292: How to Find the Best Tech Talent - with John Light

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this new episode of Scale Your SaaS, John Light, president and the visionary behind SBR2TH, draws from an extensive background in recruiting across various models. His journey through contingent, retained, and RPO setups led him to realize a gap in the middle-market segment, especially for tech talent, and he shares with us how you can grow quickly with the right talent on board. 

He sat down with host and B2B SaaS Sales Coach Matt Wolach to tell the story of how he learned the best methods for finding the most quality people. John’s innovative approach aimed to blend the efficiency of contingent hiring with the precision and loyalty of retained search, catering specifically to the middle market, where tech talent thrives.

PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE

Podcast: Scale Your SaaS with Matt Wolach

Episode: Episode No. 292, "How to Find the Best Tech Talent - with John Light"

Host: Matt Wolach, a B2B SaaS Sales Coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor

Guest: John Light, President of SBR2TH

TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE

• Attract and Retain Top Tech Talent: Beyond Ping Pong Tables
• Decode the Technical Talent Puzzle for Non-Technical Leaders
• Shape a Strategic Approach to Talent Acquisition

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

• Tech Talent: The Backbone of Scaling a SaaS Company
• Pitfalls in Tech Team Hiring: The Soft Skills Oversight
• ‘Drowning in the Tech Talent Pool’: John Light's Insightful Podcast
• Conclusion: Reshaping Talent Acquisition Paradigms

TOP QUOTES

John Light

[5:11] "Employees now are getting more savvy. The good ones want to be a part of something bigger."

[14:43] "There's a cost that you may not see or be able to quantify associated with putting the wrong person doing some of the right stuff but not all of it at the wrong time."

Matt Wolach

[18:59] "People want to be around genuine people and stay for genuine people."

[21:22] "You start with a great idea, but from that point forward, everything else is about who you hire."

LEARN MORE

To learn more about SBR2TH, visit: https://www.sbr2th.com/ 

You can also find John Light on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johndlight/ 

For more about how host Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth, visit https://mattwolach.com.

Get even more tips by following Matt elsewhere:

• Sales Tips
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Instagram

Transcript

Matt Wolach: 0:00

I think one of the scariest parts of running a software company is knowing when to hire, who to hire, how to hire and what to look for. And especially for me as a non technical founder trying to figure out how to hire a technical person, one of your developers or somebody running the whole engine of your company. That's scary. That's why I brought John light on the show. He's with SBR2TH. And he explained how a non technical founder or even a technical founder can find and hire great technical talent, where to find them, how to vet them out what to look for all of those things John covers in this episode, so if you want to make sure that your development team is top notch, definitely check this out.

Intro/ Outro: 0:50

Welcome to Scale Your SaaS, the podcast that gives you proven techniques and formulas for boosting your revenue and achieving your dream exit brought to you by a guy who's done just that multiple times. Here's your host, Matt Wolach.

Matt Wolach: 1:06

and welcome to Scale Your SaaS Thank you very much. Glad to have you here. I really appreciate you showing up. We're here to help you grow your company and giving you all sorts of perspectives and ways of doing that. If you are new to the show, and you want to grow your company, hit the subscribe button right now. That way you're going to be subscribed. So you get all of the new updates all of our new shows, so you don't miss out on anything. And I am really delighted today to have a special guest with us, John light, John, how you doing?

John Light: 1:33

Hey, Matt doing great. And I'm very happy to be here and have been looking forward to this for a while too, because, you know, we look at people who are interested in scaling their SaaS business into something more. One of the biggest inhibitors is talent. And that's where I've spent over the last two decades plus in my life, my professional life focusing is the identification, qualification attraction, acquisition of the right talent at the right time, hopefully at the right time.

Matt Wolach: 2:04

Look so true, it's super important. And that's something that we're going to touch on today is how that talent can how you can find it and how you can make sure that you get the right people on board so that they can help you grow your company. So let me tell everybody who you are, John. So John, he's the president of SBR2TH and SBR2TH provides a new tech talent higher vehicle called retention. They improve the quality of hire and speed up the time to fill specialize machine learning data engineering, data science and developer talent. Stretching tech recruiting budgets, further, Sabretooth does that by bringing the precision of retained search and the speed of contingent search to the market in one complete solution. John absolutely knows his stuff when it comes to finding the right talent, especially tech talent. And I'm so glad he's here to help us understand how to do it. Well. So John, thanks for coming on the show.

