The Salesforce Career Show
The podcast dedicated to helping you HIRE, GET HIRED and SOAR HIGHER in the SALESFORCE ecosystem.
Enjoy these live recordings of The Salesforce Career Show from X Spaces and YouTube's JoshForce. A guest + AMA format hosted by Josh Matthews, founder of Salesforce Staffing, LLC, Joshforce and The Expand Exchange and Vanessa Grant, Dreamforce speaker, 9X certified BA, consultant and social media darling. Recordings are 3x per month.
The Salesforce Career Show
2024 Salesforce Ecosystem Predictions + The Best of 2023 with Past Guests
We shine a light on the Salesforce layoffs that marked Q1, and the importance of demonstrating resilience and adaptability in the face of adversity. We also explore the future of recruiting, where AI is already revolutionizing the hiring process, and speculate about the potential impact of Google Gemini on the recruiting landscape. Tune in to hear our insights on how job seekers are navigating these evolving landscapes, and how we can start to see fraud seeping into these processes, underlining the need for discernment when working with recruiters.
Now, let’s change gears and talk about the transition from a full-time Salesforce employee to an independent consultant - it’s not for the faint-hearted! We share our personal experiences guide you through understanding your skills and values to effectively market yourself, and offer advice on how to build a sturdy foundation for your consulting career. As we wind down, we share our hopes and dreams for 2024 and the Salesforce ecosystem, and the importance of authenticity in the workplace. So, join us on this journey, and let's make 2024 a year to remember. Here's to a successful year ahead!
And now the number one audio program that helps you to hire, get hired and soar higher in the Salesforce ecosystem. It's the Salesforce career show with Josh Matthews and Vanessa Grant.
Josh Matthews:Welcome everybody to our final episode of 2023. This has been an absolutely incredible year. It's the first year that we actually put this show out as a podcast. That's after running it for two years on Clubhouse and having a live show. Now we record it live on X and we've got some exciting things coming in the show for you today. We're going to do a quick round robin. Just some introductions. I'm so excited to see these handsome and beautiful faces on my little X panel here because we've got co -host Vanessa Grant. Say hi, vanessa, hi everybody, it's Vanessa Grant.
Josh Matthews:It is Vanessa Grant, and if you don't know her by now, then you can fix that right away by staying tuned and listening. Right now let's say hi to everybody else. I'll go ahead and unmute because I'm just going to call on you, give a quick introduction, and we're going to start with the people who have been guests on this show. Let's go to David Giller. David, hello, hello.
David Giller:Thank you for having me again. I appreciate it. David Giller here, based in the New York City area, Salesforce geek. That's all.
Josh Matthews:That's me. Come on, man, you're more than that. Where can they find you? Tell them what you do.
David Giller:I am CEO of Brainiate Salesforce Consulting Firm. We help companies to get the most out of Salesforce. I also have a blog and podcast and YouTube channel. I refer to all of those as the Brainiate show. I also have some online on-demand courses for Salesforce admins to unleash their potential. I refer to that as Brainiate Academy All right, that's me All.
Josh Matthews:Right, david, I'm so glad you could make it. Today we also have with us a friend of mine, john Sisson. Hey John, hey sir, how are you? I'm doing fantastic. Let's hear that nice, smooth, resonant baritone you've got. Tell everybody what you do.
John Sisson:I am the SVP of a company called Sales Optimizer. Like David, we are a Salesforce implementation and sales consulting company. We help companies derive performance and predictability through the tool set. I'm glad to be here after you for a second time, thank you Love it Fantastic.
Josh Matthews:Then we have panelist and guest Peter Ganza. I pronounced it right this time Say hi, peter, tell them what you do real quick.
Peter Ganza:Hey Josh, Hi everybody. I'm a Salesforce alumni turned ecosystem junkie and I am, for the last year and a bit, the AppExchange Whisperer, primarily helping partners get more leads. I love it.
Josh Matthews:Now let's go to one of our most listened podcast guests of all time, that's Kristin Linguat from 10K Advisors. Say hi, kristin, tell them what you do.
Kristen Langlois:Hey everyone, I'm Kristin Linguat. I am the Chief People Officer at 10K Advisors. We have a really unique model where all of our consultants are independent Salesforce consultants, where they have made the decision to transition from full-time careers and got in our own. Our goal is to really help them on that journey, provide them the opportunity to connect with clients and customers, support them through delivery, ensure that they're enjoying the project and that the customer and client is having an awesome delivery situation where we ensure that the project is successfully delivered, all while providing a community for them to be a part of and enjoying being that collaboration.
Josh Matthews:All right, Fantastic Thanks, Kristin. Now, good friend of mine. We've never had him on the show as a guest but he, along with Peter Gansa, is our most regular panelist. He runs the Banking on Disruption podcast. Personal friend Fred Cadena. Fred, let's hear it.
Fred Cadena:It's Fred Cadena here. Thanks for that. Excited to be here for this recap. I think there's a ton of stuff happening in the Salesforce career space. We talk about it a lot here. We talk about it a lot, leaving it out on the Banking on Disruption podcast as well. Just really excited for this panel and just having a discussion today. Thank you for inviting me.
Josh Matthews:Absolutely. Each of you and all of our guests over the past year have enriched this program and enriched the community, each in your own unique ways. I absolutely I know Vanessa and I both just love having smart, intelligent guests who are steeped in the ecosystem, have a flair for communication and have a lot to say. It's so helpful to all of the listeners. Speaking of our listeners, if everyone will indulge me for just a couple of minutes, I wanted to share some statistics about our program, some fun little facts. Then we're going to go ahead and dive right into a couple of core questions. What are some highlights or downlights of the past year? Then we're going to move into what can we expect to see? Did you know that the average listener of this program, their favorite music genre, is pop music, followed by rap and then by rock and roll? There we go. We have maintained a 5.0 rating on all of our podcast platforms. It's not surprising, because not many people voted, given how many people have listened to this show.
Josh Matthews:Very few have voted or ranked or given the thumbs up so you can do us an algorithmic favor by liking the show, subscribing, hitting the bell that normal crap that everybody says on YouTube but actually rate us. If you think we're a one out of five, it's okay. You can put one out of five and hopefully you leave some comments so we can know what to do a little bit better. Some other fun things Most listen to city top cities. We've got a handful of them, but this one surprised me. We're all most listened to city Melbourne, victoria. That's in Australia, for those of you who don't know. Melbourne is our most listened city and we've got a handful of others, all the usual suspects, including New York City, seattle, los Angeles, chicago, miami, atlanta, phoenix, charlotte, dallas, and at the very end of the top list is my good old fashioned Portland from back in the day. We also have some interesting stats on the best podcast or the most listened to podcast. Guess who wins here. Vanessa is the big winner with two of the top three, including her episode on the business analyst blueprint, as well as the dream force discussion that she ran. Good job, vanessa. You're the big winner here this year, in 2023. Other episodes that people really enjoyed happened to be around succeeding as an independent consultant. That was our number two episode. That's our very own Kristin Languah here who was on that discussion and in fourth place salary negotiations.
Josh Matthews:I think a lot of this shows that any time that we're running a show that's really specific, like do this specific thing to help your career, that's what captures our audience's interest the most. Who wants to guess? I'd love to hear from the audience how many countries do you think this show has been listened to in the last year? 12. 12 from Peter. What else do we have? 23. 23 from Fred. Okay, do we have any other takers Over under on 23.
John Sisson:Over Over.
Josh Matthews:Okay, well, you are right, it is over. We have been aired in 48 countries across the earth. Across the earth, yeah, earth, not the earth, just earth. Pretty amazing, all right. Well, I don't know about you guys, but those statistics I felt were really fantastic. Just as a little side note, we also were able to grow our ex-community called Salesforce professionals to over 1,600 members now, and we'd love to see that at 100,000. So if you're listening to this and you're not part of it, there's some cool, interesting activity on there and, in fact, on X, it is the largest Salesforce specific community out there. Last time I checked, so maybe I need to check again, but that's the largest and fastest growing one out there. So, join Salesforce professionals in X communities. Okay, so that's all I got to say about that.
Josh Matthews:We're going to move forward with the big question Go ahead and raise your hand. Who wants to start off? What were one or two key highlights in the Salesforce ecosystem in the last year? And if it's about a product, that's okay. If it's about a tech, that's cool too, but keep in mind that this is a career show. So if it's something that impacts careers, even better, let's go ahead and Okay, so that's fine, shy guys. Oh, here we go, john Sisson. Come on, brave man, let's hear it.
John Sisson:I think it's funny, as for as much tech and data and AI that is coming out, especially for people that are in the ecosystem, it's still about making sure. I think this has proven, more this year than ever, that it is understanding business and business impact Right, the AI is only as good as the data that you're leveraging and it's also as only as good as the KPIs you're measuring, and so I think one of the things for me that was a highlight this year you can call it whatever you want is understanding even more as much, as fast as technology changes, it's only as good as the data, the processes, the strategy behind it, and without those things together, it's struggling. And so, as a person looking for jobs, the more that you can understand business models, the more that you can understand process, the more that you can understand KPIs, the more that you can help your customers really help them achieve their goals.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, who wants to riff on that for a second? I'm 100% with you, john. We're talking about business knowledge. What are the results and what are you actually trying to achieve? Go ahead, peter, you've got your hand up, mr.
Peter Ganza:Gansa. Right on, john, I totally agree. I think one of the themes that definitely resonated on most, if not all of them at some level was oh, I want to be an admin, I got to get my certs, I got to get certified on this or that, and that'll get me a job in a lot of different ways. I think that will be the one that jumps up to me Okay, so that was a highlight. A theme, I think, that came across. I think many of them obviously a lower level.
Josh Matthews:Okay, what about a highlight, peter, since you're on right now? What's something awesome that happened in 23?
Peter Ganza:Honestly, I think just getting everybody together right, every podcast was great. Obviously I was a presenter at one point, but even setting myself aside from a career perspective in the Salesforce ecosystem, everybody added value, everybody show. I mean I don't listen to podcasts that often and I'm sitting on these an hour and a half, two hours, not just because I'm in the ecosystem, but because I get stuff out of it right and I think that says a lot. So just the general value add and the podcast and the speakers itself awesome right.
