Mastering the Art of Matching: HireWell’s Custom Recruiting Approach with James Hornick

Intro  

Welcome to another edition of inspired stories where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes, how they’ve overcome adversity, and explore current challenges they’re facing.

Anthony Codispoti (10:11.126)
Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast, where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Cotaspodi and today’s guest is James Hornick, Partner and Chief Growth Officer at HireWell. For more than 20 years, they have partnered with growing companies in various industries to help them solve their hiring needs. Their success is attributed to their

passionate consultants who bring their rich experience, impressive network of professionals and knowledge in retained search, corporate recruiting and interim staffing to connect the right talent with the right opportunity. James runs a blog called Talent Rants and Sarcasm, where the landing page says, I do two things, talent and sarcasm, and I’m fresh out of talent. So I suspect we may be in for a good laugh on today’s show with James.

But before we get to that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Adback Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cashflow by implementing one of our proprietary programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible. To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at adbackbenefitsagency.com.

Now back to our guest today, the chief growth officer of HireWell, James. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

James Hornick (11:40.598)
Yeah, thanks for having me. I felt like you got the podcast intro voice down pretty well. You almost made it to the very end before slipping up, I think, on the last sentence. So maybe better luck next time.

Anthony Codispoti (11:47.417)
I appreciate you calling everybody’s attention to that.

James Hornick (11:51.982)
You’re gonna edit that in post or something like that, you know, use the AI translate

Anthony Codispoti (11:55.257)
No, people listening are probably like, my internet connection must have dropped out. His voice disappeared for a second. But no, now they know the truth, thanks to James calling me out. All right, so James, let’s start maybe a little bit towards the beginning. How did you first get started in the staffing industry? What drew you to it?

James Hornick (11:59.66)
Yeah. Yeah. You’re welcome.

James Hornick (12:08.792)
Sure, sure.

I needed a job. mean, I’d be surprised if you’ve had recruiters on here before. I don’t know if you’ve had them on your podcast. Side note, never actually, I don’t actually listen to podcasts and I run two podcasts. So yeah, it’s a great thing. I’m assuming you may have had some recruiters on before. Everyone’s got a similar, we just, everyone just fell into it. Like no one, no one chose this profession. As a child, no one was like, I want to be a recruiter when I grow up. There’s always some story. So for me, it was,

Anthony Codispoti (12:15.063)
Good reason.

James Hornick (12:40.746)
I graduated the very tail end of, as the dot com bubble was bursting and there were still a couple good years left of tech sales at my first job, early 2000s, I was working at UUNet, which was part of WorldCom. yeah, well, if you don’t remember WorldCom, it’s because of Enron. So WorldCom did the same thing Enron did, just slightly smaller.

Anthony Codispoti (12:58.947)
I remember those names.

James Hornick (13:08.898)
But yeah, it was a massive fraud meltdown, huge tech conglomerate, telecom conglomerate, because telecom used to be like a thing people sold back in those days. I got out right before it all melted down, but it was still at this, it was crazy. early two, like that, it was early 2000s, but you could sell stuff really easily without knowing what the hell you were doing. It was one of those eras where everyone was just spending all kinds of cash and.

as when you’re, I graduated when I was 21 years old and you know, when you’re 21 and everything sells itself, you get a really good sense of false confidence of how good you are as a salesperson and how easy the whole profession is. And then, two and a half years later, so, cause actually I moved to a different job. got, you know, got a promotion raise during that whole process cause I was so good.

And then all of a sudden when like the bubble burst and all of a sudden doing this by anything you realize, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. It was all just luck and circumstance. So to answer your question, as I ramble through this, getting into. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (14:13.561)
Well, just for context, for those younger folks listening, there was, yeah, there was a lot of spending in tech leading up to your 2000. The internet was becoming a hotter thing. Lots of people worried about Y2K, the tech issues that might occur, you know, when computers rolled over from 1999 to 2000, because they weren’t set up for that. At any rate, lots of big spending. And then right after Y2K, people stopped spending, the dot com bubble burst. so, so did your bubble burst.

James Hornick (14:20.076)
Yeah.

James Hornick (14:29.678)
Yeah.

James Hornick (14:40.206)
Yeah. I mean, I was, I was able to write that ride that to like 2002. it kept going pretty well there. So, but yeah, after, know, two or two and half years or so years, you know, all of a sudden, the company I was with after that, Akamai great company still, by the way, they laid off half their sales force. their whole business was based on delivering, making websites at that point in time, making websites deliver faster because that was the thing people liked. If your website took too long to load, but this is how, how back far we’re going.

Anthony Codispoti (14:43.98)
Okay, nice.

James Hornick (15:09.454)
Anyways, yeah, I lost that job and then things got real tough because no one was hiring anything. And if people think that like the current, like the 2020 or the 2023 in current market, all things kind of downturn, not even in the realm or ballpark of how bad the market was like back then. Like the only thing comparable I think was like the financial crisis, like COVID bounced back quickly. like, naturally that was a market where like a lot of people lost their job is probably the biggest thing like in 2020.

But it was followed immediately by the biggest hiring market, whereas like this early 2000s, like it took a while for tech specifically to come back. Like there were out of work tech people for people who couldn’t get a role for a couple of years. Now I was just a sales guy. So what do I do? I, cause I think you’re going to across, that’s how I got into recruiting. Here I am probably talking about this five minutes already. That was the main dissatisfaction I had in tech sales was that like you can.

sells stuff that just doesn’t work. That’s still the case now. can be good at sales or good at what you do, but if you’re at a crappy company that has bad software, you’re kind of stuck with that. What I liked about recruiting, aside from the fact that it was easy to get a job at that point in time, because anyone take a shot at you because they didn’t pay much, is that you do your own fulfillment. If you have a client needs to hire and they need somebody, it’s up to you to find someone that’s going to fit that.

Anthony Codispoti (16:29.602)
Hmm

James Hornick (16:33.418)
And either you’re good at that or bad at that, but it really kind of like, there’s challenges with like, can’t, you know, you can’t make people accept your, but if you’re, if you’re good at what you do, you’re good at finding matches, like over time, you’re going to be more successful than people who aren’t. So it’s very much once you’re, I knew that once you’re experienced at it, once you’re good at it, like it’s, it’s career security, if that makes sense. You know, if you know how to find clients, you’re to find the people that they need. You don’t have to rely on someone else building a widget that’s any good for you to sell it. You know what I mean? So.

That’s kind of why I got into it, but also I kind of fell into it because the economy sucked. It was kind of the job I got.

Anthony Codispoti (17:08.481)
It was kind of a, you kind of have a supply demand thing where you’re controlling a little bit of both sides of it, which is an opportunity and also a challenge, right? Because you’ve got to sell to different groups. You’ve got to sell to the employer who’s looking for somebody that convinced them that you’re the right person to bring them a solution. And you’ve got to sell to the contractor, the employee that you’re going to bring into that situation.

James Hornick (17:11.82)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

James Hornick (17:29.518)
Correct. Yes.

