely. So because of that, we recommend you reach out to your bench early. And folks, you can reach out to your bench when you're just thinking about hiring. You can do it before you go through the process of getting your open rec, which means before HR begins their sourcing, there may be no one on your bench who is ready or interested. That's absolutely possible and it's totally fine. But make the early reach out every single time so that when you do find someone who is ready and who's right for your role, they and you will have a head start on the process to help them get ready early.

[B]

And we're going to talk more about working on your bench briefly. But let's also remind everybody when we say bench, we don't only mean external candidates. Your bench can include internal candidates, people you've met in other departments who are one level or two levels beneath you that you think are absolutely fantastic. One of the great things about great Executives is they're talent magnets. They meet people, they stay in touch with them and they look for opportunities to put that person in to a specific role. And that's very different than HR going out and essentially canvassing for potential people who might be interested. And I would argue right now, thanks to AI, HR's sourcing process of going out and getting resumes and getting applications on. We're talking to Trevor woods of Proudly Human about this the other day. That job has gotten much harder. Companies are worried about people using AI to prepare a resume that is not really truthful or writing a cover letter that they didn't write that makes them sound almost too good to be true, even though it probably also sounds like AI at this stage of the game in 2026, no matter how good AI is, once you do get an open rack, let HR know that you already have a bench candidate. This is the first time your early bench outreach helps. Your bench candidate can have already prepared their resume and you can have reviewed it and made improvement recommendations.

[A]

Exactly. You want your improved by you bench candidate's resume in HR's hands before they start sourcing for several reasons. One, it will help HR identify candidates that are similar. And assuming they're from your bench and you're making this recommendation, you want people to be more like them. Also, HR won't feel misled or misused. If you introduce your bench candidate into the process after they've already screened resumes, they may feel like you've had this person in mind the entire time. They've been going through all of this hard work and all of this process and they've been doing that for nothing because you already had someone in your pocket. What we would suggest is not cool. Yeah, not cool. Not cool. And it may not be true, folks, but that's how it looks. And if that's how it looks, then that's how it's going to feel to them. And again, going back to what you said at the beginning, Mark, you want to work to have a better relationship with, with hr. Like to have a better, a stronger relationship with your HR business partner so that you can leverage them and their talents and their time because they're here to help you. But you don't get that if you engage in activities that make it look like you're poking them in the eye. So letting them know early is the best way to do that.

[B]

Yeah. Perhaps the most important reason for introducing your bench candidate at the front end of the sourcing process is part of what is known as external Validation. Hiring processes, folks, actually have two important responsibilities. The first is internal validation. The hiring process produces the best available, the best candidate you can hire. Okay, but close to that in importance is external validation that the people who are affected by the process, usually the team which the candidate will join, will see the process as professional, valid, tough, fair, rigorous. Okay, that's important. And the reason why is because if they come to the team and they feel that your team feels they've come through a rigorous process, they will have less of a trust deficit than somebody who just gets parachuted in and they don't know anything about.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. And folks, you want your bench candidate to go through the exact same hiring process as every other candidate. Introducing them at the end of the sourcing process indicates that they didn't go through that same validation process. Which, back to Mark's previous point, means that they've skipped over that external validation step and most people don't realize it. But this is one of the reason companies have policies against nepotism. Hiring a family or a friend without subjecting them to the competition of a rigorous hiring process is seen by those that they will work with as demeaning. Like that individual just got by because they're just Mark's friend. And not only would I say that the other individuals on the team don't see them as equally as valid, like, like they've earned their spot, they actually see them in, in a decrement like, oh, this person definitely didn't earn their spot. So now your. Your poor candidates having to spend weeks and weeks earning their stripes, even though we know that they deserve it, which is unfair to your candidate and your organization, frankly.

[B]

Yeah, External validation is a big reason why we recommend your hiring process is also rigorous. As we've said before, we recommend your process have the equivalent of a moat filled with crocodiles, a drawbridge that is always up high walls with archers on the par protecting your existing team.

[A]

Absolutely. Folks, it should be really hard to get hired onto your team. Candidates can't just be able to walk in and just get a job easily. I mean, if they do, they will start their role with zero trust from the peer, which delays their development into an effective team member. And what's more, a rigorous hiring process discourages weak candidates from ever applying. Another thing, Mark, that you and I were talking to Trevor about this week, right, this idea that if AI is going to create all these resumes and is going to flood the market, then all of these individuals that are applying may not have the actual skills that they need. But we're trying to create a world where people who are trying to skate by people are trying to avoid the hard work of really interviewing and all that. They just decide, you know what, I'd rather self select. And I mean, my experience around hiring with the University of Alberta, we did something as simple as instituting a pre screening test before an interview. We had everybody come in and they had to do a pre employment test. And I mean, we were hiring for people on desktop support. They were individuals who were probably just out of or maybe even still in college. And there were multiple occasions where a person would come in and they would sit down and within seconds they would leave. And I want that, I want to know if, I mean, because the screening questions were, I mean they were valid, they weren't completely made up. But it was a long pre screening test, like on purpose, by design, so that people knew, oh my gosh, like I'm going to have to spend an hour doing this thing right now. I mean, if it's not worth an hour of your time, then great, go, before we worry about trying to interview you.

