 The live stream up but it was starting to get painful watching that up here so I was like it's time. But I am Jill Jubinsky and I am a technical recruiter, well kind of. I fancy myself a little bit more of a people advocate but being a technical recruiter in that vein I am a little bit of an outsider in this community so although DevOps is one of the, one of the communities that has very much welcomed me above a lot others I always like to take a step back in the beginning of when I'm giving a talk and just say thank y'all for having me and thank you to my friends and supporters who have given me the confidence to come up here in front of a room of engineers and talk to y'all so thank you very much. Alright so I am especially excited to be here because although I live in Seattle now Illinois is my home state. Woo yeah I'm from southern Illinois so all my family yeah all my families are up in from Belleville right across the river from St. Louis so although I am pretty weirded out by all the Cubs fans up here I'm still happy to be here. So since I'm a tech recruiter when I was brainstorming for this talk I was wanting to speak to things that I get asked about a lot from y'all side of the technical community and those typically fall into one of two segments so either like how to create a team that entices individuals to want to come join and be a part of my organization and how to work more effectively with my recruiter so that we can all have a you know a happier process. So from that DevOpsing recruitment was birthed so that I could talk about both sides of that equation. Alright but before we get into that too much let's talk a little bit more about me and why I have any authority to be up here in front of y'all. So again I'm Jill Jabinski aka at Jill Jobs or Hug Dispenser on Twitter. I got my start in technical recruiting right out of grad school where I got my master's of science in what's called industrial organizational psychology which is basically the study of humans in the workplace. So it really helps me understand why people think, feel, react the way they do within a work environment. I've worked at a bunch of different companies at varying stages of their career and different sizes. So it's really helped me pull a lot of data points from to give you this information. I sadly can't control everything but what I can control is hiring, onboarding and culture so I feel really passionate about those things and it's really become my life's mission to make things better for humans within an organization. And I personally do that through process improvement, implementation of thoughtful practices and what I like to think is spreading general happiness within the org. So I know that can be a little bit kind of all the feels for y'all but consider this. So the Bureau of Labor tells us that every day we spend about nine hours a day in work or work related activities. So to me it's the duty of an organization to create great environments for y'all so that you can thrive and have a positive day and on the flip side it's y'all's job to seek out employment at companies that create those environments for you and thus force change on those ones that don't. So if we're wanting to talk about how to create this thing we need to figure out what the idea like what are we striving for. So you want to create a way to attract great talent in a seamless and enjoyable fashion. You want to stop the rift between technical teams and recruiters and because when you do that you're able to focus on your day job and be a lot more productive. So if we're creating a positive environment where people are not only content but what we want to strive for is so everybody's shitting rainbows. Because that's the light at the end of every DevOps tunnel am I wrong? So we're going to do this ideal for two reasons. One because then I get to stand up here in front of a couple hundred people and say shitting a lot which is just kind of fun. Two because this is so ridiculous that there's no gender race background anything tied to it so we're all starting off on an equal playing field here which is important to me. Additionally important is goal setting. So let's talk about what I hope to achieve during this session. First I'm going to be talking a lot up here. You'll probably get used to I mean get tired and used to my voice. But I'm hoping from that I'm sharing some good insight. And then I want to definitely start conversations. Like I don't want this to be a one and done. I think this is very much why I fit into the DevOps community too. Come find me in the hallway. Let's do an open space. Tweet at me anything like that. I can't fit everything that I want to say into 30 minutes. And I ask the organizers and for some reason they wouldn't let me have all day up here even though I would do it. If you know me online or in person you've probably realized that I don't take life too seriously and I like to have a good laugh. Albeit I have a very awkward laugh so you'll get used to that as well. But let's do the same in that talk and just have a good time. And then I definitely want to create actionable items for y'all. So we've all been to presentations where you're like super amped on the content. And then you walk out of the room and you realize I have no idea how I would go about implementing this in my day to day at all. And so poof it's gone. I definitely don't want that to happen here. So I have some steps that y'all can take. And then my last and number one goal of all time is to have y'all give a shit. I want you to care about the environment you're creating for your employees. And I want you to care about creating great relationships with