Anthony Codispoti (17:32.543)
So, okay, so you get in the staffing industry and how did you find your way to hire?

James Hornick (17:38.478)
Like anyone who’s in their first recruiting job, your first recruiting job typically always sucks. I can count on one hand how many people I’ve worked with or known in recruiting where the first company they went for was awesome. It’s a very old school industry where it’s lot of pound the phone, 100 calls a day, at least calls back in those days, a lot of micromanagement, lot of…

Old school sales bullpens, the pay isn’t great. It’s just, that’s, that was my first job. You have to get in somewhere. Right. so, but after a year of like learning how to do it, I knew, I knew I was good at it or could be good at it, but, I just knew I wasn’t in the right place. And that was when I kind of reached out to different contacts and trying to find like talking to companies and people I know who use recruiters, like who are the good firms you work with, you know? And, so the current firm wasn’t called hire well at the time we rebrand at some point in time, but.

I had multiple contacts, like refer me to, people at hire well, and it was a small firm at the time. was only four people, but you know, at that point in time, so I just had conversations with, with Matt who’s, the founder and our CEO and one other gentleman, and kind of hit it off, you know, so was one of those things where they were looking to grow. They were small, just kind of getting started. Like I said, like when I joined, it was like four people when I joined, but I knew they were, I knew it was just the right crowd of people compared to like having the previous year been at.

the wrong crowd of people, you know, I it was a good, it was worth like taking a swing at.

Anthony Codispoti (19:08.825)
So if that first experience in a staffing firm was so distasteful, so unpleasant, why did you feel like, I could be good at this. This is something I want to continue doing.

James Hornick (19:13.868)
Hmm.

James Hornick (19:20.726)
I mean, it’s just just because just because you don’t like the people you work with and they’re awful doesn’t mean like the whole industry sucks. So like you can recognize like I think I could do better somewhere else, you know, where I think I know how to feel like I’m smarter than these people and I know what I’m doing. Like, yeah. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (19:29.603)
Gotcha.

Anthony Codispoti (19:36.811)
If you could filter out all the noise, the micromanagement that was going on around you and the times that you were able to just do your work and focus on that, you were like, yeah, I’m good at this. I got a knack for it.

James Hornick (19:46.254)
Yeah. And I guess that’s another thing I’d point out too about the industry. One of the challenges of it is there are a lot of people who I think are so turned off by their first role in recruiting that they never come back to it. And it is kind of heartbreaking to see people that are smart, that are capable, that I know if they worked with a better crowd, worked at a better organization, that they could have had a good career. there is something to it where you just,

just have a bad experience and it turns you off to it. And I’m sure it’s not just recruiting, there’s a lot of fields like that. You have one job that’s so bad you realize you want to change your entire career as opposed to like, I just need to work at a different place.

Anthony Codispoti (20:27.617)
What personality traits do you think make an effective recruiter?

James Hornick (20:32.658)
I think that you, there’s, I’ve known a lot of different recruiters that have different traits and been successful. so personality wise, I think it can be all over the map. the ones that I think are universal, like you, you have to have some level of perseverance and be able to deal with frustration because especially early, you’re not going to be good at it. you have to be okay with being in uncomfortable situations.

Like you’re, especially when you’re getting started, but really at any point, like you’re talking to people about like the most important thing in their, one of the three most important things in their lives, like their job. And you’re really digging it and like, and you don’t do their jobs. You don’t know it as well as they do, but you have to be confident that you’re asking the right questions and carry yourself in a way where they feel comfortable opening up to you and they feel comfortable that like, okay, this is someone who I should open up to because they, they know what they’re doing and they’re going to help me out. Right now.

That being said, the recruiting, especially when you’re an agency recruiting externally like I did, your real client is not a job seeker. Your real client is like helping look at a hire. So you also have to be polished enough and trustworthy enough from like a sales standpoint. people who are, and here’s the thing, I know a lot of, and if there’s a knock on the recruitment industry, there is, when I was talking about my first firm a lot, but there’s a lot of recruiters out there who aren’t trustworthy, that are kind of slimy. So not.

sweeping that out of the rug, but I think the people who can be great at it are ones who are good listeners, they’re empathetic, they can deal with frustration, they know how to take requirements from a client and find a good match. They have some sort of selling ability. They might not realize they’re salespeople, but you have to be able to talk to a client and carry yourself in a way where you’re able to help them understand that you’re

You know what you’re doing. They should take your guidance. The people you’re submitting them are good and try to, you you’re not making the ultimate hiring decision, but there’s a lot of companies out there that don’t know how to hire. So you also don’t have to be able to influence them in that way too.

Anthony Codispoti (22:43.875)
So I had to chuckle.

James Hornick (22:44.652)
I’m putting you to sleep, I can tell. Talking about recruiting is like the most boring thing in the world.

Anthony Codispoti (22:51.925)
I was just digging for my next question here. I checked out your LinkedIn profile as part of my research. I see that you list a job there that says obligatory failed startup, which is not the way most people frame those things. I appreciated the…

James Hornick (22:54.658)
Yeah.

James Hornick (23:12.908)
Yeah, I didn’t remember the name of that place. Yeah, no, that was between, that was the year or two year period between Akamai and my first recruiting job. Just had a friend who was trying to start some stuff out, you know, and I was trying to help him out with that and didn’t go anywhere. So that’s.

Anthony Codispoti (23:29.773)
Yeah, but most people would take that and they would still fluff it up. you know, I was the executive director of, you know, growth for this startup that leveraged synergies of, you know, like throwing in a whole bunch of buzzwords. But all of your LinkedIn experiences have very brief descriptions. Like you cut right through the corporate speak. You know, like there’s your job at Akamai Technologies, which you say was a great company.

James Hornick (23:40.29)
someplace no one ever heard of. Yeah. No.

Anthony Codispoti (23:59.801)
In fact, what you said in your LinkedIn profile here is great company, period. I did sales, period. Five words. There were five words in that description.

James Hornick (24:09.868)
Yeah, that accurately sums it up. I believe that writing is important and saying as few words as possible is an effective way of getting your point across.

Anthony Codispoti (24:21.399)
You must have been a journalism major back in college. Tighten up your language. No, okay.

James Hornick (24:24.682)
No, I was not. do a lot of writing. I don’t even know if this is on there maybe, but if we’re going to go completely up tangent. I have been, we maybe were jumping forward here. I write a lot. It’s one of our biggest drivers, if we want to fast forward 15, 20 years, has been how we have used content to really kind of elevate our profile and articulate what it is we do and attract talent and these other kinds of things.

and I think part of that is like, I, I wrote a kind of a comedic blog, like 10, 15 years ago, and that was kind of unrelated to this. And then when content marketing started picking up, we’re definitely kind of flying away for it in time. We can come back to this topic if you want. I, I recognize that, a lot of the principles of like, you have to be able to organize your thoughts. You have to be able to articulate what your kind of vision and value is, and you have to be able to.

talk about.

