From A People Perspective

Marty (00:00)
Hey, my name is Martin Hawk and you're listening to From a People Perspective. It's a podcast for HR recruitment and operations professionals. If you're looking for a little bit more, you can check out the community at the people, peoplegroup .com. If you're a business owner or if you're HR person or a recruiter and you need a little bit of extra support, we've also got a fractional consultancy called Purple Umbrella. You can check us out at purpleumbrella .co.

Amy McLellan (00:25)
Just see where it goes.

Martin Hauck (00:26)
I'll see where goes.

Amy McLellan (00:29)
There's never a shortage of things to talk about with you.

Martin Hauck (00:32)
No, there is not and that's why I'm excited to have you here today, Amy We're starting it's happening Let's do this. So

Amy McLellan (00:38)
All right, let's do it. Cool.

Martin Hauck (00:44)
A lot of podcasts that I watch are now starting to just jump right into it. So that's kind of the whole thing. Previously, I would do a set of icebreakers and I would do a set of questions. But I know I want to talk to you today on this podcast, but what do you want to talk about?

Amy McLellan (00:50)
Mm-hmm.

Martin, I just like talking to you in general, and we could literally pick a topic out of a hat, and I'm sure we could go to town on it. What I love talking to you about is you, Martin, are a thought leader in the space when it came to talent acquisition. Way back in the day when you first started the People Group, I was like, who is this guy? What is this? This is a virtual community. How is this going? How did he think about this? But

you have been such a big part of my path of like

what to look for when it comes to positioning in the market, how to go about doing an effective job search, how people are going to enter tech, what to keep in mind for that. So in my thought in the universe right now where the market's not great, there's a lot of layoffs going on. A lot of people are feeling hopeless and I myself am part of a layoff and currently a job seeker. You and I could easily have a conversation.

Martin Hauck (02:02)
Yeah.

Amy McLellan (02:10)
and relate to a lot of people and maybe share some insights along the way about how we could help, what they should think about. Yeah, unfortunately, there's just a lot of people who are displaced right now. And I think there's gonna be a lot more. So between your mindset and mine, I think we could have a pretty good conversation.

Martin Hauck (02:20)
Yeah.

Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. So we're going to talk about layoffs today and job sequin. That's what we're going to talk about.

Amy McLellan (02:41)
Layoffs and job seeking. Displacement.

Martin Hauck (02:47)
Displacement is feels like a very Sugar-coated Speaking of dentists. We were talking about dentists just before we started this Like super shit there. There's not it's not sugar-free like it's us. We need a sugar-free term for for it. It sucks

Amy McLellan (02:53)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, it sucks. It sucks. But even not, not just only like people who have been impacted by layoff, but I've been talking to plenty of people that are currently employed somewhere miserable and are having a real hard time getting out and are scared to get out because the job market's not great, right? So I think there's a lot of people struggling.

Martin Hauck (03:29)
Nobody's nobody's coming back from the job hunt. If we're talking like hunter gatherer sense of the word, nobody's coming back like it's great out there. Everybody. Yeah. Back at base camps like cool. I'm just gonna stay here and we're gonna grow some berry bushes and just keep tending to what we've got. And it makes sense. It is such a

Amy McLellan (03:39)
I'm having a great time!

Thank you.

you

Martin Hauck (03:57)
It's it's it's it's it's people are reacting out of fear and and making their choices based on fear and there's I think a lot to be concerned with I think of myself as an optimist in most circumstances and so that's a whole thing to to deal with given what I'm saying, but I've

Amy McLellan (04:03)
Yeah.

Martin Hauck (04:22)
I have, I'm very lucky. when I got laid off in, in March of 2023, I'd been growing this very Bush of the people, people group for the last five years. And it was sort of a choice. Do I go out there into the market that I know is insanely hard?

Amy McLellan (04:33)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (04:45)
Or do I try and give it a go with this whole thing? And it's just had more appeal to me for a variety of reasons. And I think one interesting thing to kind of talk about as well is sort of like the fractional side of things, because a lot of folks...

Amy McLellan (04:49)
Yeah.

Martin Hauck (05:01)
don't have the ability, nor do I, to just say, you know what, I'm gonna try this for a year and see how it goes, and if it doesn't, then I'll go get a job. We still have to put food on the table in some capacity. Still have to keep a loop over our heads. And so fractional is a thing, and consulting is a thing, and people have a ton of awesome skills, and they're figuring out how to kind of...

Amy McLellan (05:10)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Martin Hauck (05:27)
weather the storm while they look for their next thing if that's what they intend on doing so

Amy McLellan (05:32)
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, it's a good time to be thinking that way too, because businesses have such a limited budget. So non-committal relationships and you're adding value and you're getting a little bit of coin along the way. It's absolutely a smart approach because I've learned diversifying your income is probably smart. Because you never know what tomorrow will bring.

Martin Hauck (05:56)
Yeah.

Amy McLellan (06:02)
Yeah.

Martin Hauck (06:02)
So all your eggs in one basket for a second there, like that analogy is, so do you just get two baskets and then put some of your eggs in two different baskets or am I just thinking way too much about this?

Amy McLellan (06:16)
I don't know, maybe, I don't know, I'm not, yeah, I don't know. I'm still early days, my friend. I'm figuring it out myself. But I'm learning along the way. It's a different world. It's not the same world that, I don't know about your parents, but my parents had this mindset of go to university, get a degree, don't even worry about it, you just need a degree and then you'll have a career and you'll be fine and like.

no thought process that went into like a choice of what program I was going to go into in university, no thought process of like where I was going to go and have a career in life. anyway, yeah, I just think that like there's a lot of people along the way that got

Martin Hauck (07:01)
The nice thing about being lost is once you realize you're lost, then you get started on finding out where you're going.

Right? And so it might suck at first. And I think that's what a layoff is. Is you become lost for a little bit. I don't know what I'm going to do next.

Amy McLellan (07:23)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (07:25)
you start having to ask yourself the hard questions of what is it that I really want to do? And the pandemic amplified that by 10 X because everybody's like, Hmm.

Amy McLellan (07:32)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (07:39)
I'm stuck inside all day. I realized that maybe the engagement I have with fellow colleagues at work was adding a bit of a, an experience to the overall experience. But when it comes down to it, I don't actually like the work that I'm doing. And so when that gets taken away and you puts a bigger.

Amy McLellan (07:59)
Yeah. Yeah.

Martin Hauck (08:06)
magnifying glass on the stuff that you are doing. And then a lot of people started reinventing themselves or starting side hustles that involved things that either they knew they loved or people just started doing more stuff so that they could find out what it is that they loved.

Amy McLellan (08:09)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I the most important place of where to start with all of this because you know when you talk to someone who's on the job search you and I could talk about you know bad practices or things that we've seen that people it's just not an effective approach and one of those is that they're just gonna like they call it spray and pray right like I'll just apply to everything that's on the internet without taking that reflective moment to think

what's the type of job, what's the industry, you know, like how do I want to be spending my days, what's the life I want to create, and then start to build themselves to be applicable into those types of roles. And that's not easy, like it takes a lot of reflection and sometimes a little bit of heartbreak along the way to figure out what it is that you really want to do.

Martin Hauck (09:15)
Yeah.