Josh Matthews:I love it. Go ahead, Mr Giller.
David Giller:Yeah, just to build on the AI theme.
David Giller:I think 2023 was really all about AI, but let's think selfishly, focusing very narrowly on career advancement and career management for Salesforce professionals.
David Giller:Ai totally changes the game as it relates to how do I present myself on whatever social media platform, what am I putting in my profile, how am I describing myself, how am I describing my accomplishments, how am I describing what I'm looking for in terms of using AI from a brainstorming perspective, of what type of roles are most appropriate for me, based on my interests and areas of expertise, et cetera.
David Giller:Building out resumes and cover letters and communication pieces, let alone once someone is in the job, to really wow everyone that you're working with. Leveraging AI and, by the way, I have to tell you I am still learning a ton every single day on this topic myself leveraging AI from a business requirements gathering perspective, from a perspective of managing scope creep, of putting together project management documents, of highlighting issues, risks, concerns about a project and communicating with team members. Using AI to do all of that completely changes the game really, not outside of the Salesforce profession as well, but for anyone inside the Salesforce profession having nothing to do with building formula, fields and validation roles goes way above and beyond that. A lot of people focus on AI to build validation rules and formula fields, and to me that's like using a brand new iPhone as a paperweight Like yeah, you could do that, but you could do a whole lot more.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, that makes sense, as I'm holding this chief of papers down with my iPhone, so I'm probably in the lap again. All right, mr Kedena.
Fred Cadena:Yeah, no, I mean, I have to 100% agree with David there and everybody, take out your AI talking point bingo card and I will say you know, if you're, I'll be the first one to say it today you're not going to lose your job to AI. You're going to lose your job to somebody that knows how to use AI effectively in their role. And so you know. I don't know there's a whole lot more more to say about AI from that perspective. But the other thing I'll bring up and it took me a minute because I wouldn't have necessarily come to it as a highlight, but I think I'm going to frame it in a way that's a highlight which is the other, other than AI.
Fred Cadena:The big news from Salesforce this year was obviously the layoffs in Q1, right, salesforce has had a significant reduction in staff.
Fred Cadena:We've talked about it here before. It was, you know, still a net gain in employees from pre pandemic levels. That you know. We don't need to rehash those topics.
Fred Cadena:But where I think it could be beneficial for the audience is when you, when, now that we've had a chance to stand back and look at where a lot of those reductions came from. A significant amount of it wasn't the resources that Salesforce had that were freely available to users that do not have premier success plans, and so that is going to create, and has created, a significant amount of demand for people to come in either you know additional admin roles inside a company, either for people that are looking for a side gig to pick up some side gig work and help out companies with their Salesforce orgs. For people that are looking to build a you know Salesforce consulting business to pick up managed services, because that that gap in support that a lot of companies were getting from customer success teams and other free resources and Salesforce are a lot harder to come by today than they were at this time last year.
Fred Cadena:And I think you know, from my perspective, other than AI, that's probably the biggest you know, mover and in some ways, a highlight this year from a career perspective.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, good points, fred. And it was right about now, right about a year ago, when the layoffs started to happen and we started to learn about it and figure it all out. And boy was there some serious fallout for good people, for highly efficient people, for bright people, who shouldn't have been let go, you know, by at least by their or others estimation, and a lot of people that should have been let go. A lot of right sizing, and boy, you know, when a person makes a mistake, you know it's got. You know those effects, depending on your position in society have a have can have some effects, but they're not generally serious and they don't affect thousands of people not usually. But when a company makes a mistake and in this case, over hiring post COVID, whether you're a Peloton or Salesforce or you know whatever Microsoft or whomever it is, then there can be a lot of pain out there. And, vanessa, go ahead and share, if you can. What do you think was the biggest highlight of 2023?
Vanessa Grant:For sure, of course, the AI part, but I have a different perspective in that. I think, with the push for AI, the big thing for me is the focus on business analysis. Of course, I'm always going to bring it back to business analysis, but how important it is to do documentation to take care of your, your, your tech debt and your data, and that's that I think is is really important. That, where AI is, is really putting a focus again and making clearing out tech debt and making things well architected, sexy. We finally have a good business case for for doing these things and I think that's that's really awesome.
Vanessa Grant:And for me, the other highlight is the community coming together. You know what, what, what, when, when Gemma passed and and we had another big loss in in the community a week ago with Amanda Beard Nielsen and it's just seeing the community come together for each other over the course of the year Super. I mean. I don't know if that's a highlight so much, but like it was lovely to see that, even even though we're all Salesforce professionals were also there for each other. There is something special about this, ohana, that despite the layoffs, despite the challenges that that we've had with pandemics and everything that that we're still a community.
Josh Matthews:Yes, we are and we're, we're stronger than ever. I mean, I really believe that. You know, I think it's, I think it's been incredible to be able to have so many more people join the community. You know, start trailhead, get involved, have some curiosity, have some interest. I think people who are joining now are now a little bit more aware of how long it actually can take to get your big break right and that's all it takes one little break, get some gigs somewhere for six months and now you're in right. Now you're hireable.
Josh Matthews:And there was a little bit of a disconnect, you know, in 2022, where we found so many people kept, you know, joining, joining the Ohana, and so many people were struggling. Now I'm sure that is still happening, okay, but at least people hopefully don't have, you know they've replaced their rose colored glasses for prescription glasses and can see the world as it is, can see what is it actually takes to break in. Peter, I know you've got your hand up, but I would like to go to Kristen first. Let's hear your highlight of the year for 23.
Kristen Langlois:Definitely so. I think exactly what you mentioned and everyone talking about you know it was unfortunate the beginning or this time last year, the starting of the layoffs, but just seeing everyone come together and be support of one another, that had gotten impacted, really trying to promote them to their networks, trying to be there to help them in their job search and just ultimately that connection that everybody came together and then seeing all the new directions that people have gone into to expand or take that next step in their careers has just been incredible to see.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, it absolutely has, kristen, and I'm kind of curious, like when you look at kind of the numbers, I know that 10K has been growing, which is fantastic and congratulations on that. In my experience over the last 25 years or so in the industry, in the tech recruiting industry, we see a lot of growth more towards contract when we're experiencing a down economy. That's the kind of economy we've had. You can call it a recession or a near recession, but overall it was a down economy. There are certainly signs that it's picking up right now, which is terrific. I'm curious did you feel, like for the independent contractor space, that that started to really boom, and is it because of the economy and people just want more ad hoc, a la carte work completed versus, say, doing a full time hire?
Kristen Langlois:It's a great point. We have seen 10K itself has seen about 40% growth over last year. Now to really say, is that because of the market and the downturn or is it because also the evolution of Salesforce and the customers that we're working with have already gone through a large digital transformation or implementation and now they're looking to optimize, but they don't necessarily need a full time resource or resources to do so. I think it's probably a combination of both.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, good perspective. Mr Ganzo, you were patient with your hand up. Go for it.
Peter Ganza:I just wanted to follow up. Everything's coming in loud and clear. You were trying to ask me a question. I think there was 2024 in there, if I'm not mistaken.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, actually, let's do this. I'm kind of curious if yeah, let's just jump into that. So 2024, what do you? Now? I've read a bunch of articles what to expect from Salesforce in 2024. It's great click baity, bloggy stuff, but as far as I'm concerned it's almost all conjecture. It's probably half right all these articles that I've read and I'm not the guy who makes great prognostications about the future. If you've listened to one or more shows in the past, you might have heard me talk about how I was confident that Britney Spears, christine Aguilera and Justin Timberlake and Lady Gagwood never make it when I saw them on TV for the very first time when they were all fairly young. So I'm not really good at predicting pop musicians' success. I don't know that. I'm better at predicting sports outcomes or anything else, much less what's going to happen in the next 12 months, because we all know. We all know wars break out, planes crash into buildings, crazy things happen in specific communities throughout our country. We've got some weird stuff happening right now.
Peter Ganza:I actually believe 2024 will be the year of AI. Everyone's been talking about it this year. It's a toddler. I've played with ChadGBT it's dumb and the other tools out there. It's in its infancy and, yeah, it's been spreading like wildfire and, of course, it's impacting everything, but it's just the beginning and the speed at which it's going. I honestly believe 2024 will be the year of whatever that looks like AI, it's going to be something.
Fred Cadena:I'm not the host, but can I push you to be more specific in what that's going to look like?
Peter Ganza:I don't know, but I just know the way it is right now is it feels like a toddler. People are talking about generative AI, right, and there are these different buzz words and everyone's coming out with. Elon just came out with his own. I feel like we're going to finally figure it out. What does that actually look like? It started right and, yes, we've got bots and different ways of automating things. I use it quite a bit in different capacities, but I don't know what's going to happen in 2024. I just know that it feels like it's going to be the year that it leaps and bounce. It's just going to explode. I don't know if that makes any sense, but that's just the way that.
Josh Matthews:I feel yeah, I think you're talking about. It's been crawling and now it's going to start walking. I don't think it's running yet right, yeah. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. What about you, fred, since we're on the topic, and between you and David we have some severe AI enthusiasts on board here what do you think is going to happen in 2024 that we should be on the lookout, and if it's got something to do with AI, how would you answer the question you posed to Peter?
Fred Cadena:Yeah, sure, I will give you three succincts, write them down and you can tell me if I'm running it wrong at the end of the year predictions. The first one is that by the end of 2024, this is the AI related, most directly AI related one more than 50% of American workers will have some type of AI enabled assistant that they use every day To do the types of tasks that traditionally an executive assistant has done booking appointments, booking travel, those types of things. I think that is in the near term.
David Giller:Do you?
Josh Matthews:mean that? Let me ask you about that, though, real quick. Sure, do you mean that they're going to be using products that already have it integrated, or that they're actually going to be users of, say, a text-based chat product like Claude Bard or ChatGPT4?
Fred Cadena:Sure, I don't know that it's going to be in the form of going to ChatGPT. Chatgpt has had in their marketplace an anthropic has for Claude as well some connectors out to TripAdvisor and Expedia and stuff like that. I think it's going to be a commercial, a separate commercial offering that is independent of the specific providers. It's not going to be Expedia or whatever, because it's not going to be limited to travel. It could come from Microsoft, it could come from Google, it could come from Salesforce, it could come from a number of people that is going to leverage best in class LLM technology and connect by API to whatever it can connect to American to book my flight. To Marriott, to book my hotel. To Grubhub, to book the dinner to be delivered to my hotel when my flight gets delayed. To Uber to book my car to wait for me as soon as the plane lands. I think that's coming faster than most people think it's coming.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, that's interesting. What about you, david Do?
