Talent Talks, formerly The Talent Revolution

Join Pinpoint CEO Tom Hacquoil for quick-fire questions with leading recruiters.

In this episode, get to know Matthew Parker, Founder of the Open to Work community.

To stay up to date with Matthew, follow him on LinkedIn at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/talent-acquisition-director/

Visit the Open to Work community at:
https://www.opentowork.community

Know someone who'd be great on Talent Talks? Email us at podcast@pinpointhq.com

Pinpoint is the ATS that makes complex hiring simple. Find out more at https://www.pinpointhq.com/

What is Talent Talks, formerly The Talent Revolution?

Join Pinpoint CEO Tom Hacquoil for quick-fire questions with leading recruiters on Talent Talks. And catch up on previous episodes of The Talent Revolution—a podcast dedicated to talent acquisition specialists, people leaders, and CEOs who want to hire better humans, and build stronger teams.

Know someone who'd be great on Talent Talks? Email us at podcast@pinpointhq.com

Tom Hacquoil: Welcome to Talent Talks, quick fire questions to get to know leaders in recruitment. I'm Tom, CEO at Pinpoint, and today I'm joined by Matthew Parker, founder of the Open to Work Community, a community for job seekers to superpower their job search. He's also an advisor to the HIGHER community who we love.

He's also been at a bunch of our events and been, if not the most articulate speaker, best contributor, and just all round general winner, and so thrilled to have him with us. Thank you so much for joining us today, Matthew.

Matthew Parker: My pleasure. I hope I live up to that hype.

Tom Hacquoil: You will. And I think to reinforce that point, Matthew has his own podcast Open to Work.

And there's lots to go learn from there. We'll put the show notes and links and everything as we wrap up later. But once you've finished here, go check that out. There's huge amounts of stuff to go digest there. So Matthew, you ready for some questions?

Matthew Parker: Always.

Tom Hacquoil: Awesome. Cool. Let's just start with that sort of open to work community piece, right?

Could you give us sort of a 60 second summary of what it's all about and what caused you to start it in the first place?

Matthew Parker: Yeah. So the Open to Work community was started really with the vision that it was really hard for job seekers to understand exactly what advice to follow online, right?

There's a lot of content creators, there's no barrier for entry and let's be frank, people are taking advantage of job seekers in this market. So we wanted to create a central place where regardless of your background, you could get direct advice on your job search. And so we brought together some of the best ex-recruiting, ex-HR job search content creators on LinkedIn, people who have been in the seat, who know exactly what they're talking about, to create a one stop shop for individuals all around the world to navigate this very challenging job search market.

Tom Hacquoil: Awesome. Yeah. And I agree. Unfortunately there is a bit of nefarious behavior at the moment and it is a challenging space. And so really good that you guys are tackling that. I think before we go into the depth of a lot of that stuff, I'm always interested in what you'd be doing if you weren't doing this, right?

So if you weren't in talent, what would you be up to?

Matthew Parker: Yeah, I think about this from time to time. I think there's one would be I'm an entrepreneur at spirit. While I will be joining a new company soon and I'm really excited to announce that. I love the idea of building businesses.

I love building businesses. I happen to do that in talent and HR and people and solve problems with businesses doing that. But there's a really kind of big passion of mine. I think if I wasn't working for other people, I'd be working for myself. I think secondarily, and probably a consistent theme that I see with a lot of recruiting and HR leaders is that I would probably be very interested in being a therapist, supporting people and navigating their problems, I really considered getting a degree in support in that world.

And in another life, I think that's something that I would have loved to do.

Tom Hacquoil: Makes sense that the empathy piece shines through, both because I've heard you say lots of things before in a different capacity and here, but yeah, that's actually super, super interesting. I hadn't thought about that. We'll no doubt cover that later. I think like talking about the Open to Work pod and the stuff that you discussed there, obviously kind of wide range of topics. I think one of the things you discussed recently was this kind of deep dive on candidate journeys. And I guess I'm just interested in, So what did you learn from that about what companies should be doing to really beef up their best candidate experience offering?

Matthew Parker: Yeah. So we started a new product stream within our Open to Work podcast, which is free and accessible to all on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple podcasts. And really what we wanted to do was showcase how businesses around the world were actually hiring. So what can you expect , within a business?

What do you expect from, how can you best prepare? What does the application look like? What does the recruiter screen look like? What does that hiring manager interaction look like? Yeah. And how are you overall going to be assessed? There's a lot of opinion about this on online, right around what the good and bad looks like.