Amy McLellan (09:15)
But you need to also figure that out because you have to articulate it and you have to be able to strongly articulate it to convince the person to hire you or spend time with you in some regard.

Martin Hauck (09:28)
Yeah, becomes sales. So salespeople have a pretty easy time of getting their next role because their job is effectively the job of job seeking. But if you don't have that skillset baked in, it's sort of like starting from scratch to a certain extent. And then you become good at it, but like you spend a few months, weeks getting...

Amy McLellan (09:40)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (09:55)
ramped up on what it is to be a full-time job seeker and oftentimes I think the Surprising part is it is a full-time job. And if you don't treat it as that you're gonna have a bad time

Amy McLellan (09:59)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, it's true. And then like, I mean, we could take this conversation in so many different dynamics, because it's like, yeah, you do have to treat it like a full time job. But it is emotionally exhausting. And so you also really have to balance in

ways that you are filling your cup and happy to keep going because you have to keep showing up as an optimistic candidate, right? So in order to do that, you got to do something for your own mental well-being too. So you got to you got to do it all.

Martin Hauck (10:46)
One thing that stands out to me, and I'd love to get your take on this, is people see, every time I talk to somebody who is in job search mode, I ask them, walk me through your process. And they'll say, well, I applied to this job, and now I'm waiting to hear back. And sometimes people will say that they also connect with someone on LinkedIn and let them know that they've applied for the job.

Amy McLellan (11:05)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (11:15)
But that's it. And then, you know, that activity for that company is done in terms of outreach and attempts and efforts. And the one thing that always surprised me and I think this is just because I grew up in sales and cold sales where it's like literally dialing for dollars and just picking up the phone and I would dial a phone number for a company and I wanted to sell them nuts and bolts literally.

Amy McLellan (11:20)
No.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (11:43)
And he would get the automated machine where it says.

Press one for Jimmy and purchasing press two for Diane and accounting, etc, etc. Right? So you press one for Jimmy and purchasing and you go to Jimmy's voicemail. You say, hey, Jimmy, it's Martin from fast. And I just wanted to see if you'd like to buy some nuts and bolts from me. You hang up. You call the same number again and you talk to Diane and accounting and say, Hey, Diane, sorry, I was trying to get a hold of Jimmy and you just go through and so like that's door number two for that attempt, but nobody

Amy McLellan (12:15)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (12:18)
Nobody necessarily has this training and it's obnoxious. Don't get me wrong. Like that's an obnoxious thing to do. And if somebody did that to me today, now I would react very poorly. However, if done well, it can be a endearing to, you might want to just extend an olive branch to that person if you do it well. And

Amy McLellan (12:21)
Mm-hmm.

you

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Martin Hauck (12:43)
And I find that people are just like knocking on the front door and if nobody answers the front door, they just move on to the next house. Meanwhile, that house that they've been knocking on has like 400 other doors because each person at that company is essentially a door and you don't, if you knock on one person's door and you get to talk to somebody, that's better than just accept, just moving on from that house. And I think that's the one thing that.

Amy McLellan (12:56)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (13:11)
people just give up after the first try. Rightfully so, because it's exhausting. But that also kind of paints a picture, I think, of how much extra effort you do have to put into the job search.

Amy McLellan (13:23)
Totally, totally Martin. And like, I mean, we could talk also about different tactics of how you can keep opening doors, but what I'm hearing a lot from people that I'm talking to is like, what do you say? And I'm going back to a time you and I came together, I worked for Queens University, and I asked you to come in and talk to a group of MBA students that all wanted to enter the tech industry. And I...

This is like burned in my memory because I loved every minute of this of this virtual session that we had. I think it was like a bit of an &A. I was talking with you and asking questions and someone asked a question of like, well, what could your company provide me or like what could your company offer me? And you were like, no, no, no. What can you offer me? And you need to do your homework to figure out.

what I need a little bit in advance in order to position yourself to respond. So I think when you're talking about knocking on doors, like there's a lot of questions of like, what do you say and people are making the mistake of saying.

Hi, I'm so and so and I can do this and this and this and you should hire me. And it's like, thank you. There's a thousand and one of you, but you like you really haven't gone to that next step to showcase your value. And a lot of that means that you have to have a lot of exploratory conversations. And so you have to be able to open the door or get someone to open the door to want to have a conversation and share their knowledge with you. Anyway.

Martin Hauck (15:04)
If you're a job seeker, you're basically a vampire.

Amy McLellan (15:08)
What do mean by that one?

Martin Hauck (15:09)
Your job is to get them to let you in, right? Because you're knocking the door, they need to invite you in, right? And so you don't knock on a person's door and say, hey, why should I come into your house? Like, why should you let me in? No, right? It's the opposite. It's like, you need to be like, hey, I've got this.

Amy McLellan (15:14)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (15:35)
charcuterie board, it's delicious and fresh and I've got these pastries. Do you want to invite me in and we can talk about why your house is so awesome? Like it's just like the complete reverse mindset and I don't get it because, but I think it's the first, I don't understand why that's the case, but that is truly the sort of like reverse mentality. I have a question for you.

Amy McLellan (15:44)
you

Yes.

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (16:03)
Why are we talking about this in the first place?

Amy McLellan (16:05)
Why are we talking about this? I mean, ultimately we're talking about this is because it's something that is impacting my life and I'm hearing about it impacting other people's lives as well. And I think it's great that we share a message out there and try to share some thoughts and some ideas. It's something, it's interesting how, you know, when you're almost 20 years into a career, when you look back,

how it all kind of makes sense and it all kind of stacks together, but there's no way you could have forecasted that right from the beginning. There's just no way, but it's, it's hilarious, you know, how all these things kind of work together and where I started and where I am now, I have a very unique understanding of the job market and how to get a job. And I'm talking to people right now that are being displaced that all like across all industries and it's.

Martin Hauck (16:36)
No.

Amy McLellan (17:01)
really interesting because like this has changed so much in the last 10 years, but I'm talking to people who are software developers and all they had to do was like take us off. We're engineering degree and they were easily hired and they worked and now all of a sudden they don't have jobs and they don't know how to get a job because they never had to figure out how to get a job in the first place. Or there's people that have worked in higher ed or in the administrative roles that

have been there for like decades and now even those industries are being hit, right? And they don't know really the most effective way to go out and get a job in this market. So all that said, like I think there's opportunity to share strategies for the modern job search and best approaches. But there's also an opportunity to share that you're not alone. Because there's a lot of people that I'm talking to that feel

worthless, embarrassed, and they isolate. And they're not like putting in their LinkedIn circle open for work because it's humiliating a little bit and they, you know, there's ego there. And so, you know, if there's a platform to say like, you guys aren't alone and that there's an opportunity to bring people together in that community to share and support one another, then.

Martin Hauck (18:26)
Yeah.

What's the...

I'm losing my train of thought now, but I'll edit that. I have a little marker thing here. So in terms of

your, yeah, go for it.

Amy McLellan (18:48)
Let me ask you a question. Why did you want to have me on your podcast?

Martin Hauck (18:57)
Well, every time we have a chat, I am always...

So grateful for having met you in the first place and you reached out because you were at Queens and you were looking to help your MBA grads get their next gig. And so anytime we've always had a discussion, you've been a real energizer for me, right? And I think a lot of that has to do with

Amy McLellan (19:26)
Hmm.

