Season 6 • Bonus Episode 3.5
In today’s competitive hiring landscape, simply posting a job and waiting for responses is no longer effective. Companies need innovative, tech-driven approaches to reach and attract top talent. In this episode, we’re joined by Michelle Rawlins, VP of Sales and Client Success at Nexxt, to explore the power of programmatic job advertising. Michelle explains how this approach differs from traditional, duration-based job postings and how AI and performance-based strategies can increase traffic, improve candidate quality, and reduce costs. Tune in to learn how programmatic advertising is reshaping the recruitment landscape for today’s employers.
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About DE Talk
For DirectEmployers, it’s all about valuable connections and meaningful conversations. This monthly podcast features honest and open dialogue between powerhouse industry experts on a variety of HR topics ranging from OFCCP compliance advice to emerging recruitment marketing trends, diversity and inclusion initiatives, and insightful solutions that help infuse new life into your HR strategies.
Episode Interviewer
Shannon Offord
VP of Strategic Partnerships & Alliances, DirectEmployers Association
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With over 24 years of experience in the HR and online recruitment industry, Shannon uses his industry knowledge to build and maintain relationships with the Association’s bevvy of recruitment, veteran, disability, government, and diversity-focused partners. In addition to his responsibilities at DirectEmployers, he also serves on the Board of Directors of Corporate America Supports You (CASY), a nonprofit organization focused on veteran recruitment, and is on the Advisory Council of Youth Opportunity Foundation, a nonprofit that helps vulnerable young people turn into productive adults.
Episode Guest
Michelle Rawlins
VP of Sales and Client Success, Nexxt
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Michelle, currently serving as the Vice President of Recruitment Marketing Sales and Client Success at Nexxt, leads a dynamic team dedicated to fostering robust partnerships with clients, centered on understanding, education, and expansion of their recruitment marketing strategies. With over 15 years of experience in corporate recruitment marketing, Michelle’s passion, dedication, and commitment to understanding and advancing the recruitment marketing space are evident. Her expertise lies in building national and localized marketing strategies and understanding return on investments. Michelle’s strength lies in her ability to generate innovative ideas that revolutionize and refine strategies and programs related to the attraction, acquisition, and development of top-tier talent. Her track record includes roles at renowned organizations such as Charles Schwab and Amazon, showcasing her builder mentality and leadership in the field.
Episode Transcript
DirectEmployers (00:00):
Get ready. The DE Talk podcast starts now, insightful conversations and dialogue, helping you put the human factor back in HR.
Shannon Offord (00:08):
Welcome to the DE Talk podcast. Hello, I’m Shannon Offerd, VP of partnerships for DirectEmployers, and today I have the pleasure of welcoming someone I’ve known for a very long time. Michelle Rawlins, the Vice President of Sales and Client Success at Nexxt, a leading HR technology company for reaching candidates at scale as a former recruitment marketing leader with Member companies, Amazon and Charles Schwab. Michelle has a vast experience when it comes to not only recruitment, but the strategy and effort surrounding inclusive recruiting practices. As a former recruiter myself, I’m excited to have this conversation today focused on programmatic job advertising and helping employees learn more about this strategy. Let’s dive right in. Michelle, I gave our listeners a little background, but can you share more about your role at Nexxt?
Michelle Rawlins (00:55):
Yeah, I can. So I have been at Nexxt, a little over three years. I am currently the VP of Client Success and Sales. So essentially my team and myself works with a number of different employers and we help educate them on different recruitment marketing practices and help them fulfill their pipelines to attract new talent.
Shannon Offord (01:16):
So you’ve reversed roles a little bit going from working for an employer to supporting employers with their talent strategies. How does your past experience play into your role at Nexxt?
