This past weekend, I was scrolling when I ran into a video of Counting Crows lead singer, Adam Duritz, talking about how Counting Crows got its name. Look them up, kids; their album August and Everything After is fantastic. I’ve been lucky enough to see them live twice.

Here’s the story.

Duritz had put this band together, and he was trying to figure out a band name. Coming up with a name for anything sucks. It seems like every single name you come up with is worse than the last name idea. So, he’s sitting in his living room, watching a movie, and brainstorming names.

In the movie, he’s watching two characters standing outside on a hill, and they are watching these birds fly around, and one character mentions something about “Counting Crows”. He’s like, that’s the name and throws away the paper with all the other names.

Here’s the thing, though.

He knows this name sucks. All the names suck until you make them not suck by being a great band!

He gives the example of the Beatles. It’s cheesy! Using “Beat” as a play on the word beetles (the bug). It’s awful! Until it’s amazing.

I talk with at least 100 new HR Tech startups on an annual basis. I talk with current HR tech companies who have been in business for years. Probably half the time, someone in marketing wants to change the name. “Tim, Google, as a name sucks!”

Yeah, no one knows what the hell that is. Also, no one knows what the hell you do! So, does it really matter what the name is? You being great has very little to do with your name. It has everything to do with you being great or your product or service being great. Almost every name you’ll pick will suck.

Until it doesn’t.

Okay, I’m bringing back the HR Famous podcast, but instead of having the OG crew of Kris Dunn, Jessica Lee, and Madeline Laurano, you’ll have me and all-star guest appearances by my friends, and the King of GenZ, Cameron, the Producer Sackett!

Life happens. The OG crew got too busy, but I wanted to return to it! Here’s how I’m thinking about Round 2. I might do some episodes where it’s just me ranting about sh*t (I really want to see if anyone wants to listen to just me for 30 straight minutes!). There will be some episodes where it’s just Cam and me because I don’t think GenZ is heard from enough in HR specifically. Let’s be honest. They are overheard everywhere else! LOL And, I want to introduce you to my friends.

Don’t ask to be a guest – I’m not interested in randoms. I want to talk to my friends.

That’s what I did in this first episode. Jon Stross, the CEO and co-founder of Greenhouse, has known each other for the better part of a decade, and I find Jon to be one of the most thoughtful people in talent acquisition. He listens and tries to understand the plight of the recruiter and the candidate, and I think you’ll hear that in this episode.

Enjoy!

Oh! Like and Subscribe!

The kids told me I have to say this…

It’s that time of year when most of us in talent acquisition just got that fresh new budget for the year. While most of it will be earmarked for stuff we already have, it’s always exciting to think about some new things we can bring on board — and there might even be some things you use it for that you haven’t even thought about yet. 

So how do we make sure we’re spending that money in the right way? Well, this caught my eye: some fascinating research from Aptitude Research looking specifically at corporate talent acquisition budgets.

The findings were both somewhat shocking and somewhat expected to me. One of the first things that hit me when looking at this research report was the reality that most TA leaders don’t have long-range visibility into our budgets. Almost all of us have a one-year view or less. It’s very rare for a TA leader to have visibility beyond a year (as corporate budgets tend to go), yet we are constantly told to think long-term about our talent strategies.

The problem here is that if you have workforce plans and strategies that your executives are building that are a few years down the road, but no budget, how exactly do you accurately prepare for that? Well, you better be sitting down with your CFO and their team to develop, at least, cursory budgets that are beyond a year in length, especially if you foresee growth or major technology changes happening (hello, AI!).

Here’s another big one from the report: “Currently 64% of TA leaders fear they will face budget cuts this year, and 1-in-3 believe their existing budget is being wasted.” 

Let’s start with our budgets getting cut each year. Get ready for an unpopular opinion! If you don’t have major change or growth happening, then some combination of these three things is happening: you’re 1.) optimizing your processes, 2.) upgrading your team. and 3.) utilizing your current technology to its fullest. In this case … your TA budget should be cut — that’s just how leadership works. In your role, you should be expected by your organization to gain efficiency, increase productivity, and reduce costs year over year.

On the other side, if 33% believe their TA budget is being wasted, this is a real problem. It’s not exactly a “you problem”, but it’s also kind of a “you problem”. Now, we all get saddled with bad contracts that we need to work our way out of as we take on new TA leader roles, or maybe it was our own doing, and we have to live with it before we can make it better. So, some waste is understood in the short term. My hope for the third of leaders who felt this way is that they’re doing everything they can to tackle that waste.