recruiters. So before we fully jump in, I know that some of these practices and procedures are going to be a little bit different for y'all. And so I don't want you guys to freak out and just bear with me that change is inevitable and don't be that person. So, let me grab my coffee book. I'm really afraid that I'm gonna knock it over up here, so because that's something I would completely do. But anyways, back to the task at hand. If we're gonna talk about, if my pitch is like DevOps and recruitment, then we better figure out what DevOps is, right? I mean, I don't think anyone's asked that question before, so it makes sense. There's a lot of different camps of what DevOps is. And so we'll run through a couple of them first. First being CampCams, that's pushing culture, automation, measurement, and sharing. Next, CampJobTitle, which typically comes from within the business. And it's just their thought that if they're calling something DevOps, that means it's DevOps, right? Unless your pitch has luck and then you're adamant that any job you have, your title has to have DevOps in it. Love you, Pete. Next being CampTools. So that's the thought that if you just throw a little bit of automation in anything, you're doing DevOps. CampBuzzword, it's typically comprised of people who are actually doing DevOps, and they're just making fun of the word over and over and over again. And then my favorite, CampCashMoneyMillionaires, which means that you will just nod your head at anything a business sells you is DevOps because it means they're gonna pay you more. All right, so the more that I learn about DevOps, and just to give you an idea, I'm not new to this community. I've been involved in it for about four years now. I think this is something like my 10th DevOps days. But the more I learn, the more I realize that DevOps is just organizational effectiveness. So y'all are doing IoPsychology, and you didn't even know it. And since I'm up here and in charge from now on in this session, DevOps will equate to organizational effectiveness. So let's talk about that a little bit more. So what exactly is OE? Well, it's the concept of how effective an organization is in reaching the outcomes that they intended to produce. So if you're an OE practitioner, you focus on things like leadership development, talent management, organizational design and structure, etc. So if you're an OE practitioner, you deep dive into things like these. And so what they really do is become a part of that team and examine them and figure out how they're interacting with each other and really sit back and learn and listen before they implement things. They see what kind of team dynamics are happening and balance trade-offs. So maybe one side of the equation wants to focus on reliability and the other is gung-ho about stability. And there's got to be a happy medium in between. So they're figuring out how to work together so you can have a little bit of both. And with that, they want to make sure that everyone's bought in. So that at the end of the product that everybody's happy. And then through that, facilitating not only how the group and organization should be structured, but also from a people perspective and a workflow perspective. So to me, that sounds a lot like DevOps. And so if you're not an OE practitioner, what do you focus on for your team in layman's terms? Well, it comes in five buckets to me. Things to focus on are communication, flexibility, collaboration, learning, and trust. I mean, communication in working with your team and with the other teams in the organization, flexibility in action. So maybe like white knuckling processes that you did before and understanding that a little bit of change could go a long way. Collaboration and working with others and finding out people's strengths and weaknesses and working together to find the balance between the two. And in learning where I hate to break it to y'all, but none of y'all are the smartest person ever. So maybe if you bring your wall down a little bit and listen to others from different parts of the organization, you could learn too. And trust, and sadly trust is not something that just because you're assigned to a project or product, it's just gonna show up the day you walk in the door. It's something that has to be built and maintained. All right, so yeah, this all sounds good and well. But why is this important? I thought you were gonna talk about recruitment. Well, these days everything that happens inside your organization filters to the outside of the organization. Humans do this thing called talking a lot. And so that these days it's just gonna get out. So if people find out that things aren't going well internally, it's gonna affect your ability to recruit new and great talent. Okay, so we're all bought into that. We wanna make things good. So what are a few key things that we can do to make it better? So for me, the number one thing, and I've said this a million times and I'll continue to beat this bush, but treat your employees like human beings. Put managers in place that can understand who they are as individuals and how they like to be communicated with and how they work best and facilitate that. If you're doing that and you're buying into the individual employee, they're gonna be a lot more bought into you as a manager and as an organization. Building internal and external communities is key as well. Internally, not only with your group, which I mean, if you work on the day to day with people, you'll have some kind of internal community and culture. But with the broader organization as well. And that should happen during work hours. I know that there's a lot, I mean, I