Michelle Rawlins (01:27):
Yeah, so I’ve found that my past experience is really helpful to understand their roles and what their day-to-day is and how Nexxt can essentially help them solve the challenges and the pain points that they are having with their jobs. My previous experiences allowed me to have what I feel like it’s probably more in depth conversations with employers compared to some of the conversations that I had prior to joining the Nexxt with vendors. It allows me to think a little bit more creatively and come up with potential solutions for clients where they’re having challenges that either we can help them on or even make referrals to other partners that we have. It’s also allowed me to internally really focus on some areas that either we can improve upon or that we can rebrand or resell to employers to essentially improve how we work with them in the future.
Shannon Offord (02:24):
I mean, I remember working with you when you were at Schwab and also at Cummins and you always seem to really understand the technologies that were out there. So you were one of those people that I would bounce stuff off of and I was actually in the industry. So you definitely know the space well. We know there’s a lot of focus right now on just job visibility and recruiting. We’ve seen some major shifts in how jobs are advertised over the last several years. It used to be that people would just post their job on a job board or a site and just hope that candidates were coming in. Now it seems to be a lot more a dynamic than just posting jobs on the site. There’s a lot of talk about programmatic job advertising. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it does differ from the whole just posting your job on a website and waiting for applicants to come in or for job candidates to come in?
Michelle Rawlins (03:24):
So there has been a lot of shifts over the last several years in how we advertise jobs specifically from duration based posting to that programmatic space. And the biggest difference between the two is that programmatic is not a static placement, duration based postings, which we’ve seen for years in this space. You buy a job slot, it goes up for a week, two weeks, 30 days, however long it is and it’s on that website. Whereas programmatic advertising is a lot more dynamic. Programmatic advertising has been around forever in consumer marketing, Google, that’s essentially what they do for consumer marketers. But essentially what the programmatic space allows companies to utilize is the technology to buy essentially clicks or applications depending on who you’re working with to place your jobs not only on that website. So for example, if you worked with Nexxt, you’d not only go on the Nexxt.com site, but those in what we call our network. And so we’re taking your jobs, your budget, understanding what your goals are, and we’re helping post your jobs to let’s call it twenty, forty, sixty, a hundred sites depending who you work with. And we help manage that relationship on your behalf. So it allows employers to not have to go to 20 different job boards themselves by a very fixed posting at a fixed price regardless of performance, and it shifts the focus to performance based postings to where you’re paying based off of your results.
Shannon Offord (05:02):
So I mean I know you talked about the whole results aspect of things. Are you seeing as far as programmatic is concerned, more of the sites doing more the whole pay-per-click? Are you seeing more of the pay-for-applicant? What are you kind of seeing out there?
Michelle Rawlins (05:20):
Yeah, so it’s more what I would say pay-per-click today as per click, pay-per-click that that is kind of the norm today we are seeing, and even internally here at Nexxt, we are seeing more requests for that cost per application or pay per application fee based model. And so there are a lot that have moved to that more recently or are starting to move to that here soon. So we can do pay-per-click do for application, whichever route is a best fit. Most of the programmatic technologies out there, if you go down the route of pay-per-application, there’s a lot of still requirements around that on data sharing, being able to see, not see who the application was from privacy standpoint, but understanding how many applications you’re getting through either integrations, pixels, whatever it may be, because you need that data to be able to work together seamlessly. So cost-per-application, pay-per-application is becoming what I would say is probably the new norm because realistically employers care about applications. They don’t necessarily care how many clicks they got, they need the applications, not the clicks.
Shannon Offord (06:34):
And I know that we can all pretty much agree that programmatic is playing a big role like in advertising today. I know you’ve had experience as a corporate doing corporate recruitment marketing utilizing programmatic and now being on what a lot of people consider the dark side or the vendor side with the whole job boarding or programmatic piece. What are some insights or what are you seeing or what have you seen from being on the other side to now being on this side?
Michelle Rawlins (07:07):
So when I was in corporate programmatic job ads program were just starting to become the norm at Amazon I helped implement using programmatic for our hiring. We were one of the first groups at Amazon that started using that as a way to advertise our jobs. So it’s been an interesting experience to see both sides because when I was in corporate I felt like there was some lack of transparency that we didn’t get the first several years around how it worked, how the technology worked, the reporting needed, how we could improve. And luckily I did have some really good partners that some of them were very transparent and really helped educate me when I was in corporate. And then I came to the vendor side, the job board side, and I really was able to start to see the backend systems, the technology and learn the challenges that are still there today.