Okay, it’s been a while. We had the holidays, and then I went on my annual Caribbean get-out-of-Michigan trip – but I’m back!

When I came back, I’m immediately hit with the “Ghost Jobs” “Fake Jobs’ thing all over the media, and you guys know I was going to lose my mind! So, KD and I jumped on a pod to discuss.

Enjoy!

BTW – Here’s some early returns on an informal survey I did on LinkedIn:

This actually aligns with the WSJ article. So, what do I have to say about this?

Nope. It’s still a fake concept. We’re just really bad at communicating with candidates, so it’s easy for candidates to believe when they don’t hear anything back, it must be fake!

Also, I did have one brave soul message me privately with a link to show me a fake job! It was a startup technology company that was going through layoffs, but they didn’t want the “street” to think they were doing poorly. But they are, and this friend of the blog said they were 100% not filling these jobs. So, for real, fake jobs do exist, but it’s rare.

I was talking with an HR Leader who recently left their position. It’s a tale as old as time; they came in to make the massive transformation of the HR function. They were surrounded by a team that had been in place for decades. A team of professional survivors, I call them. They had been through other HR leaders, and they went through my friend.

What is a Professional Survivor?

First, let me try to define it: “An employee who does slightly above the minimum based on what the current leader desires, but they are more intuned with what the organizational politics prefers.”

Traits of a Professional Survivor:

• Friendly with the current leader and can acknowledge the failures of the past leader without taking responsibility for those failures. (I was doing what I was told and tried to advise them we should be doing what you want us to do now.)

• They are usually fairly well-connected with the old guard within the organization. Professional survivors know how to stick together.

• They never rock the boat. Even when they are demanded to rock the boat by their current leader.

• They are experts at knowing when to push for promotion and pay increases and when not to.

• They are often well-liked, good, positive energy people, so they are not viewed as a problem; they are viewed as just good employees; we wish we had more of them. They know how to “go with the flow.”

I’m not here to bash professional survivors. We see them in every single organization, and they might be the glue that keeps organizations going through major leadership shifts and changes. When we hire new leaders to come in and make change, it’s very common for these executive leaders to bring in their own next-level leaders directly under them, but rarely do you see entire teams overturn. Professional survivors always remain.

Many of us grew up with parents and grandparents who were professional survivors. For those who are type-A it might have made you mad that you were raised by a professional survivor. “How did you just stay in that position your entire career!? Working for the same company for 40 years!?” We struggle to understand that mentality. For the non-type A personalities, we struggle to understand how someone can be so reckless with their career.

Professional survivors want to see the organization succeed. I mean, the majority do. There are always bad folks in every organization. What they don’t want is for something to disturb their status quo in life, which sometimes makes it feel like they don’t honestly want to see success, as much as a new leader might believe.

The key to any new leader in an organization is understanding who are the professional survivors on my team. How do I get these people to be on my side and want to help me, help the organization, and ultimately help them maintain their status? Professional survivors can be amazing advocates to have as a leaders. They know the norms. They know the right people. And they know how to survive!

I was going through my email recently, and I saw some data pulled from Greenhouse showing that the number of applications has basically doubled per job opening in the past year. At first glance, you would believe, “Oh, the economy isn’t doing great; that’s probably the reason.” But in reality, unemployment is still relatively low. So, it is a bit harder to find a job, but historically, there has been pretty low unemployment.

My next feeling is that AI and candidates’ ability to use AI to apply for jobs are more likely the culprits and the Greenhouse team confirmed that. They are seeing candidates apply to many jobs within seconds, which isn’t humanly possible. Also, candidates are using AI tools to match their resumes to the job description, so our matching technology is also struggling to differentiate candidates.

All of this leads me to one simple conclusion.

If AI writes resumes for our jobs and matches jobs to our candidates, we are going to end up with way more candidates who look amazing but are most likely not that amazing. The only way we’ll find this out is to do an amazing job interviewing!

Guess what?!

Most of us SUCK at interviewing! I mean, not you/us/I; we are recruiting professionals, and we are amazing at interviewing! Right?! Right? Right…

It’s our hiring managers who will need the most help.

This is why I believe Interview Intelligence Technology, like Pillar (FYI—I’m an advisor and investor in Pillar—I think they’re amazing technology) and BrightHire, will be the type of HR Technology that takes off in 2025 and 2026. Right now, about 10% of organizations are using AI-built interview technology, but we’ll begin to see that percentage skyrocket.