Martin Hauck (19:29)
There's a lot of uncertainty in the job hunt, but there's also lot of uncertainty in just building something. And so you were one of the first people to just kindly, not gently, wasn't, you're like, that's a pretty cool thing. You're doing, you get a decent amount of that, but you're like, almost like splashed a big bucket of water on me. You're like, this is, do you, you don't even realize it was such a, and it was such a, you know,

Amy McLellan (19:36)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (20:00)
interesting moment for me because it woke me up. You woke me up from my own kind of days like I got a lot of stuff going on and I got this thing and that thing and and it just kind of helped nudge I need to take this thing more seriously. Amy's not wrong. Like

Amy McLellan (20:03)
Hmm.

Well, you can't see the forest through the trees at that time, right? And there was, you know, when you were making a choice of do I go into this full, do I go back to the, like, there was, there's pros and cons to each. And so you're working your way through those trees, right? And you, I don't think you were seeing the impact that you're having on a national and international scale.

Martin Hauck (20:21)
Yeah.

Amy McLellan (20:40)
And then COVID hit and how isolated everyone was and how these, this community, but communities in general were literally a lifeline. And also just the gift of reciprocity, right? Like you were seeing people in, putting out,

putting out questions, like this is a challenge I'm having at work, and then having counterparts from across the country sharing ideas with one another, and each of them being able to show up as experts in their space because they have an army of people behind them empowering them, like this is huge. Every time I was talking to people in talent acquisition and making my circuit, I would be like, have you heard of the People People group? This is gold. And then they'd get on and be like, this is gold.

you

Martin Hauck (21:33)
No, it was really, I mean, why we're having this conversation today, I think what you're working on and the direction you're heading, we've had a few conversations about it. It's really exciting to hear that you are doing something similar or wanna do something similar, but for a very, it's unfortunately a growing group of underserved people. Like everybody's going through this experience, but there is...

Amy McLellan (21:58)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (22:03)
Not it's not a huge business to go and help people find jobs. There's a huge business in recruitment where people are currently working and you help steal people from one company to get them to the next company. And it's a step up financially or responsibility wise, but to help folks like you've got EI right from the government, which is just

Amy McLellan (22:27)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (22:29)
Basically a giant Olympic sized swimming pool of paperwork that eventually runs out in terms of its support And then and then what?

Amy McLellan (22:33)
you

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (22:41)
your friends, your own motivation, your own motivation drops in terms of it is grueling, right? If you're a salesperson, the first six months, the first six months of being a salesperson, you get comfortable with being told to screw off, right? But that's a choice you made to a degree, right? You chose to become your job. You chose your job.

Amy McLellan (22:55)
Yeah.

Martin Hauck (23:06)
where you got a job and it was sales and so you went through the process of it. Typically most people don't choose to be on the hunt for their job. And when they do choose, they're at their company. So they've got that safety net of still got my job and I'm gonna balance the act of looking and the act of either phoning it in or doing your job and doing a nice transition so that you can move on to the next thing. So.

Amy McLellan (23:14)
No.

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (23:34)
You're at this point where not only are you just dealing with the mental challenge that impacts you physically, but you're dealing with now I got to get told no a bunch of times and you don't even oftentimes you don't even know that I'm and you're having more conversations than I am given what you're up to. But I'm curious how you envision like an ideal support system for folks in this.

Amy McLellan (24:02)
Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of power in communities, as we know. And you've been a massive leader in that space and really have woken me up and I'm sure a lot of others. But I'm also part of a few other virtual communities and it's really amazing to see again that reciprocity and how far that takes people.

Martin Hauck (24:10)
You

Amy McLellan (24:30)
and the connections that would just never typically happen is pretty awesome. So, you know, why don't we set up a virtual community for job seekers? And I'm not saying this in terms of like looking to monetize this. I'm saying this because I think this world needs it right now. I think there's a lot of struggling people and I think it's...

Good to do good. And I don't know if I should say this on your podcast, but like with Trump-a-lumpa, think the silver lining is that there's a whole empowerment of people who want to do good for society right now. And so if I'm in a position where I have a unique expertise and perspective on the job search, I can relate. I'm very much part of that.

and I can share that out on scale, but more importantly, create a platform where people can come together and share with each other. That could be a really powerful thing. So you and I both know the best way to get a job is through your network. So again, a community provides you with a network that can give you ideas or give you advice, good or bad.

Martin Hauck (25:36)
Mm-hmm.

Amy McLellan (25:46)
can give you referrals, et cetera. But if you set up a community quite right in a place that people can be a bit vulnerable and it's safe, and really everyone will be on the same page, because regardless of where you are in your career, you're all job seeking, to really be more of a support group with one another. Because one thing when I'm having conversations with people one on one, regardless if I've shared an idea of how to...

basically get a hiring manager's attention. You know, like if I give them some strategy or approach of how to do that, regardless if we do that, just the venting and being able to talk to somebody and like not feeling alone and isolated was really the great piece. And that was what lifted people to have that optimism to show up the next day and be like, hey, hire me. So.

Again, like if I can create a platform that brings people together. Now, I don't want to get in over my head. I'm not going to the scale of the people-people group rate yet, but I do want to launch something I'm calling the Seeker Society, which is just basically allowing people to come in, get access to a Slack channel that has modern day job search strategies to it, and join a very small cohort of fellow job seekers to meet once a week and

Martin Hauck (26:39)
Which way?

Amy McLellan (27:08)
talk through their job search. And there's no limit of themes of, you know, like everything from tell me about yourself to how to get through applicant tracking systems. The other thing, you know, I'm glad that we're doing this podcast together is because of your network and who's gonna be listening to this. There's a lot of people in talent acquisition that want to give back, but it's not your job. Like how many times...

I mean, times if you had applicants come forward and they're like, can you give me some feedback? And it's like, I'd love to give you some feedback, but I don't have time. It's not really my job to do that right now. If you can come, you know, join as a moderator for one of the weekly sessions and be able to give feedback to a group of people or join me for our LinkedIn live session and share some of your knowledge, that can be really impactful for people too.

Martin Hauck (27:58)
No. So for the folks listening, reach out to Amy on Slack or on LinkedIn.

Amy McLellan (28:04)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (28:05)
and you want to give back. And I know there's a lot. It was interesting. So I'll put some data onto this that you'll probably appreciate that folks listening will also potentially appreciate. So a while back, I'm, don't know, maybe three, four years ago, I was looking to monetize the people, people group and the goal with people, people group very similarly as I just wanted to give back. It was never built like the first five years. It was just all out of pocket on my end.

Amy McLellan (28:15)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (28:31)
And then we started looking at partnerships and stuff. But the essence of it was always just to create room and space for people to help each other out. That's, that's in the same profession, right? We all have this, this, this thread of we're all in HR recruitment or operations. How can we help each other out? Right. But while we were exploring ways to monetize, the one thing that we noticed was that the candidate channel.

Amy McLellan (28:38)
Yeah.

Martin Hauck (28:59)
had a lot of good resumes coming through and we did a survey once and was like, we got up to, and this was pretty recent, but over like 500 people have gotten jobs through the People People Group.