And then I think there's also just a reality of what is actually happening. And so what we wanted to do was identify some of the best companies in the world that are hiring lots of different sizes and scales all around the world and say, how are you actually recruiting people right now? And I think there's two kind of angles to this. One is that means that this company has a great asset, which they can send to their .Candidates who then can be better informed and better prepared as a result and end up becoming better candidates for their interview process, but also it just elevates the entire kind of concept of transparency when it comes to the recruiting process, right?

It's not a black box. We know exactly what's happening. These things are very well documented in many of these businesses around the world. And they're not, what we're learning is that they're not that different. You're probably going to go through a relatively similar, if you're applying for a software company or a US technology business, it's within a margin of error, exactly the same. And I think that's really important and valuable piece of information for people to know so that they can listen to one and go, ah, okay, if I'm applying to a job at this XYZ software company, it's probably going to be the same as when I apply to one of their competitors.

Tom Hacquoil: Makes loads of sense. I love this and part of the reason we wanted to talk to you about this candidate experience piece, it's just that it comes from our own heart, right? I think you're right in that there is a lot of commonality. You're also right that there's a great deal of disparaging opinions on what's correct and what's wrong and what best practice should and shouldn't look like there, I think.

The thing that we really try and do here is just make sure that's as transparent as possible for the candidate, regardless of what the organisation thinks is correct. And so we think about hiring manager profiles, we think about hiring workflows. And I think there's lots to learn from the way that you're doing shining a light on some of that stuff.

I think we've talked about the good. I guess I'm interested when you were having those conversations and doing the research you do anyway. Have you seen anything particularly bad? What's the sort of razzle award? What should people not be doing when we think about candidate journeys?

Matthew Parker: Yeah, I think it's really easy to point to, people not getting back to their applicants and people not quote unquote, ghosting, right?

Which has become really a challenge for all businesses. The kind of consistent theme that I, and I'm doing a kind of an event talking about this very soon, is how can we solve the application funnel problem? With more people out of work than really there has been in for a while with a challenging job market that we have.

How do we solve that? And also AI enabling people to apply for lots and lots of jobs simultaneously. How do we really ensure that we're giving a very good candidate experience to people when they also might not necessarily be giving it back? I think if you're applying for a job, the reality is you might not hear back.

And I think that's just a kind of a construct of the world that we live in right now. And you might get an automated message, but, bearing in mind that hundreds and hundreds of applicants are going through these pools and recruiting teams have been absolutely cut to the bone, sadly as well.

There are fewer opportunities and times for people to be able to respond to your initial application. However, we should be making a commitment as an industry to respond to everyone who passes that first recruiter screen. If you are not right for a role and you have met with someone in the business, you do have, I think, a right to understand whether or not you're going to continue with that business.

And I think that has a massive mental tax on people. Speaking as someone who's also been a candidate, when you don't hear back, it's extraordinarily mentally taxing and really wears you down as a human. And I think we need to respect that if you have had a conversation with someone. That they deserve to receive a response.

And that is I think something that, lots of people out there will theoretically agree with. But we obviously seeing that not happen at scale.

Tom Hacquoil: I think you are 100 percent correct. And I think, yeah, to the sort of emotional and mental tax piece, I think, again, it just bears repeating, right?

Obviously, we're an ATS, we see millions of applicants. We spend a lot of time internally reminding everybody in the business that every one of those rows in a database per se is a real person. Exactly. That's applying for a real job that might include moving their family from place A to place B that introduces risk.

There's a huge amount of like high stakes level stuff in each one of these interactions. And it's very easy to commoditize those things. It's easy for us to do that. See millions of candidates, but to the point that you flagged and you referenced AI as an example, applicant volumes have gone up tremendously, both because of, as you've identified the sort of fractuous market conditions, but doubly so because there's all these AI tools now making it easy to apply for so many jobs simultaneously.

And I think, yeah, there is a mistake being made in organisations where that distinction you identified of perhaps it's no longer possible to reject everybody and give them a great feedback message and speak to them nicely but if you're touching a candidate through a face to face or even an async interview or something beyond that initial application using that as the barometer for who deserves a response and really holding yourself accountable to that I think you couldn't be more right.

Matthew Parker: I think it's worth clarifying as well, and obviously you're an applicant tracking system that this is an arms race, which applicant tracking systems are losing in that they majority of them do not have a at scale implemented AI solution that is at point of application, rejecting or evaluating candidates.