enjoy a happy hour as much as the next person. But the team building activities, the main ones need to happen between nine to five or whenever y'all's work hours are. Because whatever outside variables are going on, or even if there are none, and that human just wants to go home, that should be okay. External communities are important because, as I mentioned, humans talk to each other, so when they're going to meetups and conferences and things like that, you want to facilitate that and give them positive things to talk about. And then last is facilitating growth. So learning and development is key. And I think within the DevOps or Engineering communities, we think a lot about hard skills. But soft skills are just as equally, if not more important. So things like communication or conflict management. Man, those are really hard things. So help your employees learn how to do them well, because it doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. And again, kind of with the having managers there to be bought into employees, when you're helping an employee grow their career, they're going to realize that you're putting time and effort into them. And then they'll be wanting to put more time and effort into you. Now I know what some of you are thinking, that this is not the way the market is and people don't care about companies anymore and they just go and whatever. So I'm not saying that these are foolproof, and they shouldn't be taken as gospel. But what I am saying is if you don't have or do these things, that people are going to be much less inclined to come work at your company. And the people who are already there, they're going to be much more inclined to leave. So not only are you dealing then with a talent like incoming talent perspective, but you're going to have a lot of turnover as well, which is just a brutal combination for a growing environment. Okay, so you gave all these things to your employees, all the dev ops are happy, everybody's shitting rainbows. You're so ready to build your team. And then you realize to do that, you have to work with recruitment, the bane of everyone's existence, I know. And it's difficult because engineers and engineering managers are perfect. They never do anything wrong, never. And it's really hard if you're that perfect to be forced to work with a group that makes mistakes, sarcasm being laid quite thickly here, people. So for laughs, let's look at how y'all perceive the recruitment process and how it goes. So here we go. First, the work begins. You have a new wreck that you're opening up, so you meet with your recruiter, and you tell them the laundry list of things that they need. A list, mind you, that doesn't exist in a human being on this planet. But that's neither here nor there. And then you go your separate ways, not to talk again for a while. The recruiter, of course, does absolutely nothing, plays on Facebook, whatever. Then they realize that time is of the essence and they start panicking. And so they go to LinkedIn and just mass email people by the millions. No one's talent that is not qualified or over qualified. And so they end up having some sob story for you and giving you candidates that aren't qualified or no candidates at all. And then the deadline hits and everybody's unhappy. So, obviously, this is ingest. This is not what actually happens most of the time. But whatever does happen, it leaves people unhappy, irritated, and without talent. So how do we fix this? Well, let's take a game break for a second, actually. Cuz I like games, I know y'all like games. This game is called Engineer or Recruiter. And I'm gonna walk you through a couple scenarios and statements so that we can just feel free to shout out to me who you think experienced these things. First, they always assume that they're the dumbest person in the room. Second, sometimes they're awkward around new people, especially people that they're trying to impress. They get blamed a lot. They put duct tape on situations when timelines are short and expectations are high. And lastly, generally feel misunderstood by the outside world. So if you answered both to all of these, then you're 100% correct. And I can tell you that, go Matt. I can tell you that as gospel because as a recruiter and having many friends and built recruiting teams, I know we've all felt these things. And the majority of my friends and peers are engineers. And I know that most of them have felt these things. So maybe we aren't so different. And again, this was for fun, but what I really wanna drive home here is that in every relationship, you need empathy and understanding that there's a human on the other side of the equation. And that you need to give them respect in that to be able to move forward in a positive way. So if we have a lot in common and we have the same goals, which is just hiring badass talent, then why can't we get along in what's broken, see me bring in this full circle here. What's broken is communication, flexibility, collaboration, learning and trust. Now, I think it's about time to DevOps this thing. So just like the old stories of when DevOps got it started about how development and operations were in different silos and not communicating with each other, maybe we can learn something from those. And help make improvements to the situation at hand. All right, again with the talking, Jill, get to the action items. In working effectively with recruiting, I'm gonna go through like five key points and really just kind of storytell. Because I feel like for me, it's a great way if you hear what I've done and others have done in action that you might be able to go home and do that with your recruiter as