Amy McLellan (29:13)
Yeah, I believe that. That's awesome.

Martin Hauck (29:16)
And, and this isn't to be like Mr. Capitalist, like we need to be making money every time someone gets a job. Like that's not the point. However, if there's a way to incentivize people to come to the People People group more often and look through the candidate profiles and hire those people and we increase the number of hires and maybe we make it a platform and there's, you know, a fee to it, but we can get more people hired.

Amy McLellan (29:22)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (29:46)
what outcome is that gonna create? Ideally a positive one, right? And so we put together a group of 100 people who wanted to be part of this beta cohort of just getting data from them on, okay, so you share a lot of candidates profiles within the people people group. If this person gets hired, would you, are you more or less interested in?

Amy McLellan (29:48)
in

Martin Hauck (30:12)
Like, are you going to share more candidates if you got paid for it? Right? If the person you presented, cause you're solving a problem over marketplace, you need a, it's a two-sided marketplace. need companies that need to hire people and you need people that those companies can hire. And we have, we have all those profiles within the community. And so out of the hundred people we talk to,

Amy McLellan (30:31)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (30:34)
There were some people that were like, yes, this is a driving factor. I'd be excited at the potential for making a little bit of money for sharing a person's profile and helping them get hired. So we wanted a triple win. We wanted the company to win because they hired someone. We want the candidate to win because they got hired. We want the person who made the introduction to get a little bit of money because they made the introduction to the person that got hired. And so there's a whole ecosystem there. What was really interesting.

Amy McLellan (30:59)
Yeah. Yeah.

Martin Hauck (31:04)
is most of the people in the people people group and it doesn't necessarily surprise me just by you know if I zoom out a little bit but most people are like I'm not in this for the money nobody really wanted to like yes it would be nice but they're not it's coming from to your point like a place of people just want to help each other out right life's hard enough losing your job is hard enough all that fun stuff people want to help other people

And it's just like, think the big challenge for you as you do this is for some reason there's a stigma around it, right? And you've got to get people onto the dance floor. Once you get people onto the dance floor, it's a little bit awkward at first, but magic starts to happen. People start having a good time, right?

Amy McLellan (31:54)
I love that analogy. We should use the dance floor analogy way more often. It's true. How many wallflowers, like I'm married to one actually, that will never budge from the, but as soon as you get them out, having a good time.

Martin Hauck (32:09)
Yeah. I can't believe, you know, it's just like, it's, there's a lot of upfront friction and I mean, I can't, I don't want to, have to just check myself real quick by no means is that analogy mine. I don't know if you've heard it or not, but it it's been used a lot for the giving examples in terms of like diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. so, you know, diversity is having a lot of different people from different

backgrounds at the party. So that's good. Inclusion is being invited to the party and belonging is being asked to dance. And I think that's the piece that is missing a lot of the times. Not only in cultures when it comes to DEIV, but when it comes to job seeking, right? Is

Amy McLellan (32:43)
Yeah.

Yeah, I'm seeing that parallel.

Martin Hauck (33:06)
You lose, like if you think of the off-boarding experience, right? The off-boarding experience is like, okay, you're now no longer part of your company Slack. And so all your day-to-day rituals and traditions and people that you talk to, it's like getting kicked out of a WhatsApp group. Imagine getting kicked out of your family WhatsApp group. That's what happened.

Amy McLellan (33:23)
Yay.

It's true. It's true. Yeah. And that's that emotional balance that I keep coming back to because there are so many people that are carrying so much stress. Like they're not only just brokenhearted from they've been investing so much into their company or to that particular project day in and day out for that tap just to shut right off.

but now they're carrying financial stress and other things that are just typical part of life stress that it all just layers on. so people's wellbeing is actually what is most alarming and most incentivizing to wanna bring people together. Because when you are together and you're realizing you're not alone, there's just so much motivation that can come from that.

just being able to relate to one another. I'm a person who doesn't mind being vulnerable and I also know enough that if you're on a job search, you gotta tell people. You gotta tell people you're looking and you gotta tell people exactly what you're looking for. And that has actually opened the door to a lot of people coming forward and saying.

I'm stuck, I'm not doing well, like I'm having these challenges. And unfortunately in this market, it's pretty crazy how many people I'm talking to on a weekly basis that are not in a good place. So anyway, here we are. Look at us. Who would have thought?

Martin Hauck (35:01)
Look at us.

I'm curious, there's this aspect of...

people being in a room together in a group chat together and all having this like lived experience like, everybody's job search beginnings are gonna have interesting, you know, origin stories. And then once you get into the routine of it, but then there's this other flip side where the community gets to rally around the good news. And if you're isolated in your job search,

seeing other people get jobs on LinkedIn is like, okay, but if you see a person get a job, who's a member of a community that you're a part of, and maybe they asked a question and you gave them an answer and that was a tip that helped them get the job, then you see them get the job. There is so much more connection and just motivation, I think for yourself individually to be like,

Amy McLellan (35:53)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (36:03)
They got the job. I'm rooting for them. And so it's just because it's so grueling on your own. like LinkedIn is just professional Facebook and everybody on Facebook is trying to live their best lives and you only see parts of right?

Amy McLellan (36:10)
Mm-hmm.

Well, that's exactly where my brain went to as well, right? Like you think of Instagram, everyone's posting just their best lives. You're not seeing like whatever hardships they're going through on a day-to-day basis. So you just make the assumption, they're having these great lives. And we have to keep in mind too, like LinkedIn is built in a way to promote when people get a new job.

so you're going to see a lot more of that in, if you're in the space that you're looking for a job. And it's interesting because Bordy, which I'm sure you've heard of that circulating has taken that approach for their go-to-market strategy to use the connectors to put a position up on there, right? Genius, because the amount of impressions just go right up. So, you know, keep these things in mind. but if you really think about it, there are way more people around you.

that are actively seeking than actually are securing employment. So we're all being bamboozled. And it's hard to keep it all straight about what's really going on here.

Martin Hauck (37:28)
What, at what point did you say I'm gonna do something about this beyond just for myself?

Amy McLellan (37:36)
So I've been part of now two mass layoffs out of the tech industry in the last couple years. And by the time you get laid off by the second one and you kind of know what to expect and you're really kind of gearing up for what to expect, I've been able to go through the second one with a much more level-headed mind and a much more effective approach. But I've also been thinking a lot about what, again, like what do I want to do? What really matters to me? And I think

And the people who I've been connecting with as well who are being guided and making decisions around what's important to them is being really inspiring. And ultimately, I just want to do good for our society on some level. There's a bunch of different issues that I feel passionately about and which I'd like to give back. But ultimately, like economic developments and like being able to have people sustain a livelihood and how that not

just benefits the individual, but the families and the communities and all of that. You need work in order to do it and businesses need to be thriving in order to give the jobs to keep going. So I just feel that from my past experiences and the perspective and insights that I have, that I'm in a unique position and a way to give back is to help job seekers. So yeah.

That's what's bringing me to make this decision of trying to put together a virtual community.

Martin Hauck (39:10)
And so maybe can we double click on the uniquely qualified aspect? Cause maybe just kind of do a quick deep dive on, your background and your experience. Cause we haven't really jumped into that at all. I think like to your point about nobody could have predicted. I love that. How like the career path is not foreseeable or predictable. I didn't even realize this. I don't even know if you talked about it, but I just did a quick skim of your LinkedIn.