And I did a post on this the other day and people flatly told me I was wrong, even though I've sat down and demoed the likes of Pinpoint I've demoed many of these tools all around the world. And I make it kind of business of myself and trying to understand what is out there. I think it's really important that all recruiters, recruiting leaders understand the cross section of our market at any given time from a technology perspective.

And whilst there are point solutions that say they do this, the reality of this being implemented at scale at an enterprise level across, a meaningful amount of businesses where you would actually be able to feel the impact of that as a candidate, in, in house I can't speak for agency, but in house, this is just not happening in the way that candidates think it is.

And we have lost the narrative on this. This has been co opted by people who have other incentives in telling you that this narrative is that ATSs are black box, that ATSs are using AI. This is, this narrative has been co opted by people who actually are trying to probably sell different types of services to you.

And we actually caught one example of this in the community today where someone posing as a tier one technology provider and recruiter told someone that their application got rejected at ATS level because their CV wasn't optimised and that they were then told to sell by this service to help improve it.

So they can get in next time. And this person had no affiliation with that company whatsoever. They'd created a fake profile using stock images as affiliated with that company, which that company has no control over and then sold this service. And we actually caught that in the community within minutes.

And were able to stop that person from spending their money on potentially what they would have felt would have got them a job. Which is a really big and vulnerable attack that person was making on this individual.

Tom Hacquoil: Yeah. It sucks. It is a war, right?

At the end of the day. And I think that there's it's true that there's fighting to be had from both sides. I think you're right. The ATS industry itself, and obviously I work at Pinpoint and founded Pinpoint, and there's a big brand problem where a lot of the candidate market, as you say, Matthew thinks that you have to spend an inordinate amount of time and or money buying tools or thinking about how to beat the ATS.

We're a tool to supercharge recruiter productivity, not to try and make decisions on their behalf automatically. And I think if you fill in an application form and there's a question about your right to work in a location, you say, no, the ATS may indeed screen you out. What the ATS is not doing is scanning your CV, depending on the sort of metadata underneath it and making a decision about whether you deserve to be seen or not we don't do that. We have no intention of doing that.

Matthew Parker: And there's very little evidence that across the market that's happening at any level of scale as well.

Tom Hacquoil: I agree. I agree.

Matthew Parker: I think there's also another like deeper level problem here where, this is actually a problem that will negatively impact both candidates and businesses, right? High volumes of applications means that you're getting a worse experience. And so if you're using an AI tool to apply for lots of jobs, that means that you're partly responsible for this system that we exist within. I'm not saying entirely, but partly responsible.

Therefore businesses will have to implement different types of tooling to be able to manage this application volume, like an AI, which they weren't using before, but now they might be forced to do it. Or they will have to do top of funnel testing, which means that instead of spending one minute and applying for a job at the moment, you might have to go through a skills based assessment of the top of the funnel, which means it might take you 15, 20, 30 minutes to apply for that same job.

Or we go back to sourcing as well. And I think sourcing will end up becoming a much bigger part of the recruiting funnel again, even though there are lots of candidates available because they just can't deal with the volumes that they get through putting a job up online, which again, historically marginalises people.

But if you don't work for a tier one brand, you're not going to get found as easily and as readily. This kind of race that we're on to understand and manage top of funnel, ultimately, I think will negatively impact the candidate. And yes, it's, it's important that the CVs are like, as we've said, pretty rubbish at determining future success, but they are a very useful way for companies to get a quick snapshot of someone's experience and skillset and make a judgement call on whether or not they should be put through the process.

And that's something that actually candidates quite like. They like that it's quite easy to use and it's only going to become harder. And all of your frustrations that you're feeling as a candidate. are only going to get worse if you have to spend 15, 20 minutes filling out a form, going through an assessment before you've even spoken to someone.

And that is the reality of what the next five years of top of funnel application is going to look like if the volumes maintain at this sort of level around the world.

Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, I think you've done a great job of pulling out both sides of that ecosystem. And that's why I call it a war, right?

Because I think we see the other side. So we'll speak to companies and they'll complain about applicant volume or they'll celebrate applicant volume, depending on the problem that they have before the market looked like this, and they talk about using AI to try and improve the way that they filter candidates and things like that.

But as you say, it's not really happening at any meaningful scale. What they don't talk about is candidates spending a dollar or 10 or free to have an AI generated CV based on their LinkedIn profile that beats the ATS and submit 10,000 applications in 30 seconds, right? And the ATS and the companies on the receiving end of that have a job to do to combat that.