Fred Cadena:you want my other two, I promise three.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, I do want your other two, but I want to hear David's response on this first thing.
David Giller:Sure, I think that the impact of AI across not only society but us as working business professionals is absolutely profound. A lot of us don't realize it today, but even today, products and tools that we already use, like Zoom, for example, like many people use Canva, for example, have already infused in some dramatic ways, have already infused AI. Many of us are just oblivious to it, even though these tools are very, very helpful today. The AI features are very helpful today. I agree that a year from now, we're going to look back as if what we have access to today as the latest and greatest is going to feel like a rotary phone.
Josh Matthews:There you go Back. Yeah, All right. Fred Number two.
Fred Cadena:All right. Number two is the Salesforce specific prediction. You guys can feel free to laugh or not, but I believe by the end of 2024, Salesforce will acquire data breaks to build on its data enablement.
Josh Matthews:For the audience that might not know much about them. Can you just give a little bit of background on that?
Fred Cadena:Sure Data breaks is a software company. It helps companies wrangle their data from various sources. I think if you're familiar with Snowflake, snowflake might be the other well-known platform in the space, but it really is in a way that none of the other Salesforce products are. Mulesoft is great for managing integrations from as basic as ETL all the way up to sophisticated API management. Data Cloud is great as a CDP platform and its phenomenal Salesforce does not really have a data lake, a data lake house, data warehouse type product. I think that, as I've seen their continued investment in wanting to bring data to the forefront and make AI investments and they seem to be pretty cozy with data breaks in more of a way than they're cozy with Snowflake I predict by the end of the year that will be an acquisition.
Josh Matthews:Interesting. What do you think will happen to Snowflake's market share if that happens?
Fred Cadena:I think Snowflake will be just fine. It's not going to be a Snowflake killer. Snowflake's got a ton of adoption both from Salesforce companies and non-Salesforce companies. It's not by any means a Salesforce-only product. Snowflake's going to be just fine. But I think data breaks in those capabilities are. If Salesforce is looking to be that one-stop-shop and really be the way to deliver AI insights, it fills a gap that Salesforce currently doesn't have.
Josh Matthews:All right, and prediction number three.
Fred Cadena:I predict that by the end of 2024, Elon Musk will have either sold or otherwise lost control of Twitter.
Josh Matthews:All right, interesting. We got 100% shout out from Vanessa on that one. Vanessa, you want to pipe up on that?
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, twitter's gone through some stuff and I don't see it getting back to its former glory anytime soon, so I actually would not be surprised if it just shut down one day. All right, Interesting.
Josh Matthews:That would surprise me. I think there's always a buyer out there, so that would shock me. Okay, john, what about you? Predictions for the next 12 months.
John Sisson:That's a great question. I honestly am listening to AI because I'm not the AI expert the Fred and David are, I don't know. I'm really interested. One of the things I did here on a market perspective is potential reductions in interest rates and if that's the case, multiply we can see an explosion of needs and interests very quickly from the business community. I'd be interested in and I know I'm asking a question, not answering the question, that's okay, but I'm seeing so much data debt. I'm seeing so much technical debt and so much adoption challenges from people that we're taking over. It would be interesting to understand how those predictions help drive that. If those aren't fixed and that's part of one of the things I think my company struggles with internally is how do we and where do we best help customers? It's a good question.
Josh Matthews:I don't have the answer, but when you think about okay, let's say so, we all know that the interest rates are cooling down. Okay, there's other signs in the egos, in the economy in general that say, no, don't put away your umbrella yet, because it's still raining some crap out there right now. So we're getting, as we have been for a long time, some real mixed signals on the economy. But we also know that most depressions and recessions only last so long, and this one's been going on a long time. The average one's about 56 days. So this is definitely much, much, much longer than that. We see these. I don't know how often it is every five years or something like that. It's not super predictable, but we do know that it's going to happen, right, it's going to happen again in our lifetime multiple times, because we're all super healthy and young, all right. So, knowing that and I'll just riff on this for a second yeah, there's pent up demand. I mean, there are companies, including places that people on the show work, that have suffered massively. They've had to let go. First of all, they've had to invite private equity into the mix, right, we saw that with Salesforce. A lot of companies have had to take on multiple ownership and investors just to stay alive, right. And then what do they want? Well, they want results and they often want to flip the businesses. So then they let go people. They try and make it a more viable sale by reducing the overall cost of employment costs, right, by reducing headcount, this sort of thing.
Josh Matthews:But I'm kind of with you on this, john. I mean, we all remember what happened when the vaccine came out and what that meant for the ecosystem at large. It went crazy. You couldn't find an architect for less than 200 grand, and there are so many guys and gals out there making 200 grand. All of a sudden they were really worth about 145, but you couldn't find them, right. I don't think it's ever going to be quite like that. I don't mean ever, but I don't think it's going to be quite like that in 2024. But I do expect there to be a some sort of turnaround and a lot of technical debt and a lot of projects that have been scuttled or put on hold, and I think that we're going to see a little bit of a nice fresh wind of opportunity and hope come back into the ecosystem that we haven't experienced for the last year. Let's go to Vanessa. I'm curious what you have to say about what's coming down the pike here.
Vanessa Grant:Well, for me, 2024 is. I'll only speak to my own prediction, which I just got the green light for my virtual business analyst trailhead community group, and that is going to be my focus for 2024. So I predict that we are going to have a stronger Salesforce BA community. We're going to start documenting some Salesforce best practices and, while I don't think it'll happen in 2024, I'm hoping that 2025 will see, you know, basalesforcecom, where we'll be able to actually have a best practices spot on salesforcecom to call our own. That's what I'm aiming for.
Josh Matthews:I love it. And how do you figure AI is going to play a role in this?
Vanessa Grant:Well, ai is going to play a role in just how we do business analysis. I mean even just from the transcription tools that we can use so that you know it grabs talking points. I think a lot of companies still kind of see business analysts as glorified note takers Like we're not. You know, with these tools we're able to more actively listen, we're able to more quickly get up to speed on products when we need to ask questions about them. We're better able to come up with an initial list of questions. We're better able to understand industries for working on new industries that maybe we're not familiar with, those business processes or those personas.
Vanessa Grant:I mean even just creating first drafts of documentation, even brushing up on things like elements cloud is doing amazing stuff with AI and they've always been a big advocate for business analysts. So, like there's a I'll try and send you the link but like it's a, there's like a four minute demo of where you can put in a business process map and elements cloud and it'll actually write that first draft of the user story and give you a first pass at a solution leveraging the, the well architected Salesforce website. Like that's the kind of stuff that. It was four minutes that blew my mind, but that's all stuff that's going to support business analysts, and so, by creating that community and starting to do our own documentation on what we as a community think are the best practices, I think AI is going to play a big part of it. How do we become better BAs and how do we advocate for AI within our organizations?
Josh Matthews:Yeah, man, all that and a bag of chips. I mean you're talking serious stuff and I think everything that you just said pretty much is going to apply to you know, more jobs, specifically to pretty much every single role in the ecosystem. David, what about 2024 for you? Are you much? Of a prognosticator, or do you have? You're so close to the AI stuff, like so closer than than I mean you and Fred are my AI guys that I know. Thank you, right. What do you think?
David Giller:So everything that Vanessa just mentioned, a lot of you might be thinking like oh yeah, that might be available in the future. I'm here to tell you that's available today. I do those, everything that Vanessa just described. I do those things today and I happen to use, being a technology geek and an AI geek, I happen to use a lot of different tools, but just with chat GPT alone, I do a lot of, if not all, of these things. Today, for example, I have a meeting with a client and we're talking about a particular project, or nuances about a particular project. I will take the transcript. First of all, I'm using an AI tool to also join all of my virtual meetings and not only does it record the meeting and take a transcript, even if I'm only a guest and I'm not hosting the meeting, it will record the meeting and take a transcript. It will also create notes, the app that I'm using. The notes aren't all that helpful, but either way, it gives me an immediate transcript. I download the transcript as a text file. I upload that into chat GPT. I give chat GPT the background Act as an experienced sales force let's say consultant or admin this attached to your going to find the transcript for, let's say, a nonprofit based in whatever geographic region, focused on whatever it is that they're focused on.
David Giller:And in this meeting we talked about the Blah, blah blah project, where we need to do blah, blah blah, help me identify all of the help me put to get craft a business requirements document based on all of the details discussed in the meeting.
David Giller:And then we'll go ahead, spit it all out and then I'll say what other details might we be missing from the client, what are the follow up items that we need to identify from the client that we did not discuss, and it's going to list out all of the other follow up questions. What are the risks and concerns associated with this? And it'll give me all of that. Act as a sales force admin. How would you suggest structuring the objects, the fields, the formula, fields, the automation in order to implement the things discussed in this transcript? So, within 20 minutes of finishing that meeting, I now have a library of documents. I can keep doing the same thing to say you know, I help me identify the stakeholders, help me put together a project, a project scoping document, a project profile document, a project summary document, and I now have a library of documents that I can use to get my project up and running.
Josh Matthews:Man. You absolutely inspire me, david, and you have since our very first conversation. And boy, do you look like George Clooney in your ex profile pic. Man, you are one handsome stud.
Vanessa Grant:So I'll just say David Giller's been inspiring me for years. At this point, so you win.
Josh Matthews:Fine, vanessa wins. I liked you two before they were famous. Okay, you win.
Peter Ganza:I'll take two of whatever David's telling me.
Josh Matthews:Too funny. Kristen 2024,. What do you think?