(08:06):
And then also the advantages of it and my biggest learnings through both sides of this is that data is key and sha, you’ve known me forever and you’ll even be able to say this, but I’ve always been a big data fan in recruitment. There’s such a lack of data in recruitment and when you start to use programmatic, not having data, not being able to share some of that data with your job board vendors can be a real problem. Consistency is also an area that I’ve learned is really important and programmatic and then all programmatic ad techs between each vendor works a little bit differently and not every vendor is a great fit for your company. And so it takes time to learn who’s the right fit for you and how your jobs work and who is your best partner. And sometimes that time can be long and so it’s hard sometimes for corporate companies when their demand is like, I need candidates now to really go out and start to test and find the right partners too.
Shannon Offord (09:07):
Like I mentioned before, I mean you’ve always been really up to speed on some of the new and changing technologies out there. What types of things did you do to really educate yourself on when you were on the employer side? What types of things did you do to educate yourself on how technology was changing and really about the whole shift from the duration based posting to more of the programmatic posting?
Michelle Rawlins (09:37):
So my roles in corporate were always interesting because I was more in a recruitment marketing role before recruitment marketing kind of became a thing. I’ve always been in a sourcing type role. I spent a little bit of time as a recruiter, like a year and a half at Schwab and frankly, it’s probably the worst job I ever had and I’m not the person to do interviews back to back, but I love the side of how do you get people into your pipelines to help those recruiters to do interviews and that strategy and that attraction piece is, it’s just a fascinating topic and it’s always evolving. And so I was really fortunate in corporate that I had some really great partners. You and I have always kind of bounced ideas off of each other, asked you questions, you’ve asked me questions, we’ve been able to brainstorm together.
(10:27):
One of the reasons I came to Nexxt, Andy Katz who was here, he was always that way with me as well. We were able to kind of talk strategy, bounce ideas off of each other and would give me insight to where I could start to learn more over time. I was always that person in corporate that I would ask the questions of the vendors. I think sometimes the relationship between vendors, corporate recruiters or sourcers or talent attraction folks, it feels a little bit black and white, whereas it should be a partnership and I always try to create that partnership level with job boards and those that I worked with so that I could learn their insights, they could learn my insights and my challenges and then we could really start to partner together. Sometimes on the job board corporate side, it feels a little bit like that order taker side where they have a need, they send it to you, execute, and sometimes that’s not always the right path and majority of the time what I found, it’s not the right path. I’ve also been that person that I love technology good or bad
Shannon Offord (11:32):
That you do.
Michelle Rawlins (11:34):
So I’ve always done a lot of research and what is out there and tried to think really creatively on how to solve problems. I went from companies that were hiring a couple hundred to a couple thousand people a year to frankly a million plus when I was at Amazon. And that scales a lot and you have to start to look outside of what you’ve always done and I’ve always been that person that I wanted to learn what is outside of what we’ve always done because if you always do the same thing, right, eventually you’re going to hit a wall and it’s not going to solve your challenges. So been really fortunate with relationships, but researching on your own and trying to be innovative on your own and creating new ideas and sharing that internally I think is a big piece of where I’ve seen success in corporate.
Shannon Offord (12:21):
And a lot of people think this is really new technology, but a lot of marketing teams have been really using programmatic for
Michelle Rawlins (12:29):
Been around forever.
Shannon Offord (12:30):
Yeah, I mean was there ever a time where when you were kind of learning this, did you talk to your marketing team to have them kind of help you understand more of this?