Amy McLellan (39:17)
Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (39:39)
So you started off running your own surf shop?

Amy McLellan (39:41)
Yeah!

Martin Hauck (39:44)
So let's just talk about that for a quick second and then... No!

Amy McLellan (39:46)
Has that never come up between us before? Yeah, that's one of those things. They're like, tell two truths and a lie and I throw it in there and everyone's like, that's a lie. But yes, I did. First, I was in my 20s, moved out to Halifax, Nova Scotia. My boyfriend and I at the time now husband. We opened a retail store, a surf shop.

He has a background in surfing. He got me into surfing. I'm not on his level. But yeah, we opened a surf shop. We were both brick and mortar and online. And this is going to date me a little bit, but like we were one of the first hundred retailers using Shopify at that time. And we found Shopify because they're being profiled in a snowboard magazine. So if you know like the roots of Shopify, like...

Martin Hauck (40:37)
Yeah, Toby Toby ran us Toby was running a snowboarding. He was trying to sell snowboards online, right?

Amy McLellan (40:45)
That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And you're reading this magazine, you're like, what's this? This is out of Waterloo. All right, let's try it. Let's put some stuff online, see if we can make some more sales. Yeah, it was pretty cool.

Martin Hauck (40:57)
OG, the first hundred customers on Shopify. That's really cool. It has nothing to do with helping people like land careers, but I wanted to start there because I saw it and I was like, I need to know a little bit more about this. Next time we chat, I'll probably forget it, but I'm like, tell me that story about the surf shop. But so you go from that and then you enter into this world of

Amy McLellan (41:02)
I know. I know. I know.

No.

Yeah.

You

I know.

Martin Hauck (41:25)
academia from my perspective and I'd love for you to clear that up. But like what's the 30 second elevator pitch and why does it make you uniquely qualified to help people find their next gig?

Amy McLellan (41:27)
There it is.

Yeah, so I have 14 years of work experience working in higher education at four of Canadian's, Canada's top universities. That's Waterloo, Dalhousie, McGill and Queen's. And in those roles, I did corporate development for them. So I would help move students into jobs as fast as possible and graduates into jobs as fast as possible. And there's also some kind of key metrics like.

the size of the organization, how much they're getting paid, certain titles and so on. All that goes back to rankings. All that goes back to driving admissions for universities, which drives revenue for universities. So when you have that perspective, and I never physically worked on those campuses, I worked within the industries themselves, and I was pursuing people in talent acquisition. I wanted to understand what the skill sets were needed, where the hiring gaps were needed.

what's the best approach in terms of finding this job and then bridging this back to the school. And sometimes that was influencing curriculum. Sometimes I was bringing people in to be panels or speakers or even sometimes associate professors in order to bridge academia and what was in the needs in the industry. I worked across all the major professional industries, finance, accounting, but my love was in tech.

and tech was moving and doing something really different and they didn't need academia, which was really fun because I don't have an MBA. So it was kind cool to see all of a sudden, you don't need an MBA to go and have this very exciting career. This is an industry that's exploding. Jobs are changing. What is needed to go into these jobs are changing.

and the way in which we're recruiting is changing significantly. So that brought me into basically micro credentials and upskilling in different ways that you can gain new training and new skill sets in order to advance your career. So transitioned into EdTech, joining Coursera, worked on Google professional certificates.

and used that experience to come back into the Canadian market and work with universities to build online programming and bring that to market through key path education. So functionally, I do strategic partnerships, sales, go to market strategies, industry wise, higher ed, ed tech and front end technologies. So hopefully that gives a little bit of scope of my background.

Martin Hauck (44:13)
No, no, it's very helpful and it makes complete sense. You've probably seen so many instances of people getting hired and having talked to so many students, graduates, and employees and talent acquisition folks. You were the middle person between.

both sides of the fence, so to speak, right? People looking for the jobs and you're talking to all the people that are looking for people for those jobs. And just constantly trying to find that help people just kind of align. And it's always interesting kind of how it's a bit misaligned at first, but then you just make a few tweaks to the process or.

Amy McLellan (44:40)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (44:59)
You know, like candidates know that you should be doing X instead of Y. You're like, employers know that like, Hey, we exist and there's a whole pool of talent over here. And they're just like, my God, I didn't even know. Cause there's so much out there. Right. So no very uniquely qualified for it. What's the most exciting part for you in terms of this project?

Amy McLellan (45:03)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

I think it's ultimately if I can see a few moments of celebration along the way, not just in terms of people getting hired, but being celebrated because they've been recognized for the struggle or they work together in order to overcome whatever they're trying to get through. that would feel incredibly rewarding. it would also

might give me that incentive to keep growing this community beyond something small and intimate. If it works, and if the market continues to go the way it does, and I think it will, then there might be a need for a community like this. Like, you know, Martin, there's a lot you have to invent. You describe this as a baby, right? Like, so you really have to invest into it. And, you know, I'm cautious because as a job seeker,

I'm a parent, I'm motivated to get a job and start generating income again. And I don't wanna dilute from those efforts. like as we say, it's a full-time job to get a job, right? So, I don't know, I also feel like if you do good, if you're doing good, it all will work itself out. So we'll see, let's see how this goes, right? You just have to kind of go for it.

Martin Hauck (46:45)
You're putting out into the world what you're hoping to get back to a certain degree. But you're not, yeah, you're not, it's interesting because that's such a, it's very, you're very aware of having to find that balance between, hey, I gotta help myself, right? You gotta help yourself first before you can really help others. And I know, I think.

Amy McLellan (46:48)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (47:07)
I know that you're doing that, but there's also room and capacity to help others along the way, even while you're helping yourself. And so as long as you're striking that balance, while we're on the subject, what is the ideal next thing for you?

Amy McLellan (47:14)
Mm-hmm.

like job wise? Employment wise? well thanks for asking. I know, right? I'm okay, so like the two, I think my two best qualities is I think I'm pretty good at building relationships with people and secondly is and secondly is

Martin Hauck (47:24)
Yeah.

No talent acquisition people are listening to this. That's not my demo.

What are you talking about?

Amy McLellan (47:53)
organizational rigor. Like I'm pretty keen on doing things effectively and efficiently. And so that's where it drives my interest for new technologies and operations and so on. And I like driving solutions too. So that is the sales hat. Like it's harder to find. I'm a bit of a generalist, but ultimately strategic partnerships, sales, go-to-market strategy, account management.

My background is in workforce development, learning and development, digital learning products. So EdTech is a great space for me to be looking in. But you also have to be like, and this is any job seeker that's still listening, you have to be mindful of what's available in the market. So I've been pursuing EdTech, my particular functions within EdTech for about three months now. And I'm paying attention to how the market is going.

At Tech, there's very few jobs in Canada as is most of them are in the US and even just a few years ago, the US was really opening the door to Canadian talent. Ultimately, we are great talent and we came at a cheaper price tag, but it's flipped a lot now and even the Canadian tech companies are really pushing into the States. Again, Trump, Olimpa, they're going to have to continue that trend to keep more presence and a footprint into the States. So even the Canadian Ed Tech.

jobs are going into the state. So you really have to be mindful of like what you're well positioned for and what you should be chasing to be most effective to a match to a company that makes sense and they can easily transition you in. But also, is there a market there for you? So right now I'm at a place to see, you know, like, is this still the best approach or maybe I need to go back more specifically into SaaS? I'm not sure.