John Light: 2:51

Now happy to it's great to be here, Matt. And, Ben, I'm excited to talk about some of this stuff, too. Because if there's an area that we need help when it comes to finding the right talents in tech, I mean, let's face it, you know, when we look around tech, it's of all the industry sectors out there. It has the biggest growth waves, they seem to go the longest, but even today that is getting compressed more and more, as AI generative AI in particular is hitting the marketplace. A lot of companies don't know what to do. And let's face it, we've got applications of AI coming out today at a faster pace than I think anyone is expecting. You know, we we've had it sitting out AI and our ML applications for a long time on machine learning. But this generative stuff is just so many new applications, so many different ways to bring it out and tease out value. And one of the biggest one of the hardest things to do, I think is to figure out what to do with it. Right, that specific application. And I relate that back to talent in this way, going out and hiring hiring talent, no matter how technical no matter how good a person is, doesn't matter if you haven't defined the application of that talent. You know, yeah, it's

Matt Wolach: 4:05

well said, How did you come up with the idea for SBR2TH? Where'd that come to be?

John Light: 4:10

Well, SBR2TH is actually the genesis of it actually sits back in kind of a years of sitting in the recruiting space. Whether it's in contingent I've done retained as well. I've done RPO I've led retail staffing, but the permanent places where I enjoy being the most, I think it's the most impactful but the fact is pure play retain search doesn't serve the middle part of the market. You know, once a person's making, say under 350 400,000 base, either non executive levels for a lot of big companies. The the impact of retained search tends to taper off relative to the cost. On the other end of that you have contention where there's tons of recruitment going on. It's a hugely flawed model that everybody's been using since the 60s because you have recruiters that work for free at 85 percent of the time, they have no loyalty to anything but the transaction because they have to get the transaction. But it can be very effective. We have volume hires near entry level people 2345 years of experience, but it starts tapering off and effectiveness as you go up the ladder of compensations to about 120 550,000. So, the thesis behind Sabretooth is how do we bring the best of both worlds the speed and cost related to contingent, but the client loyalty, precision and service levels that relate to retained into a bundle that makes sense, what makes sense in that middle market space, which just happens to be where a lot of tech talent sets, both as individual contributors and leaders. And what's great, since we rolled it out, almost a year ago, now we've had 100% fill rate on all of our assignments, and averaged just at 35 days average time to fill. So different model, different way of thinking breaks things up a little bit because our loyalties to our client. And, you know, we breathe it and live it and it's working out fantastic. So we have something we want to evangelize and socialize and get out more in the marketplace because you don't have to sit back and and hold the recruiter at arm's length, you can actually bring them in and partner with them and listen to the people who swim in the space or that you want to swim in to know how to stay away from the sharks and off the rocks and get where you want to go.

Matt Wolach: 6:27

Fantastic. I love it. So glad you guys are doing that. I want to ask because everybody who's listening, usually they're here to scale their SaaS. That's the name of the show. So how important is it for a software company to have really great tech talent on board?

John Light: 6:42

I forget who said the WHO to assign the quote to but maybe it was Stephen Covey, maybe it's Simon Sinek. It's one of these leadership management gurus out there. But it was something the effective strategy is worthless without the talent to execute it. And when you start talking about tech talent and what you need and how to apply it, I think it's super critical that you have the ability to focus on on it. I mean, if you're going to scale your SAS, your biggest expenses really are your biggest expense is people, you need to get it right, especially if you're on a shoestring especially if you're early stage. And that means sometimes you gotta take the, you gotta take one hat off, and put a headhunter at hat on, you know, take the CEO hat off, put the headhunter at on, take the COO hat off the CTO hat off, but the headhunter hat on and make some decisions that, yeah, I know, so and so and I like them, but they have gaps that I can't overcome. Or, I love this one candidate, they have some gaps. But you know what, I've got someone else over here I could partner them with or team them with, or they can complete complement one another, I think you got to think creatively. And you've got to be willing to go the extra mile because hiring great tech talent, truly great tech talent that can take you from where you are, if you've gone from zero to one, and you want to get to 10 the people that can do that they are not on the street corner. They are not, you know, flash the bat signal up in the clouds, and they're gonna suddenly show up, you've got to get out there and compete and work for him. And it's hard. And if there's one thing I would tell people, especially early stage, you're gonna have to put some effort into it. Now you can partner someone like Saber Tooth, and we do a lot of that as well. But you're still gonna get interrogated, you're still going to have to dive in and understand what your value proposition is to a candidate to an employee, because employees now are getting more savvy, the good ones, they want to be a part of something bigger. Now, that doesn't mean they have to go join a $10 billion company tomorrow. But they need to join a company where they can buy into the mission where they believe in it, where it gets them excited, it makes them want to get out of bed in the morning, and come in and do their best work. That's where, you know, you're looking at people who you can motivate, but they also are just excited to tackle the problems that you put in front of them. And those can be really hard to find.