Michelle Rawlins (12:40):
Yeah, so about a year and a half after I started at Amazon, my leader over what we call channel marketing, recruitment channel marketing at time that came onto our team actually was from marketing. She did consumer marketing at Amazon for years and she was instrumental in helping educate me on how the consumer marketing programmatic worked and how that technology worked. There are differences, it is not exactly the same, it’s similar, but she was instrumental in explaining things like real-time bidding to me and how the bids could fluctuate and market demands and how that technology works and was able to also help me kind of trigger questions that I had for our partners and the program programmatic companies on how their technology worked. It also allowed me to give feedback to those same partners on areas that could be approved upon. And that also has helped me here at Nexxt on areas that I know how some of the consumer marketing technology works that we don’t see in the space today or hadn’t seen in the space until more recently. So understanding from your marketing team, if you’re new to programmatic and kind of connecting with them to understand how it works, it could be hugely beneficial because that is one of the main technologies almost every marketing team uses.
Shannon Offord (14:03):
That was something that when this whole programmatic piece started to really get on the scene, I had conversations with a lot of marketing people just to understand it, even though I was in the space, I wanted to kind of get it from their aspect and that conversations were really insightful, just helping me understand that the shift was happening and helping me wrap my arms around it because was new to me
(14:34):
And I’d been in the space a long time, but basically just selling the whole duration based posting, not only selling it but also as a consumer as well back from my recruiting days. So marketing I think is a really good place to go to help understand some of this if you don’t already. A question that I get a lot is around with duration based posting, you’re basically paying obviously one flat fee no matter what that job is. With programmatic, obviously your pricing varies based on the type of position. Can you talk a little bit about how that piece works and the whole bidding and just, I mean obviously don’t get crazy into the weeds, but just kind of give an overall as far as how that part works and then maybe just talk a little bit about how the quality traffic that you’re getting could increase through using programmatic.
Michelle Rawlins (15:36):
Yeah, so with duration based postings, as you said, you pay a flat fee. Let’s say it’s a 30 day posting and it’s $500 and in the next 30 days you could get one application, you could get 500 depending on the difficulty of your role, the markets, all those things. But you as the sourcer, recruiter, whatever role you’re in, you don’t have a lot of options in a duration based posting to adjust that once you buy it. There are some duration based postings where you can interchange the job if your job fills right early or you can change obviously some of the content in it, but there’s not any type of technology behind it. Looking at that posting and saying, okay, we need to advertise it more because there’s not enough visibility to it, whereas programmatic, that’s kind of the goal of it. The goals are that it can improve your overall candidate quality, it can improve your cost efficiency, it can help you hire faster and it’s flexible in nature.
(16:45):
So real-time bidding, essentially what it does in programmatic technology is it takes what you’re comfortable bidding at which bidding is bidding can get really complicated. And so one of the pieces of advice I have for anyone that’s starting out in the space is really work with your technology, your vendors, to understand how they can manage that on your behalf by setting a budget and understanding what your needs are. Because most companies, I don’t know that they really want to get in the weeds of what am I bidding today at this time versus what am I bidding tomorrow or even in 12 hours or six hours from now? So long story short, basically the bidding works from a standpoint of if you have a $500 budget for the next 30 days and you need a hundred applications, your technology may bid 25 cents right now because in their network what they’re seeing for your job type, that is the going market rate to get you clicks that hopefully convert to applications.
(17:50):
The technology is built to where it monitors their network sources and then it will weed out those that are not converting to applications if you’re getting the data back. So the bidding works is that they bid the market rate in their network 25 cents a dollar, a dollar 25, whatever it is demanding in your network. And then you look at conversion rates to application and that essentially is where your spin goes and it helps then drive your quality. So your quality by being able to target those sources that are giving you better quality candidates and converting better from clicks to candidates is where your technology essentially would want to advertise your job. So obviously you wouldn’t want to take a customer service job and put it on a tech board. You shouldn’t get conversions really there. And that technology, that programmatic technology should know that essentially in how they place their ads and eliminate those sources that are not a good fit.