James Hornick (25:27.238)
I think just, I don’t ever want to be like an industry expert guru by saying kind of the most trite things that this is what you see on LinkedIn all the time. Like all these so-called business leaders, they just, you know, it’s a lot of fluff. It’s a lot of things that people already know, you know, but I do think there’s a lot of value in like trying to find like what we’re seeing in real time and what’s happening.

and try to break things down to a more digestible level and help people solve everyday problems. Like anytime a client of ours has a challenge, we see other challenges out there, how we help solve that, just like talk openly about how we would go about kind of fixing these issues. And that hopefully attracts people to come to work with us. But to your point about writing, my blog is a lot of that.

not just my, but other people at our company that kind of went down the content rabbit hole, like how we can kind of talk about like our expertise in the industry as part of that. And more recently, I got into creative writing. So I’ve actually had like unrelated to anything, you know, business focused, I actually had five fiction stories published this year. So I just, I believe pretty strongly in the power and need to be able to use the written word to develop the spoken word to flush out your thoughts to kind of become, you know,

better articulating not just your message for yourself or your company, but then talking here on this podcast, I wouldn’t be able to talk about anything you want to talk about if I wasn’t, didn’t already have it organized my mind because I wrote it down at some point.

Anthony Codispoti (26:53.049)
So writing is a way for you to process and organize your thoughts and then that allows you to speak more clearly about it when you get the chance.

James Hornick (26:59.886)
Correct. And also helps you point out what you missed. I think a lot of stuff you see when people have half-baked ideas, it’s because they never went through that process of organizing stuff to realize where the gaps were. So anyways.

Anthony Codispoti (27:10.849)
And so you said content’s been a big driver for hire well. So the content goes up on the hire well blog and it’s good for SEO or how else are you guys using that content?

James Hornick (27:14.318)
Yeah.

James Hornick (27:20.718)
So going back in time, because can tell, I realized kind of I’ve flushed, went over this quickly, but like the whole story with content was in 2015, we launched our marketing recruiting practice because at that point in time, like digital marketing became like a really big thing all of a sudden overnight. So all your social media SEO, like a lot of these kind of functions, content, everything else, they existed, but they were very much like a…

Agencies did it and maybe native web firms did it but like your brick and mortar shops weren’t doing anything digital But then all of sudden overnight they did all of a sudden like every company started building these teams out And so like I had a meeting with a real estate company I need to hire 30 digital marketers and they’re like and the thing is at this point in time I don’t even know if there were any firms that did marketing recruiting not that I knew of right I just it wasn’t like I wasn’t big enough not to be like a market for it. It would have been minimal

Anthony Codispoti (28:13.655)
Really? That’s surprising. Okay.

James Hornick (28:16.334)
because there wasn’t that much hiring. If they did it, it’s because they did other things too and they can also help you with your marketing hire, not because they specialized in it. But then we saw we had a client that needed to hire 30 people and we’re like, sure, we can do that. And no, we hadn’t done that, but we helped them hire 30 people. You figure it out pretty quick. And then we had three or four other clients within 18 months that were doing similar build-outs. Now fast forwarding to why we’re doing it, after…

Anthony Codispoti (28:21.539)
Gotcha.

James Hornick (28:43.438)
placing a few hundred digital marketers and marketing leaders doing all these newfangled things that brick and mortar traditional firms didn’t do before. so I’m like, why aren’t we doing this? Like if everyone else is figuring this out, like why aren’t we? And then we hired a digital strategist, which was just okay. But then we realized I was speaking at a, so we started like blogging and doing kind of the basic stuff. No one really blogs. It was like, you you write something and it gets like 50 views or something. Nobody cares.

Anthony Codispoti (28:51.961)
Mm.

James Hornick (29:11.63)
I got asked to speak at a American Marketing Association conference for job speakers. And this is like a small 50 to 60 person event. And they’re like, can you help promote it? And I’m like, sure. this is like right when LinkedIn started doing video, because they didn’t do video. So I just like pick up my phone, do a selfie, just talking about the event for 30 seconds. And that got like 10,000 views. And then I realized.

Anthony Codispoti (29:36.056)
Wow.

James Hornick (29:37.23)
Okay, we need to throw the entire playbook out. Like we need to go down the Gary V rabbit hole of let’s like do long form. We’re doing what we’re doing right now. Like do a podcast, record it, cut the clips out, but which then took us further down the path of, what are we going to talk about? Like what insights do we have? So now we actually have a meeting every other week. We talk about just internally in an organization. Okay. What are our clients struggling with? What are the new trends we’re seeing?

why aren’t hires happening, whatever, just anytime someone asks you a question they don’t know the answer to, whatever that answer is, is probably something other people don’t know, how do we turn that in, something we want to address. So that’s kind of where we went. the thing is I can talk about content so I’m blue in the face, but this is not what we sell to other people, this is just kind of how we’ve managed to run and grow our business. And when we doubled in size between years 2000 and, I’m sorry,

between 2020 and 2022, 60 % of the people we hired heard of us because they saw our LinkedIn content. It was all inbound. that feel, because in a services-based organization, the more people you have, the more revenue you can make, because it’s a directly attributable billable hours, that kind of thing, whatever your model is. But that’s what really fueled our growth, is being able to attract people to work with us just because we talk about things people want to hear about, and no one else in our industry really does that.

Anthony Codispoti (30:38.616)
Okay.

Anthony Codispoti (30:59.691)
So is it equally helpful on hiring the employees as well as attracting your core clients, the employers? Or is it, yeah?

James Hornick (31:07.438)
Yes, that was the other, that was the thing is I guess I skipped over that too. Originally, I thought we’re going to do a bunch of content. We’re to get a ton of inbound traffic. Now we did, we do get inbound traffic from it, but the two bigger things were one, being able to track employees, but two, staying in touch with existing people I already know without having to do one-to-one outreach every single time. Like last year I got an old contact I hadn’t talked to in 10 years.

Anthony Codispoti (31:30.328)
Yeah.

James Hornick (31:37.132)
reached back out to me and said, hey, I’ve been following everything you’re doing and we have to hire here. Can you help me out? know, had I, and there’s been plenty of cases of that. So it’s an easier way of staying top of mind with people because I think, and that’s the toughest thing in any kind of sales where we have a lot of competition. So do a lot of other, you probably do too. people have lots of options. How do you stay top of mind with everyone all the time? Because that’s how most businesses lost is people, you know,

Some of my best contacts probably know five other recruiters. How am I the one they decided to kind of follow up with that day? It’s because I was in their LinkedIn feed. They see me all the time, that kind of thing.

Anthony Codispoti (32:12.057)
All right. So I’m curious when you were first starting in digital marketing recruiting, when there not a lot of people were doing digital marketing. So that suggests to me that there weren’t a lot of people who had experience in that. Was it a struggle finding folks to place? Were you having to find folks that maybe had tangential experience like this?