Matt Wolach: 9:14

Yeah, I totally agree. So what are some of the best ways to attract and retain top tech talent?

John Light: 9:22

Okay, that's a big question. And I think it's one of the most hilarious questions out there, right? Because what we try to do at Sabre to this, we wouldn't address issues around quality of hire time to fill cost per hire, and the lack of internal recruiting teams who understood tech enough to qualify the right people to bring the right people to the table. And so if you want to find people, number one, you got to make yourself attractive. Man, that can be a hard thing to do, right? Well, he can't put your company on a diet and go hit the gym three days a week or five days a week and try and make it look prettier. And his expression goes in the south or only so much lipstick, you can put on a pig, you know, but what you can do, I think is understand what problems you're trying to solve. And when you bring someone in when you identify someone, and you want to track them to your company, help them not only understand what problems you want to solve, but why it's important and how they are going to impact that solution. You know, you ever get the idea, you watch a TV show, or you watch your friends, maybe he worked for very large companies, and you get the sense that sometimes they wonder if what they're doing actually has value, you know, are they just a really tiny cog in the machine, and they don't understand how, you know, if that cog fails, the whole machine could fall apart, they don't understand necessarily how they impact the big picture. And I think you've got to get people to see it and buy into it to want to be a part of it. And that's a big part of the attraction, you got to tell the story that people want to be a part of in terms of retaining them. Please don't ever ignore your people. Please, don't ever take them for granted that are sitting out there. That doesn't mean that you gotta have ping pong tables, although espresso machines go a long way to making people happy in the office space, but I would suggest this, constantly put people in a position to improve themselves. I think one of the most critical things we can do is learn and to continuously learn to be curious. I want to have smart, curious people around me. If I'm growing a SASS company, I want smart, curious people who see a problem. And they don't just go, Hey, I see a problem. They go, I see a problem. I've thought about it, and I've got so many potential solutions. Let's talk about that for a minute. Give people rein to do that. And trust them. Trust them that if you help them upskill trust them that if you help them learn something new that makes them more valuable in the marketplace, trust them, that they're gonna give you first right of refusal, first opportunity if they ever decided to leave, and let the market do its thing. You know, don't be brothers sitting over their shoulder. Just relax, let them be themselves in you as leader, be yourself. People want to be around genuine people, and they'll stay for genuine people. They won't stay for facades that eventually that'll burn out and it'll burn them out and you lose them.