[B]

Yeah, I have a similar story. When I was coaching the CEO of a hospital, he felt like in his office as CEO, it was a relatively small hospital in the office of CEO, he didn't have any financial help and he was skirmishing with the cfo. Great guy. They had a great relationship about all kinds of financial stuff. And so there are 10 people in the finance office and there was one person in the CEOs office, the CEO, who had finance knowledge. And so he was fighting a losing battle, even though they shouldn't have been fighting. And so he called me up one day and said, hey, Mark, is it okay if I hire a financial person for my team? I said, absolutely it is. You're the guy who knows the budget. And he says, well, it'd just take a whole bunch of time away from me so I could focus on patients and doctors and quality of care. And so on. So I said, yeah. He said, well, is it also okay if I give them a test? I said, yeah, absolutely. If it's a financial position, much like a software developer, they should have to prove that they have financial skills. And he created a test and There were like 10 people that came in and like three of them walked out immediately. One of the people, he asked them to do a pivot table, which is a fairly advanced Excel thing. But if you're going to be a finance person, you have to know how to do a pivot table. And one person there Was a proctor in the room, just walking back and forth in case there were any questions, you didn't understand it or whatever. Walking back and forth. And that person spent the entire hour going through Excel help trying to figure out how to do a pivot table. All of these people had represented themselves as having finance expertise and in fact only one of them had the necessary expertise. Was done in half an hour. Very straightforward, easy to do. And they ended up hiring that person. He happened to be a great guy as well, but yeah, that's exactly the kind of things that happen.

[A]

Yeah. And folks, this, this, this kind of rigorous process doesn't just discourage weak candidates from applying. It actually also encourages good candidates to apply because they don't want to work with weak peers, which is exactly what kind of team they will be working with if there's a weak hiring process. So it's, it does both things for you. It both discourages weak candidates while encourages strong candidates. And that's exactly what you want to again, go back to making the process simpler. Easier, easier to figure out where the true value lies with a strong process.

[B]

I don't care if I only have one candidate as long as it's a candidate I want.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it.

[B]

And they're well prepared and they show themselves to be professional and so on. Whereas most managers like, no, I need to see a lot so that I can feel good that I made the best choice. But then they're making the mistake of comparing candidates. And you don't want to compare candidates. You want to compare each candidate to the responsibilities of the role. Look, folks, a lazy or nepotism allowing process or one where the hiring manager's friends can easily get hired is a slap in the face to the existing team. Their performance will actually decline because of this, not just because they're demotivated by the process.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

I thought, you know, we should have a high standard. I'm good at my job. I want other people who are good at their job to join us. But also because they'll be spending time having to train somebody who's not ready for the position if they were hired for nepotism or because of your friend, as opposed to having gone through a rigorous process. So you owe it to your existing team and even your organization to take everything through your rigorous process, both to ensure that the best candidate is hired, internal validation, and to help your team trust the new hire on day one, which is external validation.

[A]

When you were saying that, Mark, I thought to myself, you know, and it's also Funny, because most managers will tell you the reason they want to rush to hire is to take the burden off the team without realizing that their rush to hire is often what causes even more burden on the team. Because they're hiring, they're just shifting the burden. Yeah, they're shifting the burden. That's exactly it. That's exactly it.

[C]

Results and retention don't happen by accident. They happen through four specific behaviors, one on ones feedback, coaching, and delegation. The Effective Manager Conference doesn't just teach you these tools, it gives you the time to practice them. So you leave ready to use them Monday morning. Not just familiar with the concepts, the EMC is available in person and virtually. Please visit manager-tools.comemc for more information.

[A]

Folks, to the last part of our guidance today. Prepare your favorite bench candidate. Even having said all of that, you can still provide preparatory help to your bench candidate. We've already covered this for an internal candidate in our podcast guidance, which again is going to be linked to at the bottom of this podcast page called Favorite Candidate Interview Preparation, which we encourage you to recur to. And here's what to do at a high level.

[B]

As we said, help your bench candidate with their resume. Do the same with their application. Whatever your company requires. Don't use the word help to say I'm going to help eliminate or skip any part of your company's or your own hiring process for your bench candidate. You have to keep in mind the values of external validation. Okay? Keep in mind it's entirely possible that one of your team members has a favorite candidate as well and maybe helping them. And that's okay. And good even that they would ask a friend to join your team. That's a great sign. Yeah, I want my friends to come to work here. This is a great place to work. Now, we still have to validate that they're good enough, right? And if they get some help, that's fine. And in fact, when it comes to interview help, I would argue that most people are so bad at interviewing. There are all kinds of situations where Romeo and Juliet happens, the candidate is right, Romeo and Juliet happens, the candidate is right, the company should want to hire them, but because the interview went bad, the company doesn't want to hire them and both end up losing because of interviewing skills. And that's why we have our Interviewing skills product. And if you're a licensee, it's available to you for free. We would prefer, thanks to Intellectual property rules, that you not just share that with your friend or, or your favorite candidate, ask them to buy a copy. Okay. It's not expensive at all.