(18:53):
And so the benefit is that you’re going to multiple job boards versus just the one where you bought the duration based posting and you also have the ability to speed up your spend or you have your daily caps, your weekly caps typically or your monthly caps on spend, but it allows you to say, if I need jobs filled in the next seven days, it allows you to speed up that spend and really bid aggressively so that you get more traffic in potentially conversions applications versus really taking 30 days, 60 days, whatever your duration based posting is and evenly allowing applications to come whenever they see your job posting. So it’s putting your posting out there more for candidates, it’s allowing you to target candidates based off of your needs, your locations, all of those pieces, and then it’s allowing you to have control of your budget, whereas duration based posting is just not built that way.
Shannon Offord (19:48):
Can you talk a little bit about the whole piece where you mentioned you’re going to post your job to the main site that you’re working with and then it’s going to go to all these other different places? I know a lot of people talk about, oh, I want to see my jobs, but it’s really the results I think that are more important versus just visibly seeing your job on a site. I mean you want to see those applicants coming in and those resumes coming in. Can you talk a little bit about how that mindset, like the shift from like, oh my gosh, my gosh, I have to see my job on the site, to just really caring more about the applicants coming in for the resumes coming?
Michelle Rawlins (20:29):
So we had this come up a lot when I was in corporate because we obviously did move from duration based postings to programmatic and we had a lot of business operators and hiring managers that would go to different job boards and say, well, I can’t find my job. Why can’t I find my job? And there’s a variety of reasons why they can’t, but with duration based postings, if you posted a job and you go click on your job, it’s not costing you anymore in programmatic every time you click on that job. It could be costing you more if you’re paying on a cost per click or a pay per click model, but it’s also hurting your conversion rates with your vendors. If you’re having operators or hiring managers, go on and click on their jobs multiple times, search for your jobs. The other thing about the way that job board technology works from a candidate standpoint is as candidates search for jobs when they are not viewing those jobs, even though they’re searching over time, most job boards will start to not show them that job because there’s not an interest from that candidate.
(21:31):
If you are searching Amazon jobs, for example, and let’s say you do it multiple times over two weeks because you have a job posted, but you’re never engaging with those jobs, most job boards have technology to where it stops showing you those job postings as much, which could also be why your hiring managers couldn’t find ’em. But the biggest call out there is that as managers are going out searching for those jobs and they’re clicking on ’em, that could be resulting in budget spent from a programmatic standpoint, whereas duration based postings that didn’t result in more budget. So we always tried to educate them around how the technology worked and also how job boards worked and that every time they started going and searching for their jobs and weren’t engaging on them, that actually was kind of a negative on the backend side of job boards, and that could be the result of why they weren’t finding them, but also tried to help them understand that there also is that budget aspect now in a programmatic world for job advertising and to your point of quality of candidates, number of applications, there’s a disconnect between oftentimes the business and recruitment departments to where some hiring managers have access to the applications that are in your ATS.
(22:52):
Some I’ve seen systems where only the recruitment team does. And so I think some of that going looking for jobs is a lack of visibility or understanding of what’s in the pipeline. And so we started to help educate more from more of a reporting standpoint of what’s in the funnel, here’s the marketing plan for the jobs or the advertisement plans for the jobs, and try to help educate them from that standpoint so they didn’t feel the need to go out starting to search for their jobs. A lot of times they search for the jobs when they feel like they’re not getting enough applications or enough quality interviews. And so I think that for me, it was always trying to figure out how to solve that piece rather than trying to force stop a habit that they were used to doing
Shannon Offord (23:37):
A conversation you and I were just having prior to hopping on. We talk about this a lot too, the of jobs that people have. How does the number of jobs that an employer has or have, how does that impact programmatic advertising?