Matt Wolach: 12:26

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John Light: 14:52

Man, that can be a tough question. Because it's not easy, right? If if you asked me to go sit down right now and do a pie Fine coding competition with somebody a hackathon or whatever, I'd get my head handed to me, and made no bones about it. But if you asked me also to go out right now and play linebacker for a name, your favorite NFL team, I'd probably get killed it my age and condition and we're a better life, whether it's played earlier in life doesn't matter, you're gonna get hammered. Does that mean I don't know what good looks like when it comes to a good linebacker, or a good coder? Or a good whatever. And so I think what you got to do is find, and this is what I did early on, when I first got into the, into the talent acquisition space for tech, talent, specifically, you know, what are the top three to five things keys that I'm going to see between in someone who's really good and some and data science, for example, or machine learning or whatever it might be? Find those three to five things, those highly important critical items that these people will have mastered, or be on the way to mastering and focus on on. And then this is a dirty little secret of the recruiting world. Don't be afraid to do what we would kind of loosely refer to as a backdoor reference. Okay. So if somebody says that they have a skill and X, whatever x is, what other ways independent of that person? Can you confirm that? Can you talk to a reference, can you look at LinkedIn profile, they have something sitting out on GitHub or whatever that you can go check out, go take a look. And if they have an application out there a tool somewhere that they wrote, and it's open source, once you have somebody you know who's really good at that, take a peek at it. Don't be afraid to ask for advice and insight, don't be afraid to ask specific questions that might require some level of specialization. And then don't be afraid to ask a candidate. If they've actually done something they claimed to do. And that may sound a little odd. Well, of course, people you know, they say what they can do and do what they can say whatever you want to call it. But studies have found something like 80% of the profiles on LinkedIn, likely contain a material misstatement or omission. And it's very easy to claim credit for something that was actually a team effort when you only had a little slice of it. Sure. So to candidates, I would say, you know, talk really truly about what you've done. It's not about what the team's done, you can talk about the team context, with very get down to what you have accomplished and done. And to someone handling the interview who's non technical. Ask the question. So what did you do? Not what the team did? Tell me more about what you did? And can you quantify the impact of what you did? You know, an interview technique I use constantly is I don't like asking binary questions that are easy, easily a yes or no? I want to ask questions built around how, what, when, why, where? Tell me how you did this? Why did you do it that way? Why did you move from Company A to Company B in the companies from B to C, then C to D, and so on and so forth. And when people tell you that are their reasons consistent, because if they're not consistent, it lets you know, there could be a red flag there you need to investigate. So being a non technical interviewer of technical talent, you need to be savvy in getting to the heart of information and learning over time. What are those three, four or five things that this candidate in this particular specialization or tech sector should know? And no cold? And I think that goes a really, really long way. Just being curious yourself, because you're gonna get educated on it. It's not. It's like, people look at AI, for example, as some sort of, well, you know, it's the wizard behind the curtain. Ai, in theory has been around since the 50s. Last century, but the computing capacity, the capability to actually apply it has only come along recently. AI is not some kind of new technology that we're looking at and saying, Wow, this was just invented and some guy hadn't even got their Nobel Prize yet. Now, this is stuff you can get educated on and educated on in a hurry. If you're willing to be curious and show a little bit of drive and initiative and asking the right questions.

Matt Wolach: 19:26

Love it. Love it. So what would you say are some of the big mistakes leaders are making when trying to hire good tech team members? What are they doing wrong?

John Light: 19:36

You know, it varies so much I think from individual individual, but I would tell you in general terms, one of the biggest mistakes I see as you talk to somebody in the tech space, you know, tech talent, your non technical and they share a lot of information about the background. They show you a nice piece of paper, the resume their CV, their LinkedIn profile, whatever it may be. It will get so enamored With all the technical stuff that we forget to actually do the interview. You know, I think it's something like 82% of all miss hires, and as people who leave as people are fired, all went bucket 82%. The primary reason are soft skills, not hard skills. And so yeah, that the hard skills, vet the technical skills? Absolutely. Are you vetting the soft skills? Does this person culturally aligned with what we have in our organization? And let's for argument's sake, let's, let's get rid of the Big B School, definitions of culture and look at cultures, how we go about our business, how do we go about our day? For example, you find a problem? Do you put the problem on the table and run away? Do you try to cover it up? Do you try and push it to someone else's desk and workspace and let it be their problem? already come up with two or three potential solutions and just go have a candid conversation? Hey, I found this problem and maybe it generated with me maybe generated with with this other guy, it doesn't matter? How do we solve the problem before some companies reward that behavior, some organizations reward you push it over to somebody else's desk. If you're a smaller group, you don't have time for that. So there's how that candidate work aligned with how you go about your work. Because if you miss out on that alignment, people spend so much time putting up a facade, making the manager happy, because that's who signs a paycheck, or might give me a promotion, or whatever it could be. You don't spend that energy executing your job. And when you're not spending that, that energy executing your job, you're failing. And when that individual fails, because we put them in the wrong context, my company could potentially fail, it certainly won't be able to scale like it could have otherwise. So don't forget to actually interview people find out about them, find out about how they do things. And make sure it aligns with how you want to go about doing things.