James Hornick (32:34.528)
No, it was, don’t, actually it wasn’t that hard because there were a lot of people that did it in agency environments. And I think, I think it’s still the commonality. Like most people that might work in agencies eventually want to go internal. So that was the difference is those new clients I was talking about, they were all like internal companies hiring for their team. And I think at that point in time, there were plenty of people who are working, doing digital at agencies that were happy to try to find new things that were like internal roles. Just the work life balance typically is better.

Anthony Codispoti (33:04.483)
So James, I want to ask some questions to better understand the higher well process and what makes you guys unique. But before we get there, I want to ask you about the time that you had cancer.

James Hornick (33:16.014)
Just lay it out there Yeah before the yeah before the show what were you saying is I like to ask everyone something in a something personal like a struggle they had in their life and I’m just like I like to think that my life is just peachy keen I did have cancer once I forgot about that That was actually the route the same time we kind of did all this they started the marketing things. That was like 2015 and yeah Yeah, it was a big year. Actually, had one of the biggest years of my career about cancer

Anthony Codispoti (33:18.521)
I’m just gonna make shh.

Anthony Codispoti (33:37.623)
We had a lot going on.

James Hornick (33:44.498)
yeah, so I got cancer. did chemo. I finished it. That was it. I mean, it’s a pretty, pretty, story. There’s not like, yeah, I know.

Anthony Codispoti (33:51.034)
You’re going to have to give us more than that. You can’t treat this the same way you do your LinkedIn page.

James Hornick (33:55.822)
Yeah, but I actually did post about this on LinkedIn. It’s actually a hysterically funny video. I have seven tips on how to do chemotherapy and actually kind of go through all of it because this is like four or five years later. People are like, that’s the first time I laughed like hearing about cancer. No. You know, it’s like for me, was like my mom was a cancer survivor for like 20 years and she had ovarian cancer. So which is which is not a good one, you know, but she got through it and last a long time. So

Anthony Codispoti (34:04.057)
Of course you do. Of course you do.

James Hornick (34:24.418)
The harder part I think was, so when I got diagnosed, it was pretty quick. I ended up kind of going right into chemo and maybe the prognosis, honestly, it’s cause the prognosis was good. It wasn’t one of those ones where it’s like, they were pretty sure that you’re, you’ll get through this. You you just have to come in and do the work and do the chemo. That’s why I can laugh. Cause even at the time it was like, I really wasn’t afraid as much as I like, everyone is for the first like, you few days. But then when you start like reading, like, this is fine. I had to do nine weeks of chemo.

But the other thing is like the drugs they give you, depending on what you’re doing, the type you have and the drugs that give you four, like your experience can be completely different. There’s like 140 different types of cancer. They’re all different. They all have different, like one is no different than, is very different than the other. But mine was, I can joke about it because it was like, it was literally like, you know, nine weeks and done. In fact, can, the drugs to counteract it were so good. Like I never threw up once.

Anthony Codispoti (35:23.225)
well.

James Hornick (35:23.726)
I mean I was I was kind of a being a bitch the whole time like you’re definitely on you’re in a foul move most the time which but I am again But I still worked out four days a week that actually helped and you know, I hit a when it was all over a four weeks later I Hit my I lift if you can’t tell I’d lift a lot I hit a 490 pound squat in the gym was a PR so, you know didn’t didn’t crush me physically either but what did change to your point to

Anthony Codispoti (35:48.141)
Wow.

James Hornick (35:53.718)
tying this all back to something positive or something useful. It did make me not want to do shit I just don’t want to do anymore. I would say like I did have the what if I’m not being arrogant about getting a gru chemo, it’s that life is too short to like do just to put up with bullshit. You don’t feel like putting up with anymore. Like that was kind of the one big change I think I had. And I’m not saying this about the industry, but like I had done tech recruiting for 10 years at that point.

I was good at it, but I just got burnt out on it. And I think everyone gets burnt out on like a lot of people, two types of people leave recruiting people who like have a bad experience right away. And the people that did it for a decade and they’re just like, God, I got to do something else. I’m having the same conversations over and over again. People are pain in the butt to deal with. Like everyone hits that point too. And for me, was just, it was getting into a different field of it. So love tech people. can be difficult to work with. marketers were just.

completely different. Like you’re having business conversations instead of like tech conversations. You’re asking about challenges they saw. You’re learning. I learned how to apply it to my own business. You know what mean? It was like a completely different like breath of fresh air. So, but yeah, those two things kind of happening at the same time, because you know, had the cancer thing not happened, I might’ve been like, I don’t know if I want to start this out because I’m doing good this other area. Like I might’ve totally chumped out and be like, I just want to stay where I’m like set in my ways and I kind of where I’m comfortable. But I’m just like, you know what? Fuck it. Let’s just do something new.

Anthony Codispoti (37:01.17)
Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (37:17.923)
comfortable.

James Hornick (37:23.18)
sick of doing this.

Anthony Codispoti (37:24.567)
And so I’m curious, that revelation come in slowly as you’re going through the chemo, or was it pretty quickly, like once you got the diagnosis? That big perspective change happened pretty fast.

James Hornick (37:34.264)
Pretty quick, I think, yeah. It was pretty…

Maybe, yeah, probably the first, maybe round one of chemo, which I think will make another joke. The first day was the worst. They didn’t tell me this, that they also dosed me with Benadryl in case I had allergic reaction. So like, I came out of that first day being like, shit, I gotta do nine weeks of this. And then I realized the next day, no, that foggy, unable to comprehend what was going on, like out of it feeling, that was actually just the Benadryl. And it was like a high dose.

But no, that first week was very much like, yeah, I’m not putting up with anything I don’t want to do anymore. Time to make a change.

Anthony Codispoti (38:17.603)
Did you see that permeate into other parts of your life outside of work?

that sort of this new idea of I don’t want to do things I don’t want to do.

James Hornick (38:28.19)
I don’t know. Maybe…

I don’t think I ever did stuff outside of work I didn’t want to do anyway. that was like, know, but that’s, yeah, that’s work. I mean, I have a lot of hobbies outside of work that are unrelated. I do think it’s very important to be well-rounded and I always have, you know? So like I had already been doing some writing at that point. like for me, like outside of work, I lift weights and swim and stay in shape. I taught myself how to trade financial derivatives. like I manage my own finances with like futures and options.

Anthony Codispoti (38:37.913)
Okay. You’re already a pretty free spirit outside of the office.

James Hornick (39:03.956)
And I do creative writing. So those are three completely different, like unrelated things. so I, I, I stay happy kind of having different, the creative aspect, the nerdy analytical aspect, and the just like making sure I’m keep taking care of myself aspect. but for me, that’s, I think outside of like friends and family, like those are the things I do that I get excited for. That’s my life. And I don’t, I don’t think I ever gotten a trap where outside of work I was ever doing shit I didn’t want to do.

Anthony Codispoti (39:34.104)
Fair enough. Okay, let’s transition back to talking about what makes the hire well process different from competitors. What is it that you guys are doing that other folks can’t do?

James Hornick (39:40.003)
Sure.