Kristen Langlois:Well, that's hard to go after. No, I definitely agree with everybody seeing kind of a light in 2024. To extend how bright it goes with the market, I'm not sure yet, but I do see things opening up a bit. I also see, right with the complications or not complications, that's the wrong word of the how Salesforce is diversified, their clouds, their industries, I predict more opportunities and roles for people that have deeper expertise in those areas and companies needing to bring them in because their Salesforce orgs and instances have gotten so complicated Whether it be because of technical debt or you name it and then wanting to move forward with different AI tools or whatever it may be. They're going to need more experienced people to come in and help them navigate their current org. So I definitely see opportunities for hiring and I don't know I don't want to knock on wood I've definitely seen even an increase at the end of this quarter, with more and more opportunities coming up. So I'm predicting that continuing.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, in less than six weeks. We did in business recently. We did in less than six weeks what we did in the prior six months. Right, it's like the new year never started. It's like there was no normal February through May hiring season. I mean it was happening, but not in the same way as most other years. I'd say it was similar to about three or four other years out of the last 25. Right, so it was not your standard typical hiring season or hiring year, if it's all right.
Josh Matthews:I'd like to just jump in and talk about what I see as far as the future of recruiting goes, because, well, I'm a recruiter, so there you go. But, more importantly, how it's going to impact individuals and potentially and I don't really know this but what we might need to be on the lookout for and what we might need to be and this is an interesting thought open to. Right, because recruiters largely will continue to behave like recruiters. They will lean into AI more and more. First, with just writing emails to capture candidates' attention or to capture client attention using AI. That's what Peter said. That's AI crawling, right, great, it helped you create some emails. But what you're going to see and I am sure this has happened with almost everybody on this panel. I don't know about you, but I get so many emails every day and so many companies pitching my company. I see the same email pattern come through. I see the same. It's just like AI wrote it for everyone out there. Book, a meeting book, a meeting book, a meeting book, a meeting value, value, value. Even to the point where it's Alex Hormozzi stuff, just everywhere. Like everywhere, it's like, okay, it's almost to the point of like, well, if you're getting the Hormozzi stuff now, like that's great, but guess what, so is everyone else. So you're either going to catch up or you're going to lead the pack for what's coming in 2025. Because what I'm seeing in the last three or four months is a lot of I'll just say what it is desperation, a lot of desperation, right, and people are leaning into AI to do that.
Josh Matthews:Okay, back to recruiting. So there's some interesting products out there already and some interesting ways of filtering down candidates. Okay, if you apply to a job on LinkedIn, well, you can answer these questions, this sort of standard recruiting. You apply and you answer some questions, that kind of filters. Then people go through and they can run a search of all the candidates. Maybe there's 200 people that have applied and they can narrow that list down. And what I'm describing for LinkedIn is no different not really too different than what you might find on Indeed or say whatever platform Nike is using to recruit people or Salesforce is using to recruit people Right, and they're using AI now to score and rank people.
Josh Matthews:Now, I know a lot of things like scoring leads, scoring opportunities in Salesforce. It's no different, except that now you have a very smart machine that's doing this. It's not necessarily 100 percent reliant on clicking this box or tagging this person this way or ranking someone this way. It can do it for you and it can review all of your notes. It can look at everything and score candidates. So, more and more, that's going to happen and that's going to require candidates to be more conscientious about what they have on LinkedIn, what they have on social media, what they have on their resume Right, and if you can't talk as well as AI is writing for you, you've got a problem, Because in an interview, it's just you, right, ai can help you prepare for an interview, but it's going to be you if you're going to go to Salesforce and you've got eight hours of eight to 10 hours of interviewing in front of you for the day.
Josh Matthews:You better be darn prepared. So lean into AI, but don't. First of all, it can lie a lot, so you've got to be careful of that. I remember I think it was you, david, who shared back in, I want to say, around April, march or April of last year. It was like you kind of got to treat it like it's got Alzheimer's maybe it wasn't you, I don't remember but you got to kind of treat it like it lies 20 percent of the time and that it's forgetful right, and then act accordingly with your prompts. When I imagine a future of recruiting, after seeing and well, if there's time, we'll get into this a little bit later, but after looking at watching the Google Gemini trailer, which apparently one or two days ago and we talked about this ad nauseam on Fred's podcast Banking on Disruption, just was that yesterday, fred, that's going to be that episode.
John Sisson:That was yesterday, but Dr Moore so that's going to be.
Josh Matthews:yeah, so that's if you want to hear a deep dive on that. You know, listen to his show tomorrow and we're on the back half. But you know, basically they came out with this amazing video. It got millions of hits. I'm sure investors were going crazy, all excited about Gemini, only to find out like, oh no, that was sort of a doctor demo. It wasn't really a demo, it was like a hyper produced demo, and the ease with which it was demonstrating all of its results was actually not quite that easy. But it got my brain spinning, so much so that I sat down, I took a bunch of notes, I slept on it.
Josh Matthews:I think I dreamt about it and then the next day, which was Monday, had a big discussion about what I thought the future of recruiting was going to look like. And here's where I think it's going to be not next year, but here's where I think it's going to go. I think people are going to plug in your LinkedIn profile or ID and they're going to have very quickly connected all of your social media. How many posts you've got your engagement on those posts, how many likes have happened on it, in other words, how much of an influencer or a participant you are. What's your passion score? I think that's going to happen. I know for a fact that just last week I had two sessions with two startups that peep some of these people Like one of the guys I placed I think it was 19 years ago as a dotnet developer at Transcore back in Portland, like old in days, right, and he's launched a new company in another group that I've worked with on AI, email campaign stuff really cool trick stuff.
Josh Matthews:They pitched me on something and they more not pitched me, but they just wanted to get a recruiter input on this. And I'm telling you guys, the stuff that's coming down the pike that you need to be prepared for is a much bigger leap than when we saw the introduction of video interviewing. Like one-way video interviewing, in other words, like here's a question, you're on camera, you've got 30 seconds, answer the question, click the next button and on you go. Now we're talking about text-based prescreening, like all sorts of crazy stuff. So just like get ready for it, get your docs in order, get your LinkedIn in order, get your competency in order.
Josh Matthews:None of this stuff, nothing that we've talked about, is ever going to replace fully, it's never going to replace your investment in interviewing and your investment in being a good employee and the references that come with that, or your investment in being articulate so that you can describe your successes or your energy or enthusiasm. I think AI is going to be able to pick up on some of that stuff and score you and score you well, but if you don't bring that same level to an interview, you're going to be a little bit shattered. Fred's had his hand up for a long time. It's making me feel guilty. So fine, fred, go ahead and pipe up, buddy.
Fred Cadena:Well, no, I wanted to ask you something because I and we may have talked about this before, either on the show or one-on-one, but a while back you made a statement, you know. Oh, you better talk as well as your AI rights, and I was thinking back about I don't know three, six months ago. There was a guy who came out with a piece of technology leveraged Google Glass or something like it to enable people to go to court and it would record the proceedings and then it would use AI to give them suggestions about what they could do, you know, in lieu of hiring a lawyer. And he ended up getting forced out of business because the ABA, you know, didn't like the idea of people not using lawyers. But the implication for this is there's already so much fraud. You know, I hear a lot of interview fraud people showing up, you know, sending a surrogate to an interview, and the person that shows up on the first day is a different person.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, probably we call it proxy interviewing.
Fred Cadena:Proxy interviewing. I love it. So I don't love it, I actually hate it, but I love that there's a term for it. But I just wonder, like you know, ai when I think about, like you know, having an AI that's that quick, that responsive. David talked about you know, inviting these. I use, I use Otter, I use TLDR. There's already these things out there. You know, are there candidates that are using AI to game the interview system?
Fred Cadena:And if so obviously you know don't, but what can we do on the hiring side to kind of suss that out?
Josh Matthews:Yeah, it's a really good question. Well, the first thing, like there is a magical pill for this, right? So the magic pill is you reach out to Josh Matthews at the salesforcerecruitercom and then you pay me a bunch of money and I find the right person for you. My whole team finds the right person for you, rather. So that's the easy answer. Okay, the more challenging way to approach this, or to avoid proxy interviewing, is number one. Everybody should be video interviewed, everybody, and if you suspect a candidate is performing fraud in the interview, it's perfectly okay, I think, to ask them to turn their camera. I'd like to see who else is in the room with you. Please turn your camera, right, like everybody's on a laptop or has like a little thing sticking on top of their monitor. So that's easy enough. So you can see if someone's even there, right? The other thing that you could do is like please screen share while we're talking. Then you can see if they're, you know, splitting the screen and someone else is feeding them information.
Josh Matthews:Here's another idea use your common sense. I mean the biggest challenge with, I think, where the most mistakes are made in recruiting, at least from third party recruiters, which, I am right, meaning agency recruiters. Agency recruiters most of them are fairly young, they're fairly hungry and they never knew what to do with their life. Okay, so, like that's your baseline recruiter, right there, right, and that was me too. I was an art major. Look at me now. Okay, so I share that with you because they're generally nice people, they like people, but they're also money motivated and often micromanaged, which means that they need to get a certain number of people placed and bring in enough revenue, or else they get a PIP. You know, and nobody wants that. And so, with that in mind, you've got to be really careful and aware of, like, who is the actual person doing the screening. You know what's their level of experience.
Josh Matthews:I've said this multiple times. It's like when you're, when you're going to buy a house, you can use your Aunt Jenny, because she sells two or three houses a year and she's only gonna charge you a 1% sellers fee instead of two and a half or 3% from someone else. Now you might think that you just scored right, but you didn't, because maybe you lost three additional percentage on the house. If it's a million dollar house, you know it's 30 grand, right. So you might miss out on a lot of potential revenue of selling your house or profit selling your house because you didn't go to Marsha Keys who has owned the you know, owned the market in Portland for the last 35 years knows everybody can make a call and can get that thing sold and get a bidding war going and drive up the value of your property.
Josh Matthews:So who you work with matters. Look, we're always going to have to be apply a lot of scrutiny to individuals, but if you're not applying the same level of scrutiny to the recruiters and that includes all of the companies that are using talent acquisition pros in their own organizations if they're not hiring right, they're losing. And I've got the fricking proof 50% of people leave a job within 18 months. I mean, if that number doesn't suck like crazy, I don't know what numbers do, because that's a ridiculous number and that stat has not changed in almost 20 years, right? So there's a real problem in recruiting in general and people I've talked to recruiters they think AI is going to change their life. Other people think AI is going to put them out of a job. Right, but the problem isn't the recruiters, the problem is the model that they use and the problem are the people who are hiring the recruiters who, by the way, in general don't really know how to interview, don't know how to screen people and don't even know how to read. Maybe they can read the red flags, but they can't read the pink flags or the yellow lights right, they can't slow down, dig deep, figure out what's going on here, right?