And as you say, it ends up being a net negative situation for everybody. And so it'd be interesting to see how the space evolves, but I love that you've called out how different the sort of perception versus reality is in current market approach to this stuff. I think let's move on. Cause there's lots to cover.

Stopping before we talk too much about sort of the market more broadly, I'd love to understand there's a bit of a wild card question if there's a product or a business that you wish you could take credit for creating and why you'd love to do that.

Matthew Parker: Yeah, I speak very passionately about what the black box is.

The interview assessment, right? Like when candidates, if you're a talent and acquisition recruiting leader, and I go, Hey, what's happening in my interview that I can't tell you a scale, right? I can't tell you that it's a good interview that we assess in the person the right way that the right questions were asked that are the right leading indicators of whether or not the person is going to be successful.

And when I when I left my last job, the first thing I did was build out a whole entire business plan of exactly how I would build a equivalent to what you would now see as like a Hireguide or a Brighthire or to a certain extent, a Metaview and I advise those businesses now, but I'm not a founder of one of those businesses, but that is the where I see like the biggest opportunity next for the recruiting industry as a whole is going to be, how do we unpack what is actually happening in those conversations?

And how do we use. historically unstructured language data, and we use large language model analysis to be able to understand what is happening in that conversation. And are these people, and are the ways they're being asked, are the ways they're being quizzed, which we can now actually measure because we have the data, which we historically didn't.

Are they leading indicators of success in our business at scale over time? And I think that when business and recruiting leaders start to unpack this challenge and opportunity, we will be able to unpack so many more opportunities for the recruiting industry to take hold of. The entire funnel of HR, you can, fast forward to things like compensation as well.

Imagine if you had live compensation figures from the interviews that you were having of exactly how much everyone at scale was earning from a meta perspective by job category. You would be so much more powerful as an influencer to build true compensation strategy that would enable you to acquire the right sort of talent, which we've never had access to that, even though every single recruiter is asking that question.

And so let's fast forward a couple of years. And all of a sudden you have this powerful tool that comes out of the large, like the natural languages processing of conversations that we can now take advantage of at scale. And I think that's going to be one of the biggest differentiators of technology in our time.

And I think that's one that I would love to take credit for, but sadly can't.

Tom Hacquoil: I love that. That's a great answer. And I think all I would build on that is just to completely agree with you again, and, we'll talk about AI inevitably in a minute, but we speak to a lot of folks in the industry.

We talk about AI, what they actually talk about is quite primitive automation, right? And what they think about basic automation, which we can already do and has been in the industry for a long time, or they think about, can this write my job description for me? Or can this communicate? Both of which are just lowest from a denominator problems that to your point previously make everything worse for everybody. I get excited by exactly the point that you made. And the compensation data is a fantastic example of what we can extract from that stuff. I also think a lot about competitor intel and general market analysis and knowledge. I think like we, we really see our role at Pinpoint as trying to help the TA team have much more of a strategic seat at the top table within those organisations they're at.

And I think. There's just so much data that's sat in a recruiter's brain and they're not thinking about how it applies and can be beneficial to the rest of the business and comp data is a great example. But yeah, like understanding more about, what are we hearing from the folks that we're interviewing on the front lines?

What are we seeing in terms of market trends, consumer demand, competitor strategy, being able to pull all of that stuff out of those interviews and those other touch points with candidates and feed that back into the business. It's so exciting to me. And that's where I love the role TA plays in the future.

Matthew Parker: And we're really at the absolute beginning of it. Genuinely you're a decade away from being able to do the things that we're talking about now, I would suspect at scale and it will be a fundamentally transformative moment, in this, industry.

Tom Hacquoil: For sure. We've talked about a few different things already, right?

And you've done a great job of articulating this war on candidate volume and communication and best practice and otherwise. We've also touched a bit on AI and we'll circle back to that. When you're talking to talent leaders, what are the challenges that they're talking to you about? What are the things absolutely top of mind that they're struggling with today?

Matthew Parker: Yeah, so I think application volume is obviously one that if you ask every single talent leader, that is probably one of the highest items on their agenda.

I would say secondly to that is workforce planning. The reality is that a lot of the businesses have historically been really bad at planning for their business and adjusting to macroeconomic changes and so trying to sit down where we've had a real kind of transition couple of years of how businesses think about their growth and their access to money is different and stuff like that, investors are requiring different things.

How do we think about what a workforce plan needs to look like? Then there's this whole idea of quality as well and creating talent density which we can, talk about hours, but I think this is also like, how do we measure the quality of the people that we're bringing into the business and ensure that is going to have a lasting impact on company?