I would love it actually, because I'm waiting on a response. I'm the final two with an EdTech company and I'm waiting on a response any minute. I would love to get that email in the middle of this podcast. Wouldn't it be that dramatic? Let's go check my inbox. Let's see. No, no, nothing yet. So I don't know. Maybe by the time this podcast airs, we'll all know whether I got the job or not.

Martin Hauck (50:01)
Let's do it.

I almost want you to like text me the person's name so that if I knew them I could just call them. I'm like you need to tell Amy right

Amy McLellan (50:22)
you're so awesome like that. But there's so many tricks along the way. Again, like this is why it's great to bring people together to share because there's so many tricks along the way. I had somebody this week, they were really, really interested in this one job and the hiring manager had posted out on LinkedIn, I'm looking for this candidate and everyone's liking and so on. And they sent me the job and said, I want this job. Can you go comment on

there and tag me and say that you'd be great for this job. And I was like, absolutely, I'm going to go do that. And and did that. I don't know this person, right? I'm just commenting on job. This, this, you'd be great for this fit, which she would have been. She is absolutely great fit. But within the hour, the hiring manager had clicked on her profile, right? So it was like these little tricks of how you're going to get there a little bit faster can be shared.

Martin Hauck (51:15)
That's true. It's that's true for a lot of different angles as well But it's also very under like it's a huge tip what you just shared is a huge tip in terms of just being able to get the Unbiased third party referral versus like I'd be great at this Like of course you're gonna say that right, but if someone else says

Amy McLellan (51:23)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (51:43)
like that are so much more value. We see it all the time in the people people group when people are like, I'm looking for this particular type of software for our company. And the recommendations that come in are the ones that are often because there's enough stuff out there online. There's review pages and sponsors and ads and nobody knows how to discern. So at the end of the day, people just want to trust other people.

Amy McLellan (52:08)
Yeah, yeah, it's so true. And Martin, like, when we began this conversation, we were talking about needing to knock on 400 doors, right? And you have to figure out, you can't just keep using your in-mails over and over again. You have to find different ways to get through and knock on doors and find different people.

if you are part of a virtual community, you've already upped your credibility to have those doors open and you're going to find doors that you didn't find before. So, you know, like, I think I was the only academic partner you let into the people people group. I had to like swear up and down. I wasn't going to be selling anything in there whatever. I'm here to help and to listen. That's all. But

Martin Hauck (52:46)
Ha

Amy McLellan (52:53)
If I message somebody through LinkedIn versus message them through the people people group, just the credibility that I was in the community and I was participating in the community opened that door. Right. And I found people I would have never met along the way. Right. If I was only using one tool. So the power of community.

Martin Hauck (53:14)
I'll give so they talk about boys club a lot online and now like with Monday girl like their their slogan is like the boys club for women which is awesome and I love what they're doing doing amazing work but the thing like for some reason I've always I'm just gonna go off on a tangent here that's a little bit weird but bear with me this is the second time I've talked about this on on a podcast

Amy McLellan (53:27)
Yeah, it's cool. Yeah.

Martin Hauck (53:41)
But for some reason at, I don't know, 20, 22, 25, I was like maybe two or three years into living in Toronto, having grown up in Guelph. I was working at this hardware store where I'm literally selling nuts and bolts. And this old guy is like, I don't know, 50, 60 years old. It's just like a super friendly Gordo is his name. And he would come up and he was the driver and he would pick up the boxes of the nuts and bolts and bring them back to the company that ordered them.

Amy McLellan (54:03)
Gorda.

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (54:10)
And so I noticed he had a ring on his finger and I'm like, Gordo, that the, are you a Mason? Are you a free Mason? And he's like, yeah, just can't talk. Just can't talk. Yeah. Like, well, why are you wearing it? If you can't talk about it, Gordo. And he was just like, blah, blah. And he like had like, he's a really happy go lucky kind of person. I always just loved his energy when he came into the shop.

Amy McLellan (54:22)
Don't talk about it!

Martin Hauck (54:36)
And so he would come in pretty regularly. He would have like a weekly pickup and whatnot. I forget the company he worked at, but he would come in and I just started making a joke of it. Cause he just like, no, I'm not going to tell you, you know, whatever. I asked him again the second time and Gordo, like the next time he came in with Gordo, what's up with the ring? Tell me just who's ruling the world really like who's ruling the world. Let me know you're a stone cutter. I've seen the Simpsons. Just let me in on this.

Amy McLellan (54:49)
you

You

Yes!

Martin Hauck (55:06)
but I'll give you a discount on your nuts and bolts. Like, just let me know. You're like, I can't do that. I can't do that. And you just walk by, right? And then like next week or like a few months go by and I'm not always at the front counter or something. I'm in the back room. I'm seeing customers. I'm like, Gordo, man, gotta let me, you're killing me here. Just let me know what's going on. He's like, Martin, I'm so glad you asked me three times because...

Amy McLellan (55:13)
This

Martin Hauck (55:33)
That's how many times you have to ask me before I can hand you this piece of paper. He pulls that he goes into his pocket. This is like unintentional theatrics to a certain degree, but he had this piece of paper in his pocket the whole time. He's like, I want you to fill this out and then we're going to talk.

And I'm like, what? So the Masons, the Freemasons have a rule where you have to express interest of your own, your own interest, three times in a row to like actually even be considered. So I had to like fill out all this paperwork. It wasn't like a, an Olympic size swimming pool of paper. It's like a kiddie pool of paperwork, but you still had to fill it out.

Amy McLellan (55:51)
You got invited in. You got invited in.

Mm-hmm.

Thank

Martin Hauck (56:21)
And you know, fast forward, go through all this. Like I was a Mason for five years. I'm like the only 20, the only 22 year old there. And, and there's like a few guys that are like in their thirties and they've already got kid young kids. And I wasn't at that stage in my life. And the most of them were like older guys retired and everything like that. And I'm like, it was really out of place, but there was something really endearing about the experience where at the end of the day,

Amy McLellan (56:26)
Were you really? my gosh, can we talk about it? No, I need to

Martin Hauck (56:49)
It didn't, I'll give you this on the day that I was initiated and there are secret handshakes, which is kind of lame and also super cool at the same time. But on the day that I was initiated, it was a special day because all the other masons from all the other Masonic lodges in Toronto were visiting our lodge. That's what they're called that night. And this didn't happen every time. And so it was like, okay, for my like final initiation, they were all there.

and I won't tell what goes down in that circumstance, but you can Google it. and, and I was talking to the folks afterwards and it was just like, I used to be the chief of police in this County. And I used to be the chief had like all like important roles within municipality within government. It was just like, yeah, what do you do? I sell nuts and bolts on, on Elmore and Markham road. Yeah.

Amy McLellan (57:46)
No.

Martin Hauck (57:48)
But the thing that I loved about it was that it just made it a level playing field and they didn't care. And then eventually I didn't care about their position in life and their status in life. And the one thing I'll continue with one more story. So my wife and I, like a few years later, went down to Cuba and we were having dinner at this fancy restaurant and there was really good white wine and the person serving us.