Josh Matthews:A bubbly personality and I like people. That does not. A recruiter make people so when you're working with a recruiter so I'm sort of answering this in a roundabout way, fred so you've got to pick a recruiter that knows what's up and they can't be people who like everyone. Recruiters who like everyone belong in talent acquisition, where they're just shuffling papers and shoving people in hard hats through the door every single morning. Right, if you want someone who's actually discerning, they probably shouldn't like most people. And no offense to the world, and I don't mean to paint a bad picture of myself, but I, you know, like, I tolerate almost everybody, but like, am I a huge fan of most people? Absolutely not. I'm pretty damn picky.
Fred Cadena:Don't, I know it.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, I'm damn picky and that's why we've got, you know, all of you wonderful people and not 400 other people who are sharing the prospectus. You guys are my favorites. You're here on the show right now, right. So I'm really, really picky and that, I think, more than anything, has made me a good recruiter, okay, and then the other thing I'll say is, when you're doing these video interviews, take a photo of them, do a screenshot of them so that you can see them, and then you save that in a file, right. And then when you're getting that person if it's placed someone in its remote right, whatever, get their driver's license or passport or whatever just say I need this to place. You Go ahead and share it right and see if it's the same person. So that's one way that you can protect yourself. David, you had your hand up for a long time. Go for it, buddy.
David Giller:Yeah, I wanted to say that I think that there's definitely a lot of reasons to be concerned about AI and to be concerned that other people are trying to pass themselves off as being more talented, more creative, more competent than they actually are. But I honestly think that, just like any other tool, you give an incompetent person access to the internet and there's very little that they're gonna do with it. You give me all of Home Depot and if my life depended on it, I'm not so sure I can put together a bookcase. So my point is that AI in the hands of someone who is inexperienced, unqualified, incompetent, they're only going to go so far. Yes, they'll be able to put together an impressive cover letter and resume. They might know exactly the right scripts of how to answer all of the appropriate questions in an interview. They might be able to craft really impressive status updates and emails during the first couple of weeks or maybe even months on the job. But at some point they're not gonna know when the AI gives them crappy responses of fictional Salesforce features or products or nonsensical facts that they are relying on because they don't know the difference, they're gonna fall flat on their face and it's gonna either way. They're not gonna go very far.
David Giller:It's still incredibly frustrating and annoying for any hiring manager, but I think the fear of others pulling a fast one on any of us with the use of AI it is justified, but I wouldn't say the sky is falling because of it, because I think they're just gonna fail a little bit faster, not slower, faster. There you go so. But I think, on the flip side, ai is allowing not to sound like I'm contradicting myself. I think that AI is allowing each of us to take our either our competencies or incompetencies even further. So if I'm only mildly creative when it comes to ideas, but I have no clue how to go into a tool like Canvore Photoshop to turn it into a visualization of something, sure I can go to AI and I can do it, but if I still don't even have those minimal fundamental skills of creativity, I'm not gonna go anywhere. I'm gonna create a whole bunch of garbage with AI. The same holds true for words.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, like that makes a lot of sense and it almost makes me think, like, do you think that the early adopters of AI, the people like you certainly not people like me, but people like you and people like Fred, who've really done their first of all, you're technically minded to begin with, or at least technically interested right To begin with? Do you think that this is gonna create an even greater pay gap due to, you know, in the socioeconomic status?
David Giller:Absolutely, because take the average worker in any role in any type of company.
David Giller:The average worker I'll call it like white collar type work.
David Giller:I mean if I was a car mechanic or working in a pizza shop or a bakery shop, ai isn't gonna help me that much, but maybe knowing when to order certain products that I'm running low on or supplies that I'm running low on.
David Giller:But anyone who's working in an office type job, managing projects and technology and interacting with people, those who are somewhat competent I'm not even gonna say experienced or necessarily skilled who are somewhat competent with using AI to work more productively, are going to forget about the existence of the AI, or whether they wear it on their sleeve and they're transparent about it, or whether they keep it as a secret, as their secret little tool like oh, I got access to the internet, you didn't know about that kind of a thing. So, no matter what, those people who are somewhat competent in using AI will absolutely be far more productive and create far more impressive work product to their colleagues, to their prospects, to their customers, and they will rightfully so end up earning more money because they're bringing more to the table, they're of more value to the people that they serve, in whatever capacity they serve, because they happen to be using AI to be more productive.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, you know what this made me think of Casey and I were having a discussion about stores that have closed down because of Amazon. But Amazon's so often because you can get stuff that never would be in my town of 60,000 people here, right? And I almost think the AI user is that person who leans way into Amazon for their shopping, which would be me, an Instacart and that kind of stuff, right? Which would be me for sure. I don't like going into stores. I can't stand it. I can't stand it, right? So I'm a heavy, heavy Amazon guy.
Josh Matthews:But then there are other people who are heavy Amazon, not shoppers, but they figured out how to use a little bit of AI to write some product stuff, figure out how to open up a little shop and then go make anywhere from $30,000 to $300,000 a year without doing too much work selling on Amazon, right? So those are your like real power users. And then there's everybody else who's hanging out under the fluorescence at Walmart right now, right. So I sort of view it like that, like the Amazon users, the Walmart in-store shoppers and the people making money on Amazon. Peter's had his hand up for a long time. Go ahead, peter.
Peter Ganza:Totally not related to the topic, but previously you were starting to talk about yourself and like your personality, right, and being picky. Do you remember the first Zoom or whatever go-to meeting that we had? I left I don't even remember like a full-time employer or like a full-time employer back in whatever 2018. And I literally think it was like the next day, right, I was all pumped and you know, anxious and all that kind of stuff right applying and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you gave me one of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten like in my business career, which was, you know, you basically said stop, dude, right, you got to process it, get you know, get your shit together, whether that's days or weeks, just you know you're not in the spot that you know you should be interviewing right now. Yeah, I remember. And.
Peter Ganza:I took and I took and I took. You know, I took that advice. I forget how long it was. It's different for everybody, but I've told that to so many of my friends and family since you told me that and I just wanted to call that out because that's why that's one of the reasons, one of the many reasons why I think you're awesome and I show up.
Josh Matthews:Hey, thanks, peter, and that's I do remember that you know. Now that you bring it up, I don't know if I would have remembered if you hadn't brought it up, but I do remember, because what stood up, what stood out for me about you and that phone or in that conversation, was like you just lost your job, but you were like Johnny on the spotlight. I'm not going to let it get me down. One door closes, one door opens, you know. Another one opens like let's go rock and roll. It's like dude, like I get it, but the thing is is like we can't, we don't know when it's going to show on our face our disappointment. And you know Murphy's law is going to say that that's going to show up In your next interview for the job that you really want if you haven't processed it. So yeah, a good reminder for everybody. Fred's got his hand up. Go ahead, buddy.
Fred Cadena:Yeah, this is gonna be a bit of a non sequitur, but I was just thinking when you were talking about your Amazon example, where I thought you were going with it was Earlier this year.
Fred Cadena:You know, in leveraging AI, amazon had noticed that they were getting a giant influx of self-published books, and what I thought was ridiculous is they they still set the limit when they put a limit in place of three books a day. And Again, you know, it's one of those things that you're not gonna stop anybody from AI publishing with a with a limit of three books a day. And it's easy, you know, kind of in your same kind of vein, for someone to leverage AI To game systems like that. And I think that is something that, if any of our predictions for AI are going to come to reckoning, for it to, you know, mature a little bit more, become more Mainstream, more consumer friendly, there is gonna have to be Significant advances, not just on the capabilities of the algorithms themselves, but on the capabilities of others to be able to Dissern and suss out what is legitimate and what is AI created because I can almost guarantee you that Anybody who's putting out three books a day on the Amazon marketplace is is not putting a lot of thought Into that content.
Josh Matthews:That's probably not very good right, yeah, if you can't read, what? If you can't read a book in a day, you're definitely not writing three of them.
Fred Cadena:Exactly.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I mean, I wonder if there's a word for it. Is it called tech smarts? We say tick, we say street smarts right, is there tech smarts? So if I get an email from US Bank, right, and it's like there's just something off about the logo, it's like this isn't US Bank. I mean, I don't know how many times a week I click on the email, you know, like the actual, you know it says, oh, it's from whatever US Bank customer service, and I click on it and it's like you know, I'll be one, four, three, two, five, seven, two, four, three, right, like. It's like, okay, you're not US Bank. So you've got to be kind of aware, right, do? Is there a word for that? Tech smarts? Is that what?
Josh Matthews:we say Well, that that's it right, but that's not the same thing. Right click bait is like Overhyping something just to get the clicks, and somehow you get paid on clicks. This is this is like someone trying to scam and take all of my money from me. Right, that'd be something different, you know, knowing the difference in that email. There you go. Savvy, I like that.
Fred Cadena:I like it.
Peter Ganza:I like that. I don't remember the word. I know there is one, but I I love this concept because I used to work at semantic right the makers of Nord Nandy virus, right back In the day when, yeah, you couldn't even sure floppy disk right, oh my gosh, yeah, I get a virus and I. The next phase of that was well, but I don't run any virus anymore. I don't need that shit. It's. It's psychological. Now it's all about needing to get you to click a few times and then this guy's the limit. You're in running, you can. You can hijack and do whatever you want. Yeah.
Josh Matthews:Kristen let's. I want to come back to you. You know 10k produces this really valuable Talent ecosystem report every year and and it came out just a few months ago and we had a really nice show about it you know, is there a statistic that you recall from Either the growth or or reduction and demand, things like that From this past year, that you could predict for the future? Right, do you see? You know admin hiring spiking. Do you see independent consulting spiking? You know demand for architecture continuing to rise, demand for offshore rising or going down kind of curious definitely so.
Kristen Langlois:I I continue to think that there's going to be an Prediction, based off of what we saw in the report of, even though we saw a lot of people coming into the ecosystem and getting there and more admins coming in, there was less overall job listings for that and more in more specialized areas. So I think we're going to see more specialized roles come out, even if it's a, an admin specialized in in, you know, marketing cloud or whatever it may be.
