SHRM Talent: How to Engage Your Audience with Tim Sackett

Intro (00:01):

This is RecruitingDaily’s recruiting live podcast. Live, from SHRM Talent. Real talk about talent acquisition, recruiting, sourcing, and hiring. Are you in talent acquisition? Then listen up, because we’re about to blow your mind. Here’s your host, William Tincup.

William Tincup (00:27):

Ladies and gentlemen, this William Tincup, and you are listening to the RecruitingDaily podcast. Today we have a special guest.

Tim Sackett (00:34):

Special.

William Tincup (00:36):

Tim Sackett is-

Tim Sackett (00:37):

All my teachers said the same thing.

William Tincup (00:37):

Yeah.

Tim Sackett (00:39):

Turns out they meant it in a different way though.

William Tincup (00:41):

Yeah, it’s okay. You, you made it here, that’s what matters. We have Tim Sackett on the show today. It’s going to be fun, because Tim and I have known each other, and this is just going to be fun because every time we have a conversation, we wish we would have recorded it. Now we’re actually going to record one, so this is going to be good.

Tim Sackett (00:59):

Also there world are thankful that we didn’t yet record all those conversations.

William Tincup (01:04):

Yes, yes. That would be a coffee table book.

Tim Sackett (01:06):

Yes.

William Tincup (01:07):

And we’d both be fired.

Tim Sackett (01:08):

Yeah.

William Tincup (01:09):

And possibly canceled.

Tim Sackett (01:11):

We would look very sexy on the lounges, in our leopard underwear, in that coffee table book.

William Tincup (01:15):

Yes, I like that. I like where you’re going with this, I can see where this is going. All right. Let’s imagine a world, that’s how every movie starts, right?

Tim Sackett (01:25):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

William Tincup (01:25):

Imagine a world where we’ve never had an HR conference.

Tim Sackett (01:29):

Yeah.

William Tincup (01:31):

What would- Magic wand. We’ve never had one. What would you do to set up an HR conference? How would you set it up?

Tim Sackett (01:40):

To me, I’m always thinking back on the content side. You and I both are like, “Hey, how do we get just great content?” I think, for me, like the TEDx thing. How many times have we sat on YouTube, and all of a sudden you’re three hours in watching like dumb TEDx ones for 17 minutes. Because= they’re entertaining, they challenge how we think, and it’s just enough where it ends and you go, “No, no, I want more.”

William Tincup (02:05):

Right.

Tim Sackett (02:06):

Like, “No, don’t stop. I want it more from you.” But how many of HR conferences have we been to, where we go, “Okay, I’m 15 minutes in and I don’t want anymore”?

William Tincup (02:17):

Do you slice sideways, or is it down? I can’t remember which way you slice, but you slice one way or the other.

Tim Sackett (02:24):

Again, there’s been some evolution, but for the most part, we’re still in this hell of one-minute, or one-hour, or an hour and 15 minutes. I mean, you and I know a lot of people who speak professionally; on one hand we could count the people that we would want to listen to for an hour.

William Tincup (02:39):

Yeah, one hand is generous.

Tim Sackett (02:41):

Yeah.

William Tincup (02:44):

And it’s true. I like the burstable content because it fits my attention span.

Tim Sackett (02:48):

Yeah. Everybody’s, right?

William Tincup (02:50):

I also think that you can get there faster. You don’t have to have 60 slots. I mean, you can.

Tim Sackett (02:57):

It is more difficult, I think, for the content producer. It’s hard to do really great content in 17 minutes.

William Tincup (03:02):

100%.

Tim Sackett (03:03):

An hour, you can walk around, and screw up, and come back, and forget stuff, and then remember, and you’re like, “All right, I got it.” In 17 minutes is so tight, or 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever.

William Tincup (03:14):

Right.

Tim Sackett (03:14):

If you just said, “Hey, here’s what you have to do.” The same thing with the PowerPoint decks, it’s such a crutch. And believe me, I’m one that uses a crutch.

William Tincup (03:24):

Yeah.

Tim Sackett (03:26):

But what if you said, “Hey, you have 20 minutes, no deck,” and you have 1,000 people in that room that you have to go and actually…

William Tincup (03:33):

Entertain.

Tim Sackett (03:33):

Entertain. You’ve got to change their mind about something in 20 minutes.

William Tincup (03:37):

That’s right.

Tim Sackett (03:39):

Now, all of a sudden, that’s a stressful proposition, but the content level would raise up so high, so fast.

William Tincup (03:46):

What we learned about a great keynote is that there’s three components. It’s education, inspiration, and entertainment.

Tim Sackett (03:53):

Yeah.

William Tincup (03:53):

Okay, you need all three. You need all three. But what we typically do with the session folks, is you just have to educate, and you don’t have to entertain, you don’t have to inspire. Actually, that’s how you lose people.

Tim Sackett (04:05):

Yeah.

William Tincup (04:06):

I think the shorter, burstable content; getting them to think, wrap their heads around- A thousand people in the audience, even if there’s only 10, doesn’t matter. The idea that PowerPoint is not a crutch, I love all that. What would you do differently- That’s with speakers and content. What would you do differently for attendees and vendors? Again, magic wand, you can do anything.

Tim Sackett (04:25):

Yeah. If I did anything, I think I would somehow force an attendee to sit through like five demos. Those demos, again, are 20-minute demo, 15-minute demo.