well. So first, recruitment should be a strategic partner with your engineering team. And so I think of this as if you were bringing a new hire into your organization another engineer, you wouldn't expect them to know all of the tribal knowledge and how to work on the day to day if you didn't involve them in conversations. So why would you expect recruiters to be any different? When I got my start at Rackspace, I literally had no idea what I was doing. And I'm not just being whatever, I had no idea what I was doing. And now I just kind of know what I'm doing, so we're on the right path. But what I did know how to do and what I still know how to do is build human relationships. So I made it a point to go sit with my teams that I was recruiting for and understand what they were doing on the day to day and the verbiage that they were using and how they were interacting with each other. And it made a lot easier for me to talk to candidates. And now, six years later, I can actually talk pretty technically with engineers and I've never coded a day in my life. One key thing that I think would be a cool assignment to do is that you bring a recruiter with you because I think it's really important to partner with your recruiters when you're out doing recruiting on the town or whatever in a meetup or conference environment. But for the first one or two, don't let them recruit at all. Just let them be there with you as a peer and bring them into conversations that you're having and introduce them as a human. Because I don't know if you guys know this, but y'all are pretty intimidating. So if a recruiter just gets sent to a meetup by themselves, what they're gonna do, just like if you went to a recruiter meetup, you would sit in the back, not talk to anyone, and then you would leave and be able to tell your boss that you went to the event. And the talent there wasn't adequate, it was fine. So start partnering with them and teach each other things. So again, it's impossible to think that someone should have insight into your team or organization without you giving that to them. Now, any good recruiter is like a good engineer and they're just using Google like crazy. But if you wanna compound like how quickly they can learn, involve them in your in communication and in meetings and grab coffee with them, things like that. It's really just gonna make it go a lot faster. And on the flip side, this isn't all about what recruiters could be doing better. You should be learning about recruitment too. So your recruiter should be telling you market insights, realistic expectations, candidate information, things like that. And if they're not telling you these things, ask them to tell you these things. They probably have that information and they just think that you don't wanna hear from them. All right, next is to continue those relationships. So in the vein of trust, it's impossible to expect a trustworthy relationship. If you're only communicating with them whenever you have a job open. So once every six months or something like that. So continue to have them involved in your conversation so that they know what's happening down the pipeline. So they can be proactively recruiting as well. And you already have that baseline relationship. A good example of this is say, a recruiter is assigned to five engineering teams. And they're assigned to you but you don't have any recs open. They're talking to candidates and they find a candidate that would just be the most amazing fit for your team. So even though you don't have anything open, they send over that candidate your way. And you look at them and then talk to them and not only are they a good candidate, they're the perfect candidate. So you actually push forward and open a position so that they can be on your team. Now, this would have never happened if you didn't have a relationship that was ongoing with your recruitment partner. It's okay to push each other. My favorite hiring manager that I've ever worked with was a guy by the name of Jason Kennavali when I was at Rackspace. And I didn't fave Jason because he was a really great dude and supportive of me, he is both of those things. But I've been lucky enough to have a lot of hiring managers that I work with that are those things as well. But what Jason did was he was the first to ever push back on me like really hard in a respectful way. He called me on my bullshit. And he told me when he disagreed respectfully with things that I was doing wrong or doing. And I mean most of the time he was wrong. But I did like that he wasn't afraid to push the bounds with me in a respectful manner. So you're hired into your role and recruiters are hired into their roles because they're subject matter experts in the space. But that doesn't mean that you can't question why someone does things the way that they do them. You shouldn't be telling your recruiter this is how you should do it. Because guess what? You're not their boss. But you can ask them why is this the process that you follow or what do you think about doing it that way? And they might have a ton of data on why they don't do it that way and just neither of you knew. So it'll help continue to build that bond and understanding from both sides of the fence. And lastly, be available. Recruitment tends to be a time game. And so especially within the DevOps world, a lot of engineers will be dealing with multiple offers at the same time. So if your recruiter can get that candidate feedback or answers to questions that they have in a quick manner, it's gonna show that individual how much more bought in you are to them even before they're employed with you and kind of sway them that way a