Amy McLellan (57:54)
Yeah. Yeah.

Martin Hauck (58:17)
in the restaurant, he was just like pouring the glass of water and there's that ring again. And I'm like, I'm like, you're, you're, you're Mason. He's like, yeah, yeah. And he would, he, I'm like, cause, cause I am too. And we shook hands, we did the secret handshake. And then when we did the secret handshake, he was like, Hey, you're not bullshitting.

Amy McLellan (58:38)
Did you?

Martin Hauck (58:44)
And it went from like, here's some random dude at a resort just pouring water for me at the table and serving wine to like, he invited us to his house. We met his family. We were genuinely brothers. And it's just like, why does there have to be such friction between two people making a connection in the world? again, with the boys club side of things, I'm really glad that Monday Girl exists and just other communities are existing, but to your point, right?

Amy McLellan (58:54)
Your brothers. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (59:13)
being part of the people people group means that there's some additional level of credibility and it just kind of breakdowns the barrier. Like, you're part of the people people group too. It doesn't necessarily mean anything other than you care enough about your career to want to learn more and you're doing it via community. And so you do that for job seekers. You could do that for product managers. You can do that for designers. You can do it for any other profession or any other thing. Like one of our community managers, Mary, I'm off on like a really

hyper caffeinated tangent here, so forgive me. I'll cut out half of this, like Mary, she runs like a Facebook community of people that crochet. It was like 10,000 plus members, right? And it's just like, there's a community for everything. And if you can join it and be a part of it and participate in it and add value to that community, it's probably one of the most enriching things you can do.

Amy McLellan (59:45)
Sweet. No, this is great.

Martin Hauck (1:00:13)
yourself as an individual. I believe it because I see it all the time and people tell me about it. that's why I'm so excited. Long story short, that's why I'm so excited about what you're doing because it really needs to be done for this sort of demographic and niche of people.

Amy McLellan (1:00:16)
Yeah.

Yeah, thank you. Was your wife able to see the handshake at the table with like how did you do this with the guy in Cuba without anyone seeing this is what I want to know.

Martin Hauck (1:00:39)
it's so sly, it's so sly you don't even know.

Amy McLellan (1:00:43)
you don't even know it's happening. So is it like a handshake with your eyes?

Martin Hauck (1:00:45)
Yeah. Yeah.

No, no, no.

Amy McLellan (1:00:53)
Do you guys both dart back and forth three times?

Martin Hauck (1:00:55)
No, that's cool. Like that's a cool, it's not with the eyes, not. So the other thing, you know how they say like different levels, like I got to level three, which is like, you just need to get to level three to be a part of like the whole shebang. Like that's sort of like your probationary period, but you have to do things and memorize things in order to get to that level. I got to level three and then there was like 30 more and I'm like, okay, this is all right, but it just didn't, didn't suit my purpose.

Amy McLellan (1:01:09)
Yeah.

Yeah.

You had me in stitches because my dad was a Mason and I spent my childhood just poking at him, just being like, what are you doing? you guys got your hats. And then when you said the Simpsons, I was like, yeah, that's exact. I was like, what dad, there's you and your friends.

Martin Hauck (1:01:28)
No way.

You

Did he ever let you in on the secrets?

Amy McLellan (1:01:42)
No, to the, is so, like, and he's kind of goofy, like, we're, you know, a jolly relationship. But then if you bring the Masons, he's so serious, like, to this day, he'll go to his deathbed not talking about it. There's no way he's breaking this code, whatever is going on. So, yeah. You just bring people together and you create a space where they are allowed to connect. It's amazing. And I think the world needs more of that right now.

Martin Hauck (1:02:00)
It's funny.

Yeah.

Yeah. Are you going to have secret handshakes for the secret society?

Amy McLellan (1:02:15)
Yes, absolutely.

Martin Hauck (1:02:20)
You should. That's true. Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Amy McLellan (1:02:21)
You should create one for the people people group. Read the word. You guys all have a secret emoji that you all use.

Martin Hauck (1:02:29)
We do have, that's more of a branding thing, I think, but yeah, we have the purple heart emoji.

Amy McLellan (1:02:34)
Yeah, that's yeah. Yeah. It's so natural. It's happened all along the way. Yeah, absolutely.

Martin Hauck (1:02:37)
symbols.

What's your emoji gonna be?

Amy McLellan (1:02:44)
I don't know. I'm still early. I don't know. Do you have any ideas? Like a mask? The Seeker Society? A binocular? Is that an emoji? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah.

Martin Hauck (1:02:47)
It'll come naturally. I didn't. I would say like the magnifying glass, if I would guess, but the best thing, the best things in community come organically from the community versus like there's so many things that I tried to like come up with them. This is a brilliant idea. It's going to take the community to the next level or whatever. it just ran around.

Amy McLellan (1:03:10)
Yeah. Yeah.

Martin Hauck (1:03:12)
falls completely flat, but then somebody else within the community does something and just catches fire and that's

Amy McLellan (1:03:17)
So let me ask you this. There's going to be job seekers still listening maybe, and they're trying to keep themselves busy because sometimes it's exhausting job searching. You just need another project to think differently, or you need a way to generate some online presence or whatever the tactic may be. And they like this idea of a virtual community. From someone.

who's been pretty darn successful in building one, do you have any initial advice for people that are thinking about doing this? Starting a virtual community like Barb doing crochet, just to keep her mind off the job search, doing something different. Where do people get started? What should they be mindful of?

Martin Hauck (1:03:54)
for thinking about doing what?

Amy McLellan (1:04:09)
You and I had this conversation separately from this podcast, but I think it's helpful for other people too.

Martin Hauck (1:04:16)
Well, the cool thing is you can start a community for about anything, right? Barb slash Mary from the crochet group. I like Barb better too. Mary, you're now Barb. You're like, why? Like, you didn't listen to the last podcast, Barb? Yeah.

Amy McLellan (1:04:21)
Mm-hmm. I like dirt better.

Barb, I can't wait for Barb to show up somewhere. It's me, I'm Barb.

Martin Hauck (1:04:39)
I don't know if we're lacking on the amount of barbs in the community in the first place. We have a lot of different names. I think if you're... The cool thing is you can start a community for just about anything. The other thing is there's a lot of communities out there already. But in my mind, it's very much like coffee shops as well.

Amy McLellan (1:04:57)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (1:05:09)
You got Tim Hortons, you got Second Cup, I think they're still around. You've got Starbucks, you've got Williams, you've got, and they all serve coffee, right? And so a lot of it has to do with proximity. So you're gonna see, if you're starting a community,

Amy McLellan (1:05:15)
sticking cup, yeah, I don't know.

Martin Hauck (1:05:30)
most people are probably just going to be through your network or like your direct network. And so then it's going to become very geographically oriented. So people, people group, we, I'm in Toronto, you know, 50, 60 % of the 5,000 people are, are in Canada at the very least in Toronto, think covers about 40 % of the community. so there's pros and cons to that. but I think.