James Hornick (39:46.188)
So the groundwork on this is the way I define what our firm does is we place leaders and we help them build their teams. That’s like the high level, quick talking point view. The thing that makes us different from a delivery standpoint, which is the basis of all this is that we spent the last 20 years building out and hiring experts in different areas of recruiting. So we have executive recruiting experts, have tech recruiting experts, we have sales and marketing.

finance and accounting, HR, operations, and even industrial. So we have people in those spaces that are, like I was a tech recruiter, then I became a marketing recruiter. So like we actually have people who kind of know all those areas cold. So we’re able to work with a company. know, companies seem to hire all these different areas. They’re probably sick at working with 10 different firms because they need one for each. We actually have, so they can work with us and know they can get coverage on all these kinds of areas they work with. But the thing beyond that that we use is different.

We can do executive recruiting. We can do your any individual search we need to do. We can do fine contractors, but it’s really our solutioning. We can do RPO recruitment process or outsourcing style projects, whether they’re short term, long term company comes to us and they need to make 50 hires, a hundred hires, 10 hires, know, whatever it is. We can do a custom built to fit solution for them that will ensure they get the people they need on time.

this should make sure it’s in a budget that’s going to make sense. It’s accounting for that kind of extra volume where they have one centralized person kind of managing all this for them who then manages our team internally. That’s the big difference. There’s very, I don’t want to say the word, there are very few firms that do that type of work at that type of scale, especially in kind of, we, I’d say we operate mostly kind of mid markets. Most recruiting firms have one or two specialty areas. do.

They do search and they do contracting one or the other, you know, but the solutioning aspect and the volume aspect and our ability to handle that, especially across different competency areas is probably the biggest differentiator.

Anthony Codispoti (41:53.411)
So the benefit to kind of sum it up, one of the benefits of working with HireWell is rather than needing to work with eight, 10 different companies because you need hires in these different specialty verticals, they can work with one umbrella. They can work with HireWell and you guys have those individual expertise in-house on staff.

James Hornick (42:07.372)
Mm-hmm. Yes.

James Hornick (42:14.702)
Correct. And we can also price in a way that makes, because the traditional model that every HR person knows about, they’ll like, I can either pay through the nose for individual searches through an agency, or I can hire an internal talent acquisition person. But there’s all this space in between where we can play, where we can scale up and down faster than one internal recruiter can do. And we can reduce the recruiting expenses, like if you’re trying to hire each position on a one-off cost, we can volume package it away where it’s going to save you money versus that.

that type of solution. That’s kind of, and we can, every one of these things is going to depend on what our clients needs are, how many hires, what timeframe they need them in, you know, whatever, but we’re, we’re willing to kind of take on that type of work and figure it out and make sure there’s, it’s a, it’s a better fit for our client than either the other opposing traditional solutions.

Anthony Codispoti (43:03.235)
So would you traditionally apply a different pricing model if somebody is hiring one person versus we need help hiring for the next six months because you can place basically place somebody on their staff for six months and that’s sort of a different model than the.

James Hornick (43:12.044)
Yes. Correct.

James Hornick (43:17.932)
Yes. Anytime you’re talking volume and it’s always, it’s always cost because, you know, it’s always price to fit. And it’s always going to be more advantageous for them to do it that way.

Anthony Codispoti (43:27.629)
James, how would you describe your ideal client, whether it’s, I don’t know, geography, industry, employee size, revenue size?

James Hornick (43:36.216)
They have money and they need to hire? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. No. I would say that I do a client for us and I have to, I want to kind of lay this out there. We’re, we’re nationwide. Half our employees at this point are remote. During the pandemic, we went kind of all in on, you know, kind of remote work. It’s helped us kind of scale, us attract great people. There’s a lot of locations of the country where there’s great recruiters, but not necessarily great firms to work for. But I say,

Anthony Codispoti (43:37.913)
They got a pulse. They got a bank account.

James Hornick (44:03.01)
The Chicago thing is important because Chicago has the most diverse business community by industry in the entire country. So we have experience working with SaaS startups and marketing agencies and nonprofits and banks and manufacturing firms like all, like you name it. Like we have worked with them because being Chicago based, like all these different insurance companies and pharma companies, they all exist here. So we have good success stories in most industries that are out there.

I would say our ideal client is a place though where we were dealing with founders or forward thinking hiring managers or HR people that want a true partner that can help build them a solution. Now, a lot of times it’s a lot of mid markets. It could be a lot of SaaS or software startups like Series A, Series B, Series C, tons of those types of places. A lot of marketing agencies or just any place that is

I like working with clients where people like working there. Not every company falls into that bucket. So I like, I like making my, I like working with the happy people that like working with us, I guess is kind of the easy way of saying it. So, but yeah, we can, we, I think the challenge that we have from a sales standpoint is like, I can be kind of really open about this. Recruiting is all about knowing how to recruit a skillset. Can you…

Anthony Codispoti (45:11.363)
You like working with happy people.

James Hornick (45:30.86)
You know how to recruit an accountant. You know how to recruit a marketer. What industry they come, but buyers usually think of things in terms of their industry. You know, like I need someone who knows how to recruit in my industry specifically, but like part of recruiting a recruiter is understanding what industry they work in, why that’s applicable to what they’re doing. but how, our, our, our challenge and our, our business challenge and one things we’ve gotten better and better at is phrasing things in a client’s terms. They feel comfortable that we know their industry cold.

even though it really is more about the skill set from a realistic standpoint. Like we, if you know how to recruit a certain skill set, like the industry is kind of secondary.

Anthony Codispoti (46:09.975)
Gotcha. So Mr. Chief Growth Officer, where do you see the company growing? Where do you guys take this?

James Hornick (46:19.63)
it’s a good question. things have gotten, I think that from a service standpoint, like our big push is definitely the more of solution type sales, larger engagements, RPO type solutions, whether they’re a fixed cost model or that’s some sort of hybrid model. We have all people from teams working together. recruitment process outsourcing. If you’re HR dorks out there, love you guys. They know what that means. but.

Anthony Codispoti (46:37.369)
Sorry, what is RPO?

Okay, go ahead.

James Hornick (46:45.59)
Any like we always want to go towards that’s this means larger business where we’re kind of getting more exclusivity and we’re actually getting embedded with our clients. We’re actually doing not just finding people, but we’re actually, you know, we’ve got their email address and calendar working directly with the hiring managers. We’re, know, creating the job descriptions. We’re actually embedded with their actual like hiring plans. So we’re part of their team. Basically. That’s what we like. That’s where we like to play. That’s not where we start because most companies they need to start out with just a higher two, but, that has.

That was huge in 2021, 2022. It dipped, I think 2023. We did like five of those deals, which is not good. We’ve done, we’ve signed 15 new clients in that space since May 1st of this year. So that things have kind of rallying back in 2024. And that’s where ourselves, that’s where we want to grow. That’s where we kind of see ourselves growing.

Anthony Codispoti (47:35.979)
Is that because the industry in general is coming back, the economy is coming back, or you guys are doing something different to attract that business?