Josh Matthews:I feel service or whatever yeah right.
Kristen Langlois:I think you're going to, even you're going to see specialization happen at the, at the admin level, and at other, at other roles, and in addition to that, I do think there'll be more expansion into Offshore areas. One I think you'll start we'll start to see more and more into Mirshore. So probably you know South America and Central America. That'll pick up as well, as there's definitely more and more expansion going into Africa. We're definitely seeing increase in talent there Happening.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, and do you think it's going to be Africa supporting Europe and Latin supporting US and Canada? From a time zone standpoint, I do yeah.
Josh Matthews:I'd like to ask another question. I'm going to start with John. So, john, you know riffing off of what, what Kristen just shared here. You know there's some really cool, exciting stuff out there, whether it's Omni studio or data cloud and so on. But in 24, do you have a sense of where you think like what's going to be the biggest, most hyped up? You know, add-on or specialty? I'm coming into 20, coming into 24. It's, I think it's gonna be data cloud.
John Sisson:I met with Some of the senior level people for the ECS team at Dreamforce and it was every conversation was about data cloud. Yeah, what can we do? How can we drive? How do we help get customers healthy? How do we use that? Because it's going to be a consumption model. For the first time Salesforce history I do think it's going to be data cloud. Everything is going to be focused on that.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, yeah, who else second anyone second that? Does anyone think it's going to be something other than data cloud Totally? Agree.
Josh Matthews:Okay, so we got a yes from Peter and a yes from Fred there. Okay, all right, yeah, and I think you know, on the heels of that, personalization right in general in the ecosystem, right, so you know we're seeing that more with email messaging and this sort of thing. But Again, I know I brought this up a couple months ago I checking out the F1, the formula one booth, where they showed data cloud working with Omni studio and and how that, how that works. Now, as an F1 follower and as somebody spends a fair amount of money on F1 crap Every year, including tickets and shirts or hats or whatever, okay, I'll admit it, I've got the F1 carbon cologne. There you go. I said it, I've been keeping it to myself for over a year now, but I've got F1 cologne. Everybody and I smell fantastic, right, but they know that about me, right?
Josh Matthews:So, like, when I get these emails about which events I might want we Casey and I might may want to attend and which seating areas were most likely to want to buy and what price point, all that stuff and getting to watch how that all works at the F1 demo, again, omni and data cloud In working together to produce this stuff is absolutely fantastic. How much do you think this stuff is? Let me ask you guys anybody can answer this Like everybody's got their budget. Some live beyond their means, but their budget plus their credit cards, right. So how much of the, how much of this personalization and marketing Do you think is going to increase, increase overall spending, or is it just going to focus the spending that is going to happen anyway to the companies that are using these products?
Fred Cadena:Oh you talking about consumer spending, or you're trying to spend on the technology?
Josh Matthews:consumer spending I.
Fred Cadena:Think it's a both end. I think it's going to, you know, increase the amount of discretionary spending. I think you know this gets back to some of the like recessionary and kind of weird mixed signals, beginning from the economy, but consumers have been spending, you know, even even in the face of the economic uncertainty and tightening of the money supply and everything else. I don't think that's going to stop. I think that, you know, consumers Are feeling still a lot of pent up demand from From COVID and they're spending not just on product but increasingly on experiences. So I think it's going to drive additional demand. I also think it's going to make consumers spend to those merchants that Understand them the best and put the products in front of them that are the most poignant. You know, you, you probably wouldn't have bought a Calvin Klein you know fragrance or you probably wouldn't have bought a, you know, travis Kelsey, fragrance or Taylor Swift, right, You're right.
Fred Cadena:You're not a football guy, right? You're a Formula one guy.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, this is what Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift smell like after, you know, after a five-city tour or after a football game? No thanks exactly. Yeah, gross.
Fred Cadena:Gross. I think I think that's a. And now, just to go back to everything quickly, I think I'm ready to put a number two behind data cloud, it would be obvious. Studio and those technologies you know, and the two of them together are incredibly powerful. And they're two Technologies data cloud being the newer of the two that Salesforce just rolled out a certification that it used to only be a partner Accreditation. Now it's a certification as of the last couple of months. Yeah, an omnistudio. You know the same way, you know it came from velocity, but they're baking into all their industry clouds and I think those are two areas where there's a lot of consultants or a lot of Salesforce practitioners on the client side that have not had a lot of exposure and they're not going away. So those would be my number one and number two.
Josh Matthews:Fantastic. David, peter, kristen, anyone else want to pipe up what's gonna be the next hot thing or the next hot certification? If not, that's okay. We've been cranking now for a solid hour and a half, and Props to you guys. That's some serious endurance. I mean you. It's like anyone listening to this entire show. You could have gone and watched a crappy movie. Instead, you're learning tons of stuff and hanging out with some really smart people. So good choice, good choice on you. I'm not sure what happened to Vanessa. I think she had to go right at seven, so so she's out. I think she probably had a four o'clock because she's Pacific time. Let's do a quick final thoughts on what we're seeing in In 24, or better yet, let's keep it focused on the candidates and the hiring managers. Right, we can give some recommendations and advice to hiring managers too. What do we think People should do differently in 24 that they've been doing this year? What should they change to have a better career? Go ahead, david.
David Giller:Sure, I think that over time, in many areas of life, we've lost sight of values over keywords and certifications and and actual, did you actually work in the exact same field as us For a company of the exact same size in the exact same location? Because, honestly, even if the answer is going to be yes to all of those the company is going to be like oh yeah, that means you work for our competitor across the street. We don't want you so as a hiring manager, as an individual worker, as an individual Visual contributor, as an entrepreneur, as a Salesforce admin as a lawyer, as a grandfather as a lawyer, yeah, as a grandfather.
David Giller:So stop focusing on these insignificant Quantifiable metrics that others made you believe are all that important. They're not. There are other things. For example, when I am looking to hire someone to join my team, of course I need them to be, to have certain qualifications, certain experience, certain skills. I'm not saying that that's not important whatsoever, but what I think is more important is do they have the appropriate communication skills, problem-solving skills, what? How do they go about addressing a particular challenge or obstacle or difficult situation? And a lot of that boils down to the, the personality, the values, the morals.
David Giller:Because if You're the person who was brainwashed to believe, oh, if you have X number of certifications and X number of trailhead badges, anyone will hire you and that means you're the smartest person in the World. Guess what? You're gonna be walking around with a false sense of, of an inflated ego, expecting that everyone's going to listen to you and bow down to you just because you say, no, I'm not building your multi-select pick list. The CEO is gonna say go, take a hike, I asked you to do it and I'm the boss. So, yeah, we, we all need to sort of refocus ourselves and For everyone, based on whatever they're doing. That means slightly different things, but sort of reevaluate what's really important, what are the real goals and problems and challenges that we need to, that we need to address and that should be, I think, the way that we can choose the appropriate path for 2024.
Josh Matthews:David, thank you for sharing what, what absolutely needed to be said. I agree with you in every, every single word that you just dropped. Right now, it's it's a big deal right, and we can use AI, at least in its current state, to figure out some of this stuff. Right, like, okay, you got the basic stuff, great, right, but AI is coming to the point where it's going to be able to discern that right through conversations. Now we talked about gaming the system, so there's always going to be a risk for that. We're gonna have to find out how to protect ourselves, but there's going to be a way someday to put everything I know about behavioral analysis, microfacial expressions, tone when lying, when to dig deeper, you know what questions to ask and then, even more importantly, how to interpret those questions. All of those things right. So, but until that happens, you're going to have to, I think, invest in how to be better at everything that David just said.
Josh Matthews:If you are a hiring manager, it's so critical. There's some great books out there. There's some really good videos out there, but careful who you take your advice from, right, and if you don't have the time, lean on an expert. Maybe it's us, maybe it's another firm. Maybe it's Kristen and 10k like it, whatever, like it doesn't matter. But get the help that you need so that you're not making bonehead decisions. Look idiots, hire idiots, okay, and what makes someone an idiot is not doing something that they could have done to help de-risk this the situation Easily. So.
Josh Matthews:For those that don't know, go get good at interviewing. Understand how to read people. If you're not very good at it, maybe you shouldn't be involved in it. Defer to someone who's more empathic, someone who can actually read people's faces and expressions and tone, and all of those things to Determine the truth. Because that's all you want, right? If everybody was truthful, if everybody was truthful, there'd probably be no need for Recruiters. Everyone just fill out a form and you can push a button and here's the top people and off you go. But it's not like that. We're dealing with humans, okay. Who wants to go next? Kristen?
Kristen Langlois:sure I was just Comment on what was just said, because I think this is something that over the past few years, I've come into challenges with of. You know, looking at Skills outside of the specific Certifications, the specific years of experience within specific organizations, or, like you know, exactly like the company you're recruiting for hiring for, where I think what has happened, it's almost well, the thought process and some of these hiring managers like, well, this is what I had to go through, right, to get this opportunity role. This is the skills that I had to gain. It had to be this perfect. So it's that you know own bias, going into it versus being, you know, looking more Outwardly of what we talked, what you talked about, the business communication skills, the If it's, if it's consulting skills, the consulting acumen. You know looking more broad versus being very narrow. So I think those are great points to point out for hiring managers. And then I know this has been discussed numerous times for those looking for jobs, and I think it'll continue to be this way.
Kristen Langlois:With AI, right now you have this tool that can Create a resume for you. Take the keywords, whatever it may be, but you still need to add your own personalization to it right, you know, take it, become more efficient, but make sure it you shine through and everything that you're doing your values, your motivators, and in align that to the organizations you're pursuing, and in that right now you're, you have to continue. You have to go a step further. You need to look for people that work there. You need to build advocates, right? I think that's what we've been talking about all year with tough the market's been, but that's not going to change, right? Especially with AI, like, how are you individually going to stand out? And so that's, that's going to Just continue, I believe yeah, it's like who's better at prompting?
Josh Matthews:well, right now, my votes for David. But you know, it's like who's better at prompting? Like that do whoever prompts better wins right. We're basically asking questions and getting clear about things, and we need to do that in real life, not just on on a text-based chat chat bot thing. Yeah, so yeah.