William Tincup (04:36):

Right.

Tim Sackett (04:36):

You show them-

William Tincup (04:37):

Fast.

Tim Sackett (04:37):

Yeah, because what I find is that the HR audience, in general, has a very limited knowledge of what’s out there, what products are available to them.

William Tincup (04:45):

Right.

Tim Sackett (04:45):

What they can do. And so they just fumble around with whatever stack they have and continue to kind of flounder. If they actually spent a little bit of time, and saw some stuff, and asked some questions, and showed, they would get really comfortable with it, and then they would like, “Wait a minute, there’s some really cool stuff out there, and I want to see more.”

William Tincup (05:04):

Yeah. It would peak their curiosity. Then if you weave it into the actual program where it’s a part of the program. You’re going to the short, burstable content; you’re going to learn things; again, be inspired, educated, entertained. And by the way, after that you’ll take a bio break and then you’ll do a demo. You’re going to do speed dating demos, go through a bunch of demos, and then go back to another session.

Tim Sackett (05:29):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

William Tincup (05:31):

What would you do differently for attendees?

Tim Sackett (05:33):

In terms of…

William Tincup (05:35):

Their experience. Like, again…

Tim Sackett (05:38):

The other piece of it, I think, the one thing that makes somebody better in their profession, is the level of network they have. I know you, and if I have a question I can call one of the top guys in the world about whatever, and you’re going to respond. So many of the people we know in this industry, in HR and talent acquisition, whatever it is, their network is basically the people they work with or have worked with, and not this worldwide, national network. Like how do we do the speed dating thing? Again, some of the conferences have a toyed and played with this.

William Tincup (06:13):

Right.

Tim Sackett (06:13):

But it’s almost like- It would be one thing to say we’re going to vet a conference attendee coming in, and part of that vetting is when you come here, there’s certain things you have to do. You just can’t go to a session and be on your laptop and watching TikToks or whatever, and doing nothing.

William Tincup (06:26):

Right.

Tim Sackett (06:27):

Great, you got away from the office. We want you to be an active participant in this kind of little thing that we’ve created. Some of that is going to be, you’re going to leave here with 25 people that you actually know and can reach out to, and you’ve just created a better network for yourself in the same industry or same whatever.

William Tincup (06:47):

I love that. I love it so much that I think getting rid of the wifi code, another crutch.

Tim Sackett (06:55):

You and I have both did a session where we got rid of everyone’s cell phones and laptops.

William Tincup (06:57):

That’s right. That’s right.

Tim Sackett (06:58):

And forced people to listen and forced people to talk.

William Tincup (07:01):

And it was awkward.

Tim Sackett (07:02):

Yeah.

William Tincup (07:03):

And it was also awesome.

Tim Sackett (07:04):

Yeah.

William Tincup (07:05):

In the same sense, because we made them talk.

Tim Sackett (07:07):

Yeah.

William Tincup (07:08):

It was talking about a difficult topic as well, so we went even further. You were at SHRM Talent, obviously. What’s your session about?

Tim Sackett (07:18):

I mean, really, the title, because you have to have a sexy title to get people to show up. It’s basically something around, beyond your ATS kind of thing. Like what do you need beyond the ATS? Because most of the people here are mid-enterprise and below, so they think their ATS is what they need to hire. What we know is there’s so much add-on, great martech out there; everything, sourcing. It’s really opening their eyes to this marketplace of 2, 3, 4, 5,000 tools that are out there, that they don’t know.

William Tincup (07:52):

Combine all the world’s oceans. By the way, just little things over here.

Tim Sackett (07:57):

And then you throw in the thing they’re really there for, which is just give us the silver bullets. Tell us exactly how I can find more people, now, faster. And so you end with that. You’re like, “Hey, we have to actually go out and do some real world work here, and here’s how we’re going to do it.” I always give them my silver bullets. Here’s what we’re going to do, here’s how we’re going to help you right now. If they take one of those things back, great. Usually I get, yeah, that’s the feedback.

William Tincup (08:26):

It helps that you’ve been a practitioner, because you felt their pain. I believe you being on stage in front of a bunch of practitioners is really wonderful, because you’ve literally been in their shoes and felt their pain.

Tim Sackett (08:39):

Yeah. Well, I mean, I run my shop now, so I have this micro kind of lab I can play with. I was just texting with one of my recruiting leaders today, going like, “Hey, I want to side by side AB test of these two products, and then I want to know what’s really happening,” because I’ve got to talk to one of the products and say, “Hey, here’s where you’re falling short.” I have that ability to do that, which I think is so powerful.

William Tincup (09:01):

Oh, it’s fantastic.

Tim Sackett (09:02):

Because so many folks that we know, they want to talk about UI, UX, and blah, blah, blah, use cases. At the end of the day, they don’t have the team. I said, “Hey, this is what they’re saying, but this is what it does.”

William Tincup (09:16):

Right. Right, right, right. Brother, we could talk forever. I’ll definitely have to schedule some time to have you on the RecruitingDaily podcast, doing something topical and fun. Thank you so much for your time.

Tim Sackett (09:27):

Thanks for having me.

William Tincup (09:27):

And thanks for everyone listening to the RecruitingDaily podcast. Until next time.

Announcer (09:33):

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