James Hornick (47:39.34)
Yeah, 100%.

it’s, it’s, I’d say it’s well, both we, the industry is absolutely coming back. And anytime I see like more fear mongering posts on LinkedIn or elsewhere, like talking about, the job numbers are alive. This isn’t happening. You have to realize a LinkedIn, this will get me canceled with LinkedIn. LinkedIn is, it has three people, there’s three types of people go on LinkedIn, salespeople, recruiters, and really unhappy job seekers.

So one third of your feed at any given time is gonna be people bitching about how they can’t find a job. And I’m not dunking on job seekers. I totally get it if you’ve been frustrated, you have the right to be frustrated, you’ve been given a raw deal. What I am saying though, is of course the amount of people who think the economy sucks are gonna be disproportionately represented on LinkedIn, because that’s where they’re gonna, anybody who’s really happy with their job isn’t going to LinkedIn. They’re not there to say like how great things are going. You know what I mean? So.

I guess what I’m just saying is like there’s more gloom and doom on LinkedIn that actually exists. we are seeing things have picked up pretty significantly. We just posted our best two months in the last two years in August and September and October’s trend and probably the better than those two still. So things are definitely looking up. And then I would say, and yes, we’re good at kind of selling these solutions. So it is partially us as well too.

It’s also partially that not many companies sell these kind of solutions. So it’s a little bit more of a, what’s it? Is it blue ocean, red ocean? I forget how that works. What are those? Yeah, one of those, one of the oceans. Anyway.

Anthony Codispoti (49:12.537)
I think it’s blue ocean. Maybe red ocean has all the blood from the sharks. I think that’s what it was. So what in your experience, James, is the biggest mistake that you see companies make in hire?

James Hornick (49:18.444)
Yeah, yeah, something like that. Anyway.

James Hornick (49:31.049)
Good question.

James Hornick (49:36.076)
The biggest universal mistake, which causes a lot of other mistakes, companies just assume everyone wants to work there. And just by having a job opening that they’re doing everyone a favor and they just believe that everyone’s going to see that we’re the best company. Because if you’re a founder, if you’re an executive or whatever the company, and this is not slagging on these companies by the way, you’re probably super excited about what you do. You’re super proud of what you do and you think you’re the best at what you do and you should.

Absolutely should. The problem is, that you’re too close to it and not everyone sees it that way. Like you have to sell job seekers on why they should want to join you. You have to give them a reason why your company is better for them in their career than their current one. And companies spend a lot of time talking, bragging about themselves, saying, we’ve made this list. We’re going to change the world. That’s great. But what are you doing for that? Like that’s not selling a job so can work there. That’s the selling. Maybe while you’re a good company.

why you should go public, why you’re going to do well, recognizing that there’s a difference between that, one, you need to phrase things in job seekers terms, but two, that you have to sell people to kind of one to join you. And from there stems a lot of these, that’s where your bad interview process comes from. Companies think that it’s like, they don’t realize that you have to be upfront with job seekers about how many steps are there, then actually follow through on that.

Like they think that it’s okay if we don’t get back or if we’re figuring out as we go, because we’re so good at a company that they’re still going to want to work here. It’s not the case. Everyone who’s been through a train record interview process, they’re like, that’s a red flag. People aren’t going to work there. So that stems from that. I would say most problems stem from, and again, I don’t want to say this, no, it’s way of being rude, but there’s an inherent kind of like internal arrogance that is sometimes like, we are so good, everyone’s going to see it. We’re good, post the job, we’ll be fine.

Anthony Codispoti (51:35.725)
The reality is you still have to communicate that to somebody who has no idea who you’re.

James Hornick (51:39.694)
Exactly. Most people will have no idea who you are. They’ll have no idea why you’re a good company. These might be great companies to work for, but if you don’t make that clear and put it in their own terms and provide them with a positive experience in the interview process and follow up with them appropriately, and if you’re hiring managers and internal recruiters or external recruiters, they aren’t on the same page. They’re not all telling the same story. They’re not all giving those same points. If it feels disjointed and everyone’s telling you something different as you’re a job seeker, that’s a big turn-off.

And it takes a lot of intentionality to get that stuff right.

Anthony Codispoti (52:13.379)
So in your experience, James, what are the biggest reasons that employees leave a job?

James Hornick (52:19.308)
Sucks.

Anthony Codispoti (52:21.239)
the job itself, the pay, the benefits, the boss, the direct manager.

James Hornick (52:24.89)
everyone’s got a different opinion on this. I think that it comes down to, the bad days outnumber the good days. I’ve said this about lot about why I’ve stayed 20 years at hire well is because, recruiting can be a frustrating job inherently. Like it’s going to be, you’re going to get beaten up because like, you know, just dealing with, you’re dealing with people all day and you’re dealing with something that’s about, but the last thing I want to do is like,

add a level of frustration. I don’t want to add to that, you know, as a manager, you know. And I do think it’s kind of the same thing too, where there’s people who are in environments where negativity is allowed to breed and pessimism is allowed to breed. And especially at the management level when people aren’t kind, they aren’t nice, they aren’t polite. Because I’m sure whatever the job is, it’s work. You know what mean? It’s not easy. You’re not doing it because it’s fun. But when you’ve got

when you we’ve got jerks you’re working with on top of that, like who I think that’s the biggest reason. Pay can be a big one, too. You know, if you’re people are getting underpaid. But I think if your people are at average pay, I think it’s it’s sure you can always everyone can always find more money somewhere else. But they like where they’re working. They like who they’re working with. It makes their they can five o’clock comes and they like they’re in a good place positively all day. Like people typically don’t leave those jobs.

They don’t start looking until they’re fearful their job’s gonna go away or they’re just tired of working with dickheads all day.

Anthony Codispoti (53:55.001)
So what would you say is, what’s the biggest piece of advice you could give to an employer to help retain folks that they want to keep?

Don’t be jerks.

James Hornick (54:04.146)
don’t be jerks. I think that I don’t know if surveys are the best way, but I think that, so

You have to understand, you have to, this is where like high EQ and empathy kind of come into it. You have to be able to step outside yourself and understand like what the work experience is for other people at the firm and proactively course correct if you think things are going wrong. So you have to, whether this is one-on-one conversations, being a good listener and kind of understanding where,

where people might not be happy in organization, whether it is doing surveys, you know what mean? And kind of understanding whether it’s 360 surveys or whatever and understanding kind of what the sentiment is. But proactively making changes for the better. But similarly, if your company is going through a hard time, because I think this is another thing that gets lost on LinkedIn, especially like in the 2023 downturn.

When companies are struggling, they’re struggling financially. They’re just trying to hold on to where they are. can’t fault them for… A company is about to go out of business, you can’t fault them for doing layoffs. It’s either do layoffs or you’re out of business. That gets lost sometimes. But I do think that being open and transparent about the hard times you’re going through, people are more likely to respond, help you come up with solutions or respond to things maybe not going their way if they didn’t get the raise they thought they’re going to get or…

Other, if they have to tighten the budget and, you know, I could be able to make the spend they have or whatever it is, it’s kind of like getting people kind of upset. if it’s being caused by economic challenges or any other challenge you’re having, just being transparent about those. Cause I think that, we, we saw a tremendous amount of companies handling the bad stuff badly last year and that turned people off to those companies permanently. So.