Because if we only have, let's say, 200 hires to make, but we historically would have had 300 hires to make those have to be. extraordinarily impactful people and how are we ensuring that we're acquiring the right people who are solving the right problems for the right period of time. Then the kind of secondary point to this is like I also question the full time model.

I don't think that, I think acquiring skills is a much more interesting way to think about whether or not how you build your business and I'd be interested to see if we do see a shift towards, bringing in contractors who can specialise in understanding specific parts or specific knowledge centers, and they can bring that in for a period of time and then leave. And being much more realistic with that's really what businesses want over a 12 month period.

They can only guarantee and understand that they're going to need to solve this problem over the next 12 months. But once that problem is solved. What do we do with that person? And I think that is the reality of what's happening in lots of businesses around the world that giving full time contracts out to people who realistically, they only have a plan for 12 months.

And so I think it'd be interesting to see if that changes the nature of how we think about the workforce that we build in our companies.

Tom Hacquoil: Love that. Yeah, I think we speak to a quite a lot of people who are having this kind of quite big picture conversation around what they're calling buy versus build, right?

When they think about like labour models in the future. And it's exactly the point that you're making, but approached slightly differently, which is this idea of, yeah, are we hiring full time? Are we hiring part time or contractual or whatever? But also, Are we hiring people today to solve for today's problems that are expensive?

Or are we trying to hire earlier in the sort of employment journey, provide context, training, resources, and support to allow us to address the problems that we're going to still face in five years with a completely different resourcing model, and I think I love, and actually completely agree with your point on most organisations struggle with that kind of longterm lens and we'll find it easier and more effective to just address the problems they're facing today with different skills.

I think what's interesting to me is how likely it is that plays out that way, not because it's not the right answer, but because organisations struggle with this stuff. You look at remote work as an example and young businesses Pinpoint being an example that are smaller. We're 80 people.

We were built in an environment where remote work was an obvious choice for us. And so adapting and accelerating that transition through COVID wasn't that big of a challenge. If you're a 50 year old business and all of your process and the way that you think about execution is derived from proximity and being next to each other and so on and so forth, that transition and your appetite to go through that is very different, right?

And so it'd be interesting to see. Again, I agree that your answer is correct, but it's is the take up going to be there from organisations as that transition plays out?

Matthew Parker: And lets be real as well. There's significant vested interest in big businesses returning their people to office.

I think we talk about this concept of like real estate acquisition and their relationships with local councils. You look at Amazon's office and the way that they talk about tax credits and bring in why they make certain decisions to have certain offices in certain places. I don't believe, genuinely that, the people at the top of the tree are thinking that they can get better outcomes from having people in the office five days a week.

The data just doesn't show it. But I would say that there is going to be other vested interests behind the scenes that are really encouraging significant and large businesses that have massive workforces to bring business back into the office to support communities, which, there's an element of need for that.

It'd be fascinating to see if this conversation genuinely moves forward and what the right outcome is for businesses over the years.

Tom Hacquoil: I completely agree with you and just, I don't have a particularly great view any more than anybody else.

I think just excited to watch how things play out, but yeah, Amazon obviously a great example given the Andy Jassy memo that everyone's going back to the office essentially Jan one, right? And there's this big underlying argument that a lot of organisations, not picking on Amazon, are using that not just to support community and because of economic incentives, to your point, Matthew, but also as a sort of thinly veiled way to try and reduce the scale of the workforce, right?

Matthew Parker: Because these are also the same businesses that ask their employees to go fully remotely, and people move their lives as a result of that policy, and now they cannot, they physically cannot relocate back to Seattle or equivalent or down even in, in London as well, obviously. People can't do that now. And so that's a really nice way for them to exit the business. with a lower cost output.

Tom Hacquoil: For sure. Two more questions, one wildcard and one community driven question. So last wildcard question, which has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but it's just a good way to understand you a little bit better is if you could be an Olympian, what sport would you choose?

Matthew Parker: It's a good question. Some of the things I like most about the Olympics is that you have like objective measures of how strong people are, how fast people are, so I'd probably like to do one of those. Who can lift the most amount of something or who can run the fastest. I'm by no stretch a heavyweight lifter, runner, but I think the idea of working in can I compete to be the strongest in the world or something, or the fastest in the world or something has got a lot of appeal to me.