Our reality in Talent Acquisition is this:

• We don’t have the capacity to interview enough candidates now, and it’s getting worse, not better.
• We don’t have the capacity, material, and skill to train our hiring managers to be better at interviewing to the level we need them.
• We need technology to help us be better at making interviews as bias-free as possible for all of those employees we have interviewing candidates.
• We need to be able to track all the data and content created in interviews.

When I start to ask myself what the future of HR and Talent Acquisition looks like in an AI-enabled world, this is one of the things I’ve come up with. We’ll be having way more face-to-face interviews than ever before, and it’s going to be more critical for us to make fewer false-positive hires, not only from a skills standpoint but also from a fit standpoint.

Have you ever considered how your company handles terminations when annual review season rolls around?

Back in the day, Tesla made headlines when they let go of 400 employees right after performance reviews. If you missed the details, it’s an interesting read, and you can check it out online. Plus, my friend Kris Dunn took a deep dive into Tesla’s unique culture over at The HR Capitalist—definitely worth a read!

When the news broke, Tesla confirmed in a statement that these departures were “part of an annual review” but didn’t provide an exact number.

The San Jose Mercury News reported that up to 700 employees across roles, from engineers to factory workers, were cut. Tesla’s statement mentioned that performance reviews sometimes lead to employee departures—a common practice for companies of their size, with more than 33,000 employees worldwide.

But here’s the question: is tying terminations to annual reviews a good way to sustain a healthy workplace culture?

Sure, Tesla’s got the cool factor—having “Tesla” on your resume is a badge of honor for many. But does that still apply if employees feel like they’re on the chopping block every review season? I get that letting go of underperformers is a necessary part of business, but should it be tied to once-a-year performance reviews?

Picture the lead-up to review week at Tesla. I can almost imagine the “just-in-case” goodbye lunches, where everyone’s invited to break bread “just because.” And once reviews are over, that Friday could be one big post-review party.

Let’s be real—firing employees around annual review time can turn a standard process into a high-stress, anxiety-driven experience. If a company only addresses performance issues annually, that’s a sign performance management might be falling short.

Strong, performance-driven cultures don’t wait for review season to give feedback; they make it a continuous process. If improvement isn’t happening, high-performing companies usually address the issue immediately, rather than waiting for an annual purge day that piles on unnecessary stress.

But hey everyone can march to their own drumbeat! I’d love to meet Tesla’s HR leader back then and hear their take on how they think this approach strengthens their culture.

Keep it real in HR!

With fall comes HR and TA conference season. From October through December, there are events happening every week around the globe. These conferences are packed with vendor booths, big-name speakers, and the chance to step away from the office for a bit. But there’s a common strategy behind these events that keeps people coming back year after year.

The secret? They won’t tell you that your processes are bad. Instead, they show you how far ahead everyone else seems to be, making you feel like you’re behind.

Picture this: You’re at a session, and they’re talking about how a company like Google has created the perfect, diverse workforce. Now, you’re thinking, “How can we ever compete with that?” That’s when you start looking at the expo booths for tools to help you “catch up.”

The truth is, no company is perfect, even if it seems like it at these conferences. The reality is that everyone is trying to improve, and most companies are far from flawless.

“Exceptionalism” is this idea that every company has achieved greatness. But if everyone is “great,” doesn’t that just make “great” average? The cool new tools you see at a conference today will be standard practice for everyone else tomorrow.

In HR and TA, we see this all the time. A new trend or tool spreads fast, and before you know it, everyone’s doing the same thing. You’re not paying all that money to be just like everyone else, but that’s often what happens.

What Really Builds a Great HR or TA Team?

Here’s what they don’t always talk about:

• It’s about small, consistent improvements: Great HR and TA teams aren’t built overnight. Instead, they grow through steady progress that matches what your company actually needs.
• Chasing the top 1% isn’t always the answer: It’s tempting to try to be like the few companies doing amazing things, but leadership often doesn’t want to make those big changes. Pushing too hard for this can lead to burnout or frustration.
• Real greatness takes sacrifice: Reaching the highest levels of success requires both vision and hard work, but not everyone has the desire or resources to make those sacrifices.

But let’s be honest, this isn’t what sells conference tickets. What sells is the idea that you can be just as great if you invest in the latest tools or strategies.

At the end of the day, it’s not about being perfect. It’s about making steady improvements that move your company forward. So instead of feeling like you’re always behind, focus on what really matters for your team’s success.