Anthony Codispoti (55:54.467)
Mm.

Anthony Codispoti (55:58.455)
I had a guest on recently who had a theory that maybe this time around companies that don’t need all of their employees because their businesses have contracted a bit or maybe holding on to them a little bit longer than they would have in the past just because they’ve seen how difficult it is to then go back and hire and find good folks again once things pick back up. I’m curious if you would have any insight or if you’ve seen anything similar to that.

James Hornick (56:11.981)
Yeah.

James Hornick (56:27.706)
that’s, hard to say cause it’s subjective. I’m sure that’s happening to an extent. I, I feel like a lot of companies cut too deep, honestly. It also kind of depends on what they do. So there’s a few things happening. Like the recruitment space, what’s different. I’m talking to internal recruiters now, not like my area, but people who work internally companies. It’s the only job that is, staying in maintenance mode.

Anthony Codispoti (56:39.022)
you

James Hornick (56:55.726)
If your company is in maintenance mode and you’re a software engineer or salesperson or whatever, like your job’s safe as long as they’re making money. If the company’s in maintenance mode, they’re not growing your recruiter, there’s not turnover happening or growth happening. That’s inherently a bad place to be in for a recruiter. It’s a very volatile skill set, unfortunately, if you’re an internal recruiter. A lot of recruiters, they’ve cut very deep.

Part of the reason why our solutions business is picking up right now is because everyone already laid off all their internal recruiters. So if every company, a company used to have tenure recruiter recruiters now has two and all of sudden their hiring plan’s tripled, like they don’t have the people they need to do that. So that’s why we’re getting a lot of business there. Other aspects, I wouldn’t know. I would have a hard time saying across the industry that I would say it’s more than norm, even outside of recruitment.

because as a position circles, it’s for talking to salespeople or everywhere else, I would have a hard time saying companies are holding onto people they shouldn’t. The only companies that, because I think everyone’s experience is there was a lot of layoffs. I think the only, I think companies might be holding onto people because they feel like things are going to bounce back and they’re holding onto people because they know they’re going to need them as opposed to like laying them off, they’re having to rehire again and going through that whole thing. I think forward thinking companies are planning for.

Anthony Codispoti (58:15.406)
Yeah.

James Hornick (58:18.498)
Hey, let’s hold on to who we want, who we need as much as we can because we feel like next year things are gonna turn around. I think that happens. And I think the companies doing that don’t get the credit they deserve, but I couldn’t put a number on it. I know some companies do, but if you were gonna tell me like if that’s a rampant widespread thing, I wouldn’t know either way.

Anthony Codispoti (58:36.889)
So interesting thing that I heard you say is the fact that your solutions side of the business is picking up. It is probably a good indicator that the economy is coming back, right? Like a lot of companies, they cut the recruiting staff because things really slowed down. Like we don’t need this many people, you know, helping us find new folks. And then very quickly, wait, wait, we need a lot of help. And so they’re coming to you because they can’t get those folks on their own.

James Hornick (58:44.076)
Hmm.

James Hornick (58:47.596)
Yeah. 100%.

James Hornick (58:57.443)
Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (59:06.745)
I’m curious what the timeline is that you’ve seen this. I know it’s 2024, but is it like in the last three months, last two months since the Fed raised the rates is that picked up?

James Hornick (59:17.678)
I mean the uptick probably started like May 1st, would say where we started selling solutions. So over the summer it intensified and we started seeing a little bit of it May, June and July, but things really exploded in August, September and now.

Anthony Codispoti (59:35.331)
Do you think it has anything to do with the Fed rates? mean, August people were pretty confident that the rates were gonna go up at least a quarter, maybe a half point. Hard to say.

James Hornick (59:41.242)
I, I, yeah, well, so yes and no. So the no is that I don’t think that hiring a lot of times driven by funding, whether it’s VC funding or private equity deals or something like that, like companies have a new initiative, they need to hire for it. I don’t think that’s really uptick that much yet. I don’t think a half a point cut into rates, like in the VC space, everyone’s like, all right, take our money out of T bills and like throw it into the, I don’t, it’s not, it wasn’t a dramatic enough cut for that to happen.

But I do think seeing, I do think there’s a lot of companies out there that had money on the sideline, projects on hold that were just waiting to see, okay, is this real? Is this gonna happen before we kind of go back to like, okay, it’s time to start growing again. I also think that part of it too that gets overlooked is that companies have to start growing again. Like every company either has, you have an investor, you’re publicly traded, you have investors or you have a founder in business.

And literally no one wants to say, next year we’re to do the exact same thing we did this year. Like at some point, like it’s, you know, we’ve had 18 months, 24 months of like stagnant or contraction. At some point, everyone’s like, got to do it now. Like can’t wait anymore. It’s time to go back. I do think there’s a certain, like, it’s not really herd mentality, but there’s enough companies that are finding like, all right, time to stop making excuses. We just got to get back to trying to grow the business. Be damned.

Anthony Codispoti (01:01:00.035)
Tired of sitting on our hands, we gotta get back to business.

James Hornick (01:01:01.432)
Tired of sitting on our hands. And I think a lot of it is just that. You can’t go on contracting or staying stagnant long enough. At some point, everyone just, there’s enough people that just decided it’s time to start moving again. And I do think the Fed rate was maybe the indicator that, okay, now’s the time. But I don’t think the half point rate by itself was like, things are totally different now.

Anthony Codispoti (01:01:16.258)
Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (01:01:21.473)
Interesting perspective. James, any specific books or mentors that have been helpful for you?

James Hornick (01:01:30.008)
Books or mentors? I really like, there’s a book.

Anthony Codispoti (01:01:32.269)
or, well, I would say we’re podcasts, but you’ve already said you don’t listen to any podcasts.

James Hornick (01:01:36.11)
Listen to podcast I even listen to my podcast so like I won’t even listen to this Tell me how this go went because I’ll watch the clip you sent me to Sarah on the share on social media after her but that’s about it I from a business standpoint I Really liked there is a book called range I gotta find out who wrote that if you give me a second, I can probably pull that up real quick

Anthony Codispoti (01:01:40.119)
You probably won’t even watch this one.