Kristen Langlois:I'm being clear about what makes you different.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, you know, I met with someone today. I'd placed her in a career About see 10, 7, 17 years ago, okay, and she hit me up. She's a friend, but we don't. We haven't stayed in touch product owner at Nike. So anyone who needs a badass product owner, let me know, because she's looking. And God, where was I even? Oh, yeah, so I looked at her so I was like just being a friend, like yeah, I'll look at your resume, like let's take a look at this stuff.
Josh Matthews:And there wasn't enough about how she does things. Right, like you have a willingness to what you're focused on Achieving, what you're going to accomplish this by what you're known for, what those are all Personal things about you that we get to know and unless you understand yourself, you're not going to be able to articulate that. And, more importantly, you're gonna wind up somewhere. If you're pretending, if you're pretending, if you're a poser, if you're a faker, right, then You're gonna wind up in a really unhappy situation and then you're gonna look around, be like this place sucks, how did I get here? It's like cuz you tried to fool everybody, right, you're better than this company, or you're not as good as that company, or you're just not a fit for that job in that company, and on and on, and on. All right, peter, final thoughts from you, go for it sweet.
Peter Ganza:So, yes, totally agree with Everything that you and Kristen just said. I agree with everything David said as well, except for the multi-select pick list. That's the answer to any problem in Salesforce is just build a multi-select pick list. But that's a whole separate part, all separate podcast. What I just wanted to sort of sum up every we've all been saying the same thing. I feel like you know we're moving to an era that we need to be more for yourself.
Peter Ganza:Well, we need to be. We need to be more authentic, right? I think that, yeah, that word encapsulates really what what everyone previously just said right and a lot of what David said right is Is read on point. It goes back to, you know, the old era where, oh, you go to college or university, you get a degree and hope they'll guarantee you a job, and for so long in tech, and especially in Salesforce, it was a requirement, right? I got into Salesforce for a job that required a BA. It could have been an art degree, like someone. It was just a piece of paper, right, it didn't mean anything. Luckily, you know, there was a leader that you know broke through all those barriers. But it's the same kind of thing, it, right, it's not just about the certs, it's not just about the pieces of paper. You need to be authentic.
Josh Matthews:I Love it, yeah, be authentic. And so what does it mean to be authentic? Let's just, I'm just gonna share a couple thoughts on this. To be authentic means to be vulnerable. It means to be seen for who you are, and a lot of people don't want to do that. That can be scary. What if they don't like me? What if I'm not enough? By the way, what if I'm not enough is one of the biggest fears of anybody. What if you're not enough for your spouse? What if you're not enough for your children? What if you're not enough for your boss or your peers or your co-workers, right? What if you're not enough for the college or university that you're going to? What if you're not good enough to get through and Accomplish your first certification? That's a universal thing, people, right? So we've got it. We've got to figure out a way. We're not going to cover that today, but we've got to figure out a way to overcome that, to get to a point where you really get to be Yourself, and you've got to be careful of this.
Josh Matthews:I used to watch this show once in a while as a British show, where it was like a makeover show, so they took in people who were just like super rat, radically Dressed their get-up right. Maybe it was like I don't know, like someone who was like Overly risque in a really trashy way, or maybe it's you know, goth boy, right with six inch platform boots and the whole thing, and they can say like, okay, that's you, that's authentic, but is it? That's not? That's not you, that's your costume, that's you trying to find other people who are similar to you and to scare other people off? That's not you.
Josh Matthews:Vulnerable is naked you. Okay, vulnerable isn't your outfit, it's not, and we had a style episode, so riff on that a little bit. But vulnerable is not like, oh, I'm a goth and whatever I like nine-inch nails, okay, that's not what I'm talking about. It's what do you believe in? And, to David's point, what are your values? What do you care about? How trustworthy are you? So getting truly, truly naked? And if you can do that, if you do that and you don't like what you see, maybe you can either do something about it that you can, or you can accept who you are and operate with what you've got. That's what it takes everybody, I think. So excellent point, peter. Did we miss anybody in this little final round? I?
John Sisson:think so. It's funny. This is John. I think there's three things that I'm taking away from this. A after listening to David, I think I may shave down monkey. That's been taught how to speak, so I have a lot of work to do on AI. Secondly, I've already changed my fantasy football team name this week to idiots hire idiots. I think that's great. That's a t-shirt. If you haven't done it, there you go.
John Sisson:The last thing of this all of these things go back into, but the thing that is always the most interesting to me is how many companies that we work with that don't understand who they are and what they're solving for, which then makes the hiring process even more difficult, and they don't understand the role that they're looking for and the culture they're trying to build, and so, therefore, it is the certifications. We all know that, within five minutes of a conversation, if somebody is trying to fake it to us in regard to what their requirements is, it's always I just need a CRM tool. That's not true. Same, close, and so that, to me, is the thing I would be taking away from is one of the things Sales Optimizer is working to. Your point about being naked is who do we want to be when we grow up, and what does that mean in regard to hiring, and what type of culture are we looking to build? Because if we don't to your point, we're setting people up almost to fail right out of the gate.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, man, does that happen all the freaking time? It's like, hurry, hurry, hurry, higher, higher, higher. This is who I need. And they show up and they're like they give them the shovel and it's like, well, where do I dig? I'm gonna figure it out. It's like are you digging there? It's not fair. So, better onboarding, better recruiting, better screening, better onboarding, more authenticity from candidates. And how about we just say let's raise the average of everybody, right? And how do we do that? Well, everybody needs to get better at being authentic and doing their thing. It's just so critical.
Josh Matthews:Guys, the show's not over because we actually have a question and I got a message from Vanessa that she had a hard stop at 7pm Eastern, which is about 20 minutes ago, but she did share a question that she got this week, so I'm gonna go ahead and ask it. I think I know the best person to answer it, but this is the question and we'll push it out to our guests and panelists. My main question this is I'm quoting this individual, I don't know who it is. So my main question is how do you transition from being a full-time Salesforce employee to an independent consultant? And I don't know if this person means they work at Salesforce or they're an employee in the ecosystem to an independent consultant. I've some ideas, but would like to know your views around this. All right, kristin, come on.
Kristen Langlois:I was waiting for it. Yeah yeah, there's so many, definitely so many views or recommendations I can give, but ultimately I think it is first kind of going back to what we all talked about is knowing your skill sets, knowing your expertise, knowing your values, knowing what interests you and how to articulate it outwardly. So I think using AI is a great starting point to do that being able to take all of your expertise, put it into AI and help have AI help you kind of come together with potential, vision and mission and how to go to market. So it's a good place to start. And then also taking a look at those in your network are there people that you can immediately go to and talk to about the orgs they're in now? Do they need any specific help? So starting to kind of get almost a pipeline of work and understanding as well as being able to I apologize, I have little ones in the background.
Kristen Langlois:Yeah you're good, being able to really market and brand yourself. It's a huge, huge part of going independent and then connecting yourself with organizations like 10K and using 10K and others out there to be a tool in your toolbox as you go out and pursue independence. But there's multiple things to kind of set yourself up. But you're not sure that you are setting yourself up before you completely just stop working full time and take that leap.
Josh Matthews:That's right. It's an interesting question because it is specifically. I mean, I'll just say Christian was on our show earlier this year a couple times, and one of those times this was really the main topic of the show. So there's a whole podcast dedicated to the individual who asked this question. And, yes, you can also come to the salesforcerecruitercom. We do place independent consultants.
Josh Matthews:I'm going to recommend something else, though, because we've had some of these questions over the past several years, including recently about this, very similarly, penn, and I would ask this person to really dig deep and figure out are you ready to stop learning as quickly as you have been learning? This is kind of a weird question, but the reason why I pose it is there are some consultants out there that are all gung-ho on being a consultant. Why not? I'll be my own boss and I get to write off 10% of my house and all this other stuff. Some real benefits to it. But if you go in and you're not really a badass yet, if you're just run of the mill or worse, you risk messing up your reputation before it even gets launched and you risk having mentorship in your life, to the extent that one may when they're operating at a company, with a mentor, with someone who is looking after them. So I would absolutely recommend figure out are you even ready? If you're 25 years old and you've been cranking on this stuff since you were 18, part-time, and you've had one job for two and a half years and now you're ready to go be a consultant, I'd be like, come on, man, just give it some time. One of the things that we see we get questions like this mostly from millennials, mostly from millennials it's definitely not the boomers and I think Gen Z is a little bit young for it. So we're mostly seeing this question for millennials and there's a lot of statistics and we've talked about them recently, both here and on Fred's podcast, about what the mindset is and this desire to advance as fast as possible and not really have a sense of how long life is is common. It's really common, and you may just want to get all of your ducks in a row.
Josh Matthews:I was all gung-ho when I was I don't know, maybe I was. I had this conversation with my aunt Susie. She visited in Portland and we went outside this fish house and had nice, nice, sunny summertime lunch and I was really frustrated with my career. I was probably about 26 years old, and I was really frustrated and she said you know, josh, you're, I have a feeling that you're going to hit your stride when you're older. I just I've just got this feeling. I feel like you just need to be working and learning and getting out there and doing stuff and trying different things on seeing what fits, and go get a real real life education in real life, and when that happens you're going to know what it happens, right. And my guess is you're just going to find it when you're a little bit older, certainly not now.
Josh Matthews:So if this is a young person, I would just say you know, maybe you don't need to be an independent consultant just yet. Maybe you need to get another three to five years under your belt and then you can go out and really own it. And then the other thing I'd say too is careful, careful, careful, careful. Right, you no business owner, and being an independent consultant, you may as well be a business owner. Okay, so no business owner really ever knows quite what it's like to run a business till they've run a business. It's more work than you think, especially in the first two or three years. It's a lot more. This idea that.
Josh Matthews:Well, I can, you know whatever spend winters in Hawaii. And then I'm going to do this and you know I'll crank up my 40 hours a week. It's like are you forgetting taxes? What about marketing? What about billing? What about when your invoicing gets messed up? What about reporting? Like, what about all the time that you're not getting paid for? Well then you have to adjust your hourly rate.