[A]

Series. Yep. I mean, they can become a licensee. The first month's free.

[B]

Yeah. And it is by far the most favored of our products. Not a podcast itself, but there are a bunch of podcasts. But yeah, it's our most favorite product because of the fear people have about interviewing.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And folks, when it comes to helping your favorite candidate get ready for the interview, you can absolutely conduct a practice interview with them. Tell them about the process in advance. If you've listened to our previous guidance. You know what? We encourage you to tell all candidates about the process. And I mean be their mock interviewer. I mean, use. Maybe, maybe, maybe you don't even have access to it. Depends. The actual list of interview questions. But create on our interview creation tool. Again, if you're a licensee, you have access to that. Create a mock interview and walk them through it. Have them give you their tell me about yourself answer. Just get them, get them prepared.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. You should also do nothing to hide from your team who your bench candidate is. Okay. What's more, tell your team they should interview your bench candidate just as rigorously as any other candidate you want. No favoritism. Cover this again in your interview results capture meeting that you have when all the interview results are, when all your interviews are done. This is external validation which has value both for your candidate and for your existing team.

[A]

Yeah, that's absolutely. And folks, I mean I, I might do a little plug here for one on ones. This is where your one on ones will come in handy. Because I gotta tell you, if they don't trust you and you tell them, oh yeah, I won't hold it against you guys, they're not gonna tell you the truth. So one on ones. Because then you'll actually know whether or not in, in these important hiring decision moments, you're getting the true view from the folks on your team. And folks don't tell your bench candidate to hide that they are your bench candidate either. Because your team knows they know you. They're not going to be surprised if your candidate says, oh yeah, Mark spoke highly of you. You're an expert on cyber, aren't you? Like you want them to be able to. I mean, I'm going to say almost use this, this, this immediate familiarity as a foot in the door toward building a relationship in the interview. We say this all the time in the effective hiring manager or effective hiring manager conference. But a conversation isn't an interview. But an interview ought to feel conversational. So it's kind of that. Right? It's. Yeah, that, that, that way they have a thing to connect around. And that thing to connect around could allow for a more fruitful conversation in the interview.

[B]

Yeah. And imagine, imagine that you didn't tell anybody. You're just trying to have this person have legitimately exactly the same interviewing process. And then your bench candidate in an interview says, well, actually, Mark was telling me about this. Oh, you know Mark? Oh, yeah, I've known Mark for years. He's the one that let me know about the opportunity. And now your team is going to feel deceived and they're going to say to you, well, should we just hire that guy? Say, no, I wanted you to know she's a friend of mine. Right. But no, I expect you to interview everybody fairly and I'll be the first person to choose somebody else if somebody else is better, believe me. And I'll be the one that'll have to tell my friend, nope, sorry you got beat out. And that's okay. And by the way, if I was the friend that was referred and I got beat out, I would say thank you for the opportunity and I'm sorry I let you down, but a bench candidate is not guaranteed anything. And you should tell them that. I'm not guaranteeing you anything. I'm giving you a chance to interview for a job that if you don't like it, you shouldn't say yes to the process. But if you're interested in it, I think you're a good person for this. That's the way this goes back to, you know, your, your sourcing and your bench. This is a person on your bench and you're helping HR with sourcing.

[A]

Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a really good point, Mark, in terms of, of the, the clarity that you want to exist between the two parties, your team and your bench folks. You've got to tell your bench candidate that because of external validation, they're going to need to win this job on their own. And yes, you're going to do practice interviews with them and you're going to do what you can to get them prepared, but you shouldn't let that leak over into encouraging your team to show any favoritism or, or encouraging your, your bench, your friend to think they're a shoo in and therefore they can coast. Right. Like, tell them literally, like, you're going to have to work as hard as a complete stranger because there's no, nothing

[B]

comes free over here if a friend of mine coasted I'd tell the team in the interview results capture meeting. Hey, guys. I heard he was coasting. We're not. We're taking him or her off the list. Sorry, we're not doing it. It was disrespectful to you to coast. They misunderstood me. I told them that they would have to win the job fair and square. I don't think they prepared well. And then I would tell my friend, most people wouldn't, you know, they would just say, well, it didn't work out. I would say, look, dude, you coasted and I told you not to. This is a hard place to get hired. My people care about their work. They care about their new. Their new peers. And you just coasted a little too much. So I'm happy to refer you again for another opportunity, but you're going to have to up your game.

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[B]

So do you want to summarize?

[A]

Sure, why not? Folks, managers can use their bench to be an alternative and faster and better sourcing mechanism for hiring. This is done all the time at the top of your organization. You may not realize it, but this is how it's done. If your bench isn't strong enough yet, this is your point. Start building it now so that you can reap benefits for years to come.

[B]

That's it.

[A]

T. Thank you so much for joining us, folks. This was a good one. We hope this one helped you. Now help us help others. And tell your friends. And of course, follow rate and review our podcast. And remember, five stars only.

[B]

Five stars only.

[A]

Please.

[C]

Sa.