Amy McLellan (1:05:35)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (1:06:00)
There's, well, first thing, if you want to start the community, got to read two books. Absolutely. One's called Get Together and the other book's called The Art of Gathering. And I don't know their authors. Get Together is written by three people. The Art of Gathering is written by one person, but those two books are phenomenal. And I've got more highlights and folded pages on those books than any other books I've ever read. No, no worries.

Amy McLellan (1:06:07)
Mm-hmm.

Nice.

Thanks, Martin. That's great. Cool. Cool.

Martin Hauck (1:06:31)
What?

You talked a bit about like metrics for a quick second there. I'm curious to know what kind of metrics you're going to be looking at. Cause I know they're not going to be like number of jobs people have gotten through. Like that will be one, but I don't think it's the one that's going to be like the most exciting for you to kind of track as you go into it. Or is it too soon to kind of really ask that question?

Amy McLellan (1:06:39)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

No, it's something I've thought about for sure. And if you have advice, I'd love to hear it too. First and foremost, I'm thinking about engagement because community is only as good as how many people are engaged and

I'm thinking about the mental space of job seekers and there's some people who are really low and some people who are much more knowledgeable about the job search process and some people who aren't. And so I'm trying to figure out how engagement is going to work and I kind of keep people engaged and also encouraging community engagement through prompts.

I don't think I'm an expert. know, like the more you learn, what's that expression? The more you know, the less you know. That's very much how I'm thinking here. And there's a lot of people that you can call in who have expertise and can share and so on.

But even people need to be empowered to share their own stories and realize that they have value to contribute as well. So engagement is something that I'm thinking about first and foremost. But also metrics, I'd like to see how quickly this actually works, right? I know people that have been job searching for over six months and they're doing the same process every day. They wake up, they go on LinkedIn.

is grow, scroll, find things, spend too much time and little AI tools to be putting together applications. And they just repeat this process. And it's like they think it's like quantity over quality. If you can have a space in which now you're taking different strategies, you're being advised, you're being supported.

tend not get you a job faster. So if I could somehow measure how long someone's been doing a job search before they join the community and then how quickly they can get hired. But also, with my experience working with higher ed, a lot of stuff is out of your control, right? So you can get the horse all the way to water. It doesn't mean that it's gonna drink. So you just have to kind of see how this kind of goes. But I would be interested to see.

how quickly people can find jobs if they have the right support systems. And then if I have those metrics, again, that might be more incentive to keep growing this community and marketing this community and bringing more job seekers

Any other thoughts do you have around metrics to pay attention to?

Martin Hauck (1:09:36)
I do have a comment on engagement because it was a very recent revelation for us, but engagement from how we looked at it maybe two months ago was just how many people are logging into the community every week or every month to.

At the end of the day, if you look at Reddit, for example, it's an example of like a massive community. And so there's people who are moderators. There are people who are commenters and they're like majority of the community, like 99 or 90%, some crazy high percentage are just scrolling, reading, not engaging, not engaging, but they're on the site regularly. And so.

Amy McLellan (1:10:04)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (1:10:19)
I think the most important thing is you need to look at engagement very holistically in terms of just because people don't want to post doesn't mean, and this actually came from, I think a discussion we were having with the ambassadors recently, I think it was Kari, she writes our newsletter, has been writing our newsletter for like last five years. Thank you, Kari. She was...

Amy McLellan (1:10:25)
and

Thank you, Kari.

Martin Hauck (1:10:45)
sort of the one that helped us kind of reframe how we look at the community engagement in general, because we're obviously looking to drive engagement, right? But if everybody in the community posted, like it would just be so noisy, right? And so I think getting a variety of people to comment is helpful versus, you know, getting engagement from new members, people that maybe didn't feel comfortable to...

Amy McLellan (1:10:53)
Yeah.

Martin Hauck (1:11:10)
post you know six months ago when they first joined but now are comfortable to chime in with their thoughts on a question or something like that that's important but the other piece I think is there's always going to be people that just don't feel comfortable writing anything or reaching out but then you might host an event and they show up to the event and they're just extroverts from that perspective or

Amy McLellan (1:11:18)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (1:11:35)
Maybe they don't want to say anything, but they want to help behind the scenes and they still want to be a part of the community and they want to add resources to a section of the website. They're not looking for credit or anything like that, but it's just something they enjoy. They want to give back because they've gotten something out of being part of the community. So I wouldn't lean too heavy on that. Like it's an important thing, but it's not the be all end all, I think. think having variety is important.

Amy McLellan (1:11:39)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, good call. Good call. We're all so different, And how we show up and what and how we want to engage, we're all just so different. You probably learned a lot about people through this community.

Martin Hauck (1:12:10)
Yeah.

Yeah, no people are super interesting

Amy McLellan (1:12:18)
They are super interesting, aren't they? Yeah.

Martin Hauck (1:12:20)
Yeah. Any final thoughts?

Amy McLellan (1:12:25)
well, I'd want to say thank you. You're awesome. You've always had an open door. and you've just filled me with new ideas, like at every turn along the way. I've always seen you as a thought leader. and

We're all pretty lucky to have you and your thoughts being executed and being able to have so many advantages in our own life because of that. So thanks for that. And you've also been a huge support for me in this, doing this podcast with you is just another example of that. So I want to say a big thank you, Marty.

Martin Hauck (1:13:04)
Well, that's not what I was looking for, but thank you. Thank you right back at you. Now you've, like I've said, like at the beginning, like you're, you helped shine a light on parts of the community that I didn't even realize or wake up to for a long time. So the reason I'm here now doing this as enthusiastically as I am as a large part because of your enthusiasm and candor. thank you. Win win.

Amy McLellan (1:13:27)
Wow, that's huge. Sweet. Win, win. High five. All right, in closing, yeah, if you're listening to this and you're job seeking, come look me up on LinkedIn, Amy McClellan.

Martin Hauck (1:13:34)
BAM!

Amy McLellan (1:13:46)
Hopefully by the time this podcast is published, I'll have something live on there. I have their website, it's almost ready for you. And then when you get on the website, you fill out a very quick form about who you are. I'm welcoming this to all. If I'm putting this in kind of two buckets, if you are a fast seeker, so you are unemployed, you were just laid off, you're actively looking, you need a job now.

I'm gonna try to put those cohorts together. If you are a slow seeker, meaning you have employment or you are expecting a layoff soon, but you are still employed, but actively seeking, I'll put you guys together, but all functions, all backgrounds and try to curate some groups that work well together and compliment each other. And then if you're into it and you are willing to contribute and you're willing to be vulnerable and you're willing to give just as much as you take from these communities,

We'd love to have you. We're going to meet once a week. Plenty of themes, plenty of people that want to come to the table and help advise. And yeah, we'll go from there.

And if you're hiring...

Martin Hauck (1:14:56)
Now people should pick up on that at the very least in the sense that, yeah, no, you're doing awesome things. And I think this is going to lead to whatever you do next, regardless whether you double down on this awesome idea or not. think it's a really smart thing to be doing at the same time as job seeking. So anyone who needs an awesome human being who can do a plethora of things.

Amy McLellan (1:14:57)
you

I think so too.

plethora of things, but best in strategic partnerships. Also, I'm pretty darn good in managing operations. Yeah. All right, thanks, Martin. Appreciate it. All right, happy Friday to you.

Martin Hauck (1:15:28)
strategic partnership.

hit me up. Yeah. No, thank you.