James Hornick (01:02:04.622)
it was really interesting. So it’s called range why generalists triumph in a specialized world by David Epstein. it’s a great read because I do believe that, he, he relates it to, he is a lot of good. It relates it to music, relates it to sports, relates to lots of other areas, but it’s really kind of into being about business where,

There’s such this focus in our society, Bong, we need to hire the best specialist for anything. But if you need to get like a bunch of tasks done, you’re trying to grow a company, you need people who know how to do a lot of different things. And the more, the more of a broad based background you have, the better you are able to solve new problems you’ve never seen before. If you have, if you take a specialist who’s only done one exact thing and thrown like some weird problem at them, they’re going to struggle compared to the person who’s done like,

five or six different jobs in the past 10 years and had to solve new problems all the time. Like solving new problems is a skill in itself and people who are more generalized are better at doing that. And it’s a great book too because he relates it to sports. don’t have kids, but maybe you have kids, I don’t know. And like how sports have changed since you and I were young where like you played a of sports and all these traveling and team sports. It points out all these different like athletes who are like at the top of their game that, was it Patrick Rafter? I think it was.

didn’t start playing tennis until he was like 18 or something. You know what mean? Like there’s a lot of people who didn’t, who became the best in their field without, was, was Tiger Woods broke everyone’s brain because Tiger Woods was playing golf when he was three. Everyone’s like, this is all you have to do. You gotta get your started early. Meanwhile, there’s like a million other athletes just as successful or close that they just play a lot of sports and they’re just better than you. That’s why they’re good at what they do. But it’s the same type of, great book. Read it. Easy read, great audio book because of all the examples, but listen to range. It’ll change your perspective on like.

Anthony Codispoti (01:03:23.545)
Wow.

Anthony Codispoti (01:03:32.824)
Yeah.

James Hornick (01:03:51.502)
how you should hire, how you should position your own career and just like being good at lot of stuff.

Anthony Codispoti (01:03:57.003)
No, we definitely hear. I’ve got two boys, eight and 10. And I hear a lot of parents talk about, yeah, they want, you know, some want to get their kids hyper focused on a particular sport because they’ve shown an aptitude for it. They want to see what they’re capable of. There are other parents who are like, no, let them go out and have fun. Like this isn’t the time to burn them out on a single sport. Like let them enjoy it. And the cross training from one sport to another is actually good physically for your body. You’re working your muscles and your joints in different ways, less likely to get an injury. So the theory goes.

Anyways, James, got one more question for you, but before I ask it, wanna do two things. For those listening, if you like today’s content, please hit the like, share, or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. James, I also wanna let people know the best way to get in touch with you. What would that be?

James Hornick (01:04:42.126)
You can reach out to me my linkedin easy to find what is my linkedin address? That’s a well, I’m James Hornick on LinkedIn But yeah, it’s linked it’s just James Hornick is the after the URL so easy to find on LinkedIn Also on Twitter, although I don’t use it as much. I’m also just James Hornick on Twitter. You can find me there Yeah, I guess that’d be the best way James at higher well Podcast I link every single one on

Anthony Codispoti (01:04:52.173)
You are James Hornick. Yep.

Anthony Codispoti (01:05:04.557)
Where do they find your podcasts?

James Hornick (01:05:10.554)
are talentinsights.hirewell.com. You can find all of them there, but the 10-Minute Talent Rant, which is my primary podcast, we just finished, we’re doing episode 98 next week. It’s 10 minutes long. We were up there real quick. That can be on Apple, Google, Amazon, Spotify, all the usual suspects in terms of like, so 10-Minute Talent Rant, search for it, you’ll find it, or talentinsights.hirewell.com, or again, hit me up on LinkedIn.

Anthony Codispoti (01:05:21.03)
wow.

Anthony Codispoti (01:05:37.421)
Great. So last question for you, James. I’m curious in the next few years, what do you see are the big changes coming to the staffing industry?

James Hornick (01:05:45.55)
geez, you saved this for lad. This is a quick one. Yeah. So, okay. I am so sick of talking and hearing about AI, but you can’t have this conversation without it. believe that, and I’ll relate this back to the talent space. 90, 95 % plus of the AI apps and things out there that you see are going to fail, but the other two to 5 % are going to completely change how we kind of work.

Anthony Codispoti (01:05:49.209)
you

James Hornick (01:06:14.542)
And I think that the way it’s starting to have some effect on talent markets, I do believe that it’s gonna be harmful primarily first to, I was gonna say, like I think low level marketing roles in areas gonna get hit. think software development, good software developers will be able to do more with less people. I think that’s another area.

So I do think those, I think these things are gonna evolve over time. I think we’re at the early stages of what these things will do. I think a lot of the hype is still overdone and I get sick of hearing about it. From a recruitment perspective, I think what is interesting is that it will enable companies to use lower level recruitment resources and better train, manage and source pipelines. Meaning,

If I’m able to, if I’ve got some, especially if you’re remote, we’re in this weird remote world where it’s hard to kind of oversee people. You don’t really know what anyone’s doing on an admin basis. But if you have an AI based tool that like this video thing that we’re on right now, gives you a transcription. It gives you a summary of what the discussion was. If it can kick off keywords of like sentiment in terms of like what went well in the conversation with the person you’re recruiting, what didn’t, where you as the recruiter did your job, didn’t do your job, what you forgot, what you missed.

where there’s certain keywords are gonna match up with like what the job things are, what other jobs you’re working on that could actually fit this person. There’s a lot that AI can do to help enhance how recruiters can match people, also how recruitment companies or recruitment talent managers internally can better train their teams and understand kind of like, because even in the in-office world, it was really difficult to know where maybe if you’re on my team, like if you just completely booted a conversation or did everything the wrong way, like how would I really know that unless I ever heard you?

So I do think there’s a lot of gains that be made there. I think we’re not near that yet. think a lot of the recording, call recording technology and transcription, that stuff’s there. I think from a management and growth perspective, a lot of those tools are still kind of under development, but I do think there’s some pretty significant gains that happen.

Anthony Codispoti (01:08:21.625)
So can I assume that you’re using one of those recording platforms? Probably connects into Zoom. Are you using any other AI tools? no? OK.

James Hornick (01:08:28.04)
Not honestly, not yet. we’re well, I think there’s a good chance that we will. We’re we’re side note where this is another thing. we’re our ATS system, which is like a CRM system for recruiters is God awful. and we’re probably going to be migrating to a new one soon, but our biggest problem with our current ones, it doesn’t integrate with any of these tools very well. So we’ve been a bit hamstrung in our ability to kind of adopt a lot of latest stuff because it just doesn’t integrate with our tech stack. So, but I am planning on.

Anthony Codispoti (01:08:47.606)
Mm.

James Hornick (01:08:55.89)
there is a definite plan to start kind of going down that rabbit hole and doing these things once we’re in a better place, hopefully like, you know, early next year. But, I’ve tried and demoed a lot of them. and the other thing I will say too, is it will take, it can be disruptive. I, I do think the, disruptive to people’s individual workflows. And when you’re talking recruiting firms, and as I started out, when we started this conversation, lot of these old school recruiting firms, like changing how they do things is not something I enjoy doing.

I do think that it will be people who embrace it will have to change how they do their everyday workflow, but get rewarded by it long-term.

Anthony Codispoti (01:09:39.533)
James, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

James Hornick (01:09:44.75)
All right, hope I didn’t talk too much. Make this longer than it had to be. Thanks for having me.

Anthony Codispoti (01:09:48.515)
We’ll edit it out if we decide that after the fact. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.