I'm a team sports player by nature. Like I used to play Ultimate Frisbee. And that has long been trying to become an Olympic sport and should be it's fantastic sport for everyone to watch. So if that ever came around that would have probably been my closest ever bet. It wasn't close, but it would have been my closest ever bet.

Tom Hacquoil: I'm sure you're closer to that than I would have been at any sport to be honest, but I think we are remarkably similar. And I'm with you. I think the idea of these very kind of binary you lifted that weight therefore you win versus something where there's a subjective panel of judges and there's a little bit more ambiguity I think is like really interesting.

Matthew Parker: Once every four years you get to hear my rant about it and my wife gets to roll her eyes.

Tom Hacquoil: Sounds like my house as well. Look, final question, and I think it's again, just this like thematic trends. What are you seeing in the market? You've got your own large community. You're part of HIGHER. You're part of a whole bunch of these things in your voice in the industry.

What are you hearing from community members at the moment? What's the big hot topic? And what are people discussing?

Matthew Parker: Yeah, so I think there's a couple. One is I think I'm seeing it thematically. I'm seeing candidates who really are misunderstanding their role in the candidate ecosystem, right? And I talked about this quite a lot, in that when you write a CV, the first thing that lots of candidates do is sit down and write out the best achievements or their responsibilities or whatever.

And it's completely inwardly focused. And I think that is the wrong way to think about a job search. The first thing you need to do is understand a market map. The roles that are out there, potentially who's looking to hire, but also what sort of roles do you think you could deliver for businesses. And understand what the key themes and what are the key requests for those businesses and what problems those businesses are trying to solve in the industries that you're interested in and then build a, CV or a platform or a profile that speaks to those challenges.

And really candidates are misunderstanding their role in that. You are there to solve a business problem. You're not there to fill a role. You were there to solve a business problem. And if more candidates thought about how I could help that business solve that problem, and how could I position myself to solve that problem, there'd be significantly more successful.

And I think this like mindset is quite inwardly focused and candidates only focus, which, and to be fair, they've likely gone through some really challenging experiences to get to where they are. But if I was to say one tip for a candidate, is think about what the market is looking for first and build for that. Like when you're building a product, you're marketing a product. You don't build something that is good for everyone. You built something that's good for a couple of people and you really juggle down on that niche. And I use this adage, like if you market to everyone, you market to no one.

And that is the exact same thing with your CV. Don't use these AI tools that are going to rewrite blah, blah, blah. Go and find business problems to solve. And tell that business, how are you going to help them solve that problem based on your experience. Then I promise you will stand out. So I think that's, that ties into, how do you write a CV?

That ties into how you interview. It ties into how you job search. And I think that if I was to look at the themes that are coming up in the community, how to write a CV, how do I network effectively and how do I practically go and find my next opportunity and too often we default to what's the quick hack.

Reality is it takes work. An AI is not going to solve this problem for you. You can have a go. Probably not going to solve this problem for you. I don't know anyone who's found a job by using a mass supply AI tool. I've coached myself many people who have done it through the tried and tested methods of trying to solve business problems.

I promise you that will get a better outcome. And I think that is a really consistent theme that is probably not very welcome to lots of candidates, but is the reality I think of what's happening on the other side.

Tom Hacquoil: Great and completely sound advice and yeah, I agree. People don't like being told that they have to do the work bluntly, right?

And I think you're absolutely right to call it out. And I think when that happens, everybody wins because companies have a better lens through which to assess people and candidates have a much higher chance of getting that opportunity.

Matthew Parker: The way that I describe our community is that it's basically we're competing against the weight loss pills.

It's so much harder to get a gym membership, work out every single day, get a personal trainer, eat really healthily. That is a three to six month journey. And I think that is the reality of what your job search is. It's like trying to lose 10 kilograms.

What companies and individuals are selling is I can get you your job immediately. And here's the hack script and here's your pill. And that is just not really a safe or sustainable way to keep weight off or to find your next opportunity.

Tom Hacquoil: Love it. And I think a super great way to wrap up.

So Matthew, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. Everybody, obviously it's super clear. There's a lot to learn from Matthew. How can we go find more about you? Where do we go? Where do people find you?

Matthew Parker: Yeah, sure. You can check out the Open to Work community LinkedIn page.

We have articles coming out every single week as well as unique content from the podcast, which is Open to Work podcast. You can also join the community, which is at www. opentowork. community.

Tom Hacquoil: Amazing. Matthew. Thanks so much. And thank you all for listening. If you want to be featured or know somebody who should be, get them to get in touch with us here at Pinpoint and hope you have a fantastic day.

Thank you very much.