Josh Matthews:And now are you as competitive as you thought you would be? Probably not. Oh, you can only actually do 30 hours of billable because you're doing 30 hours of everything else. Well, now you've got problems right, and maybe you're swapping out. Maybe you're swapping out one set of problems for another set of problems and there's no real benefit to you.
Josh Matthews:So I'm not discouraging people okay, I'm discouraging people with not enough experience from going independent. I absolutely encourage people who are competent to go for it. So if you're not competent yet, and how will you know you're competent? Don't ask your best friend, ask your boss. Do you think I'm competent? You know what's something I can work on and you can set a date. You can be like great, I want to be an independent consultant, but just like I, somebody who wants to be a doctor and isn't even into residency yet. They know it's going to take some time.
Josh Matthews:So have that as a goal and then make a plan for 24 about how you're going to get there, and not just how you're going to get there, but how you're going to have the technical competency to achieve everything that. You're going to have a realistic, a very realistic understanding of how many hours you'll have to work and what you'll need to bill, and how you're going to find clients and how you're going to attract them and how you're going to keep them and all this other stuff that business people have to do. You're going to have to learn marketing. You're going to have to have a website right All this other stuff. Now, not necessarily because you could just hook up with 10K and they love you and all of a sudden you're off to the races and you barely had to do anything. I'd say that's the exception, but the rules, though right.
Vanessa Grant:Totally agree, josh. Sorry to barge back in, but I've actually had a couple people that went the independent route and then, even if they are competent, they aren't necessarily great at sales and they have no idea how to find clients. And I find that's the thing that is such a hard thing to understand, unless you've actually been doing it, and maybe just that they're reaching out to me to hey, how do I get clients? I don't know. I'm not an independent consultant. Why are you reaching out to me Like you're already on the wrong track, my friend? But it's such a hard and it's such a different skill set to do sales than it is to do sales force.
Josh Matthews:Yep, go ahead, mr Salesperson Fred Cadena.
Fred Cadena:Yeah, no, and I've been on a couple of those shows and we've talked about this in the past. I think it's one of those things, just like. It depends on your level of experience and how much to quote you, josh of a badass you are in your skill set. I think to say to go independent means a lot of different things. Back when I was at Accenture and Camp Gemini and some of the bigger places I was, I had people that were independent, that I would reach out to, that are only interested in working for big four or big 10 or big whatever you want to call them consulting firms. They put in 10 years, they know sales force, they know an industry, they only want 40 hour a week contracts. They don't have to worry about sales or marketing or end voicing they fell out of time card. They get paid like a contractor but it's very similar to being an employee experience, yeah that's a contract and I view that as a contractor.
Josh Matthews:That's not an independent consultant. I view differently. Well, I just say I mean and Christian, you weigh in on this. It's like, oh, I want to be a contract, we'll go be a contractor, anyone can do that. Right, you want to be an independent consultant? That means you're independent. That means that you're working multiple, you have multiple clients servicing multiple clients for various needs and you're running out like a business, not punching a time card.
Fred Cadena:All the way on the spectrum is two people that want to start like their own firm and have and run teams and have their own teams of consultants that are doing stuff and there's a lot in between. I don't necessarily draw that hard line that you draw between being an independent consultant and a contractor.
Josh Matthews:Because you're not a recruiter. Well, you don't have to.
Fred Cadena:You can have two or three contracts at a time at 20, 25 hours a week and, from the way you look at it, they'd be a contractor, but they're really running their business like an independent consultant.
Josh Matthews:If I'm paying an LLC, they're an independent consultant, and if they're not, they're a contractor.
Peter Ganza:Hey Vanessa, sorry, Does this bring back any memories?
Vanessa Grant:Horrible ones. And.
Josh Matthews:Christian go ahead. Fred Finish up. No, you're good, Go for it.
Fred Cadena:No, just saying. My point is the first step is to define what you really want to do. When you say you want to go independent, where are you on that spectrum? From all the way on? I have a contract with one company and I may or may not have an LLC all the way to. I want to stand up a business and run it like a business, and the more you are to the right side of that spectrum, the more you're going to have to pick up a lot of skillsets that you probably don't already have.
Fred Cadena:That was really my point.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, no, that's a good point. I do think independent consultants, I believe, more often than not are being directive to the company. They're telling them how to do it, not showing up and being told what to do. There's a little bit of a difference there. What do you think, christian?
Kristen Langlois:I definitely agree with you and I would say, from the way 10K looks at it as well as I do, from an independent consultant, is somebody that owns or own business entity typically in the US it's either LLC or Escorp has invested in business insurance and is up and running it like their own business, versus working through other firms to contract for 40 hours a week.
Josh Matthews:Right.
Kristen Langlois:And so, yes, fred, to your point, though, as you go further to the right, where you have your own entity and setting it up that way, there are so many things that you need to be prepared for, and I agree with every, josh, what you said, too, of making sure that you've done your research. Do you have the technical expertise? Do you have the experience working with multiple stakeholders, multiple industries? Do you know how to adapt in the flexibility? Have you been in so many different environments that you can bring a consultative aspect to the client and relate to them because of your previous experience and that's what we talk a lot about, too, of working and partnering with 10K we look for those that bring those past experiences, because we know that that's what those are, what our most successful independent consultants have.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, they're going to solve the problem. Right, you screened them.
Kristen Langlois:Yeah.
Josh Matthews:There you go.
Kristen Langlois:Yeah, so definitely. But I agree with everything you said too, josh. It's taking a step back and not just jumping. Oh, can you hear me now?
Josh Matthews:Yeah.
Kristen Langlois:Yeah, okay, I can hear you just fine, I'm just worried about your points.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, Well, that's you know and I. That's why I like you, Kristen. I like it when people agree with me. It's the weirdest thing. When people agree with me, I think that they're really smart. It's like, wow, you must be really smart. You agree with 100% of what I said. Okay, Vanessa, closing words for 2023 and launching into the new year Any thoughts?
Vanessa Grant:Start working on. Go get them. Looking forward to celebrating 24, josh. I think we've done a lot of really good things this year and I'm really proud of what we've done and thank you.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, thank you, vanessa. No one could ask for a better, smarter, more engaging, hard-working, speed-driven, problem-solving badass of a co-host than Vanessa Grant. So I'm doing a little clap here we get some claps going on for all of your success on the show, all your success in business this year, your career changes, all of your presentations, your world travel South America, london, two times, all over the world just sharing your knowledge. So keep it up. Great to have you be, you know, so important to this community and thank you for everything you've done. I want to also thank Fred Kedena and Peter Ganza. You two have been stalwarts regulars. It's been the most incredible thing for me to get to pull together, quite accidentally, so many intelligent professionals in our ecosystem, because for two years it was most like the first year was just me yapping away and then Vanessa came on board. So it was two of us and now we've got, you know, four or five of us up here with varying perspectives and your consistency and being there for the audience and joining the shows nothing short of admirable and it's a sacrifice. I know we have fun on here too, but it's still a sacrifice. Everyone on the show could be doing something else and they're not. They're right here serving the public and thank you for that.
Josh Matthews:I want to thank also Kristen for being on the show. You are the double guest for the year, which is awesome, so the only double guest in one of the second highest ranked podcasts of all time for season one. So your insights are clearly digestible and there's a need for them in the greater public, so we appreciate you using this platform to share your knowledge. I also want to thank Stephen Gregory, who's been listening to the show. He's our director of recruiting. He supports. He and Jesse and Felicia at Salesforce staff you know stand out to are always there for everybody. So the people who listen to this show and then reach out and say, hey, let's do your show, I'm looking for a job they want. You know Steven and Jesse are the ones who are generally speaking with most people. So thanks for all of your effort and looking forward to seeing you when you come out here to Jupiter in January. I also want to thank my friend, larry Lee, for being one of our most consistent listeners. Larry, you're a special guy Cheesecake Larry you might know him by that moniker. Larry's a Florida native, just down close to Fort Lauderdale, and he's a hell of a guy and if you ever get to see him at one of the conferences, make friends he's easy to make friends with. And Janine and everybody else who's been a participant John Sisson, all of our guests, david Giller today you guys have been fantastic. What a remarkable seriously what a remarkable crew of knowledge. I just appreciate and value all of you.
Josh Matthews:In the coming year, this podcast is going to continue. Where we host it is up for debate. Vanessa and I are going to spend some time either over the holidays or sometime in early January and figure it out. I would love to bring this to YouTube and bring this to video, so I think that would be exciting. Nobody knows, for instance, that I've grown a push broom of a mustache, but I have one now. But if we were on video, you'd see that, and wouldn't that be fun? So I'd love to get us pushed out to YouTube and some other channels this year and maybe find a way to keep the podcast growing for you listeners.
Josh Matthews:You can help us by sharing the podcast with your friends and by again giving us a thumbs up and giving us a positive rating. And when we're posting on LinkedIn announcing guests and announcing shows, go ahead and share it, or comment or give us a like, because that helps the algorithm and that consequently helps people who can take some of all these varying but mostly common views that we're sharing amongst all of these experts to heart, so that you can improve your career. Whether you're growing your career as an employee, hiring for your team and trying to hire intelligently, launching a business as an independent consultant or growing a business that you own, we're all here for you, so send in your questions. We'll get them answered. If you're curious about being a guest on the show, you can reach out to me directly here on X or on LinkedIn, or you can just message me via my website, thesalesforcerecretercom, and I'll just leave this if you're a MuleSoft architect or MuleSoft consultant and you are a badass and you're looking for a full-time gig with amazing bonus potential.
Josh Matthews:Definitely hit up, stephen, at thesalesforcerecretercom. We have that's S-T-E-V-E-N, and we'll look after you and see if we can get you an interview with one of our favorite clients. They're just a tiny little nice S-I shop, so we'd love to help you out With that. I'll just say Jingle Bells, happy Hanukkah, happy Kwanzaa and whatever you're celebrating this year. We hope that you have a wonderful, amazing start to 2024. Get those goals written down, make a plan, put them in your calendar, stick to your stuff. Let's make it at the gym past January. Let's make it on Trailhead past January. Let's make it on everything that we're trying to do and accomplish by being consistent in the coming 2024. And I hope everybody has a remarkable growth in their career in these coming months. So thank you everybody and we'll just say bye-bye 23 and welcome 24. Bye for now.