Matt Wolach: 22:02

I love it. This is exactly the type of stuff that I teach people about hiring salespeople or marketers is looking at how they fit into your culture, do they actually match the type of person that would work within your environment and the type of values that your company has. And so don't forget that with the tech side, just because they're in a different role doesn't mean that they still aren't a member of your team, and somebody who needs to fit in with that. That's something that I've kind of had to teach myself, you know, you look at a tech person who just want the technical ability, but actually, they're a person and they're part of the team. I love that. That advice.

John Light: 22:37

Yeah, appreciate that. No, I've tried to live it every day. And hey, even sometimes we missed up, right. But one of the things I found is the difference between looking at salespeople, or general operation people or FNA or supply chain, whether it might be and tech, is it in spite of a year and a half, two years of layoffs, it's still really, really hard to find great tech talent. You know, and we think somehow, because there's a scarcity in a hard skill, that we should take our foot off the gas and making sure that alignment is okay. And I would tell you, especially a smaller company, looking to scale, don't do that. Don't do that there's a cost that you may not see or be able to quantify associated with putting the wrong person doing some of the right stuff, but not all of it at the wrong time. You know, even if you have the person doing the right stuff at the right time, but the wrong fit for the organization, you still get hosed. So if you're really committed, and you know, hands down, okay, we're ready to pull the trigger, and we're ready to scale this bad boy, you need to be taking that attitude that disposition forward into your talent acquisition. And that means you've got to do the work. And that means you may vet, everybody you can think of, and sit back and go, Well, I can't find anybody. So I'm going to have to settle. Stop it. Stop it. I mean, if it's that bad, pay me to go to my team, I'll go find them. That's what we do. It may end up being that you have the wrong set of expectations for the role, or for the person or for the marketplace. It may be that, you know, you have to figure out well, maybe this shouldn't be one role. Maybe I need it to be two roles, or three, you know, a big part of his set expectations correctly. When you start at the beginning of the search. And if you get into it and find out that the markets not meeting those expectations. Go back to the beginning. Start from there, and it's hard work. And I think that's why a lot of people don't do it. We want to shortcut we want to get to the quick fix. And n right talent. There's not a quick fix.

Matt Wolach: 24:54

I mean, it's really well said and it's a great place to wrap this has been really informative, really helpful, John How can our audience learn more about you and SBR2TH?

John Light: 25:03

great, man. I appreciate that. SBR2TH.com SBR2TH.com no vowels, more than welcome to check us out there or look John Light up on LinkedIn or Sabretooth up on LinkedIn, we're all over the place on those two mediums. Plus, if you have a chance, semi connection invite, I'm always happy to tackle questions or you can check out my feed and various podcasts to join. And if I may, if it's okay, Matt plug, you're more than welcome to look me up on all the major streaming services for drowning in the tech talent pool where we discuss this in great detail. I think it's a place that gives people tools, right, and to deal with this one issue that's multifaceted and in depth. And without it if you want to scale if your strategy is to grow a company, whether you're going to sell it or whether you're going to develop as an enterprise into the future. You start with a great idea. But from that point forward, everything else is about who you hire, when you bring them on. Are they aligned?

Matt Wolach: 26:13

Love it. Yeah, your show is great. We're happy to plug your podcast as well. So we'll put all that into the show notes. If you're listening, check it out. If you need to hire great tech talent, which you do if you're running a software company, go check that out, see what John is doing. And he's putting out a ton of value for you. So, John, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

John Light: 26:32

Thank you, Matt. And I imagined we're gonna get a chance to talk again to the future. So I'm gonna look forward to that. In the meantime, however, I can help always feel free to let me know. Likewise,

Matt Wolach: 26:41

we'll do thanks so much, and everybody out there. Thank you for being here. Thanks for watching and listening. I really appreciate it once again, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on any other amazing leaders like John helping you out so you can scale your SaaS. Thanks for coming and we will see you next time take care

Intro/ Outro: 27:00

thanks for listening to Scale Your SaaS for more help on finding great leads and closing more deals go to Mattwolach.com