little bit. So if a recruiter needs something from you, you have to be timely in getting that back. And on the flip side, a lot of times we'll hear as recruiters from hiring managers that recruiting is the top priority like number one, my team is all in and then just black hole of communication. Well, guess what? If you're not responding back to me and I'm recruiting for other teams that are responding back to me, guess who's going at the bottom of the list of priorities from my side as well. So it's not okay for a hiring manager and if you've ever been in recruitment, you've experienced this. To come back to you when your boss has come to you and say, why haven't you filled this position? And then you just point fingers at recruitment. I mean, y'all know these feelings because other teams do it to you guys all the time. It doesn't feel good. So have a mutual understanding and respect and be available to each other. And it will help the process a lot smoother and get great candidates. And I just want to reiterate on the fact that through all of these things and building bonds with your recruiters, I guarantee you you're going to learn that there's a lot of recruiters out there that are really awesome. And they're great humans and you might actually like working with them. I know it seems hard to believe. But just like engineers, there are engineers who you look up to and they're just like the creme de la creme. And then there are engineers that are just mediocre. And then there are engineers that are not that great. It's the same thing in recruitment. So there's definitely a lot out there that are pretty freaking awesome and you should get to know them and you need them to build your team. All right, so all of these things through communication, flexibility, collaboration, learning, and trust will help you on your quest to build a high functioning organization full of talent, new and tenured, where everyone is excited about being there and continuing to expand the team. Everyone's happy and of course everybody's shitting rainbows. I don't know if we have time but that's the end and those are my dogs. Noodle and beanies. We do have time for questions. Thank you. I want to ask you about diversity. So from your vantage point, how are we doing? What is the trend? And what are some of the practical advice that you give to organizations who are trying to diversify their teams? Yeah, I think that that's a great question. It's a very top of mind topic for most organizations these days. Diversity is incredibly important from diversity of thought to background, ethnicities, sexual orientation, all of these things. And I would say that having a thoughtful recruitment process will help you get more talent. So if it's a last minute type of thing where you're like, we need someone yesterday, which is how a lot of this works, then what ends up happening is you're like, you on our team, white dude, do you know anyone? And he's like, yeah, I know like 40 other white dudes. Let's hire one of them. And so when the timeline is short and you're not setting those critical expectations, it inevitably lends itself to that. So I think that recruiting for diverse candidates is just, it takes longer and you need to be cognizant of that. But there's plenty of diverse candidates out there. So from engineering's standpoint, what is reasonable to expect from a recruiter in terms of pre-screening candidates for their technical knowledge? Yeah, so that's a really great question. I would say that both sides of the fence need to rely on their core competencies. So what I'm great on is screening for humans that are motivated, kind of like culture-fitty, and from a top level kind of perspective, I can understand like, I'm pretty good at sussing out bullshit. So if you're talking to me about Chef or whatever, and you've never done it, at this point I can pretty much tell. But the low level technical stuff, that's y'all's job to interview for. I'm not an engineer, like I don't know the intricacies of your environment. So I will give you candidates that on paper look great, from a personality-person perspective are amazing, and have these like top level things. And then hand that off to you, and you take over from the deep-dive technical conversations. And you can work with your recruiter, a good recruiter as well, will help facilitate in kind of divvying out who should focus on what, so that we're not overlapping questions all the time in interviews, and we're getting a really great full picture view of that candidate. Is there an easy way, or even a hard way, to sort of quantify skill sets in a given marketplace, so like, if you're in Chicago and you're looking for a specific skill set, what the popularity of that skill set looks like, so you can sort of level set your managers' expectations? Yeah, that's a good question as well, the quick answer is no. The longer answer is some groups or companies like LinkedIn will, that's probably the most insight we have into the market from a data perspective, just because I mean, so many people are on LinkedIn, and they can pull the buzzwords and figure out like on a heat map where those things are, but that's probably as close as you're gonna get. And so you just have to have recruiters who have been in that specific market for a while, and then they can pull from just day-to-day data in their mind, data they've made up, as we do. Okay, we can't take six. I think I saw a job. I think I'm sensing an open space. Oh yeah, that's good. So we'll have an open space about all of these topics, probably several open spaces, because this is an excellent topic. Thank you, Jill. Thank you, Jill. That was great. Awesome.