Michelle Rawlins (23:55):
So there obviously are a lot of different programmatic techs out there. Some of them are built to work more with enterprise level companies that have hundreds or thousands of jobs. Some of them work mostly with recruitment marketing agencies where they have thousands of jobs, they have different companies working with them at all times. What I would say from a programmatic standpoint is there’s not a great place in this space today from what I’ve seen for those really small companies that maybe only have one or two jobs, A lot of your programmatic companies have monthly budget requirements that you have to hit to be a client for the more job board side that has programmatic tech like us, we don’t necessarily have a monthly budget that you have to hit, but even in our technology, in our space, having one or two jobs, you can run programmatic that way, but there is some benefit of having multiple jobs from just amplifying your brand standpoint. And that’s no matter what the channel is. And so it is difficult today for those really small companies that I’m going to call it less than 10 jobs that are out there, but really in my opinion, if you have, I’m going to probably call it 40 jobs, twenty five, forty jobs plus there is a space, it’s just finding the right partner and those that have the budget requirements and how their tech works to be able to amplify your jobs.
Shannon Offord (25:23):
I’m going to ask this question because people, they keep talking about AI and that’s kind of a hot button, not only in other aspects of the world, but also obviously in recruitment. So how is AI being used in programmatic advertising?
Michelle Rawlins (25:41):
So every platform technology uses it obviously a little bit differently in programmatic technology and machine learning and AI, which in some cases are the same thing. They’re used to be able to benefit the real-time bidding. So you’re using AI to optimize campaigns, analyze your data, then predict the outcomes of where you would place the ads and potential efficiencies of that predictive analytics. That is a big piece in programmatic technology and ad placement. So AI is definitely an area in that piece. A lot of companies are starting to use AI to help write job descriptions more effectively so that your job ads then resonate better with your marketplaces and your audiences. AI is also used to obviously track online behaviors, so different search inquiries, past jobs, that kind of goes back to what I was just talking about with how job boards on the backend, the more you don’t click on jobs or engage with jobs, they could stop showing them as often. So you’ll use AI to do some of that work on the backend, but AI is from a job board standpoint or a programmatic tech standpoint, is used very often to essentially become more efficient and to help analyze data and then also help you be very conscientious of your budget and how it works.
Shannon Offord (27:16):
Yeah, I think it also is going to allow employers to get their jobs to places they may not have thought about that can generate really good traffic for them through these platforms.
Michelle Rawlins (27:29):
Yeah, I absolutely agree, and that’s kind of the benefit of programmatic. I can tell you from being the person that managed job board partners, talent attraction strategies and vendor relationships my entire career, you can only really partner with so many job boards. You only have so much time, and so you’re typically going to go to those that obviously you’ve had the best success with, but also those that are some of the larger ones in the space. So obviously everyone’s going to go to, Indeed, they’re the largest job board currently in the space. You definitely partner there from a traffic standpoint, application standpoint, Zip is another very large job board. Depending on the size of your team, it can be hard to go partner with 20, 30, 40 job boards. There’s new job boards as you know, built every single day. There are some really good small job boards too. And programmatic allows you to get visibility on their site. It allows you to get applications from their site without potentially having a direct relationship and allowing that programmatic team that you’re partnering with to manage those relationships within their network.
Shannon Offord (28:40):
So what advice would you give to an employer who’s looking to really diversify their strategy? Obviously you don’t want to go completely away from duration based. Would you suggest or would you recommend people have a mix? What are your thoughts on that?
Michelle Rawlins (28:59):
Yeah, so I think it’s all dependent on what are your needs, what is the size of your herding? How quickly do you need to hire? What’s your budget look like, right? So you’re really small budgets. Let’s say you only have a hundred dollars to spend on a job posting. Programmatically that’s probably going to get spent really quick and it takes time for the programmatic text to learn where to place your ads and become efficient. It’s not a turn on today, and you’re going to get applications within the next hour, and it’s really effective, even in the consumer marketing. It takes time to learn. And so there is a space for duration based postings. There is a space for programmatic. It really depends on your needs. What I would share with companies is that if you’re thinking about going into programmatic is talk to multiple programmatic techs.
(29:51):
Ask them questions about how their technology works, what is the speed of their technology to learn and become efficient? Ask them how their budgeting works and how they can manage bidding or if they need you to give recommendations on that, how they can help partner with you to understand what your goals are, what data they need. But definitely reach out to multiple vendors to learn from them how they work, because all of them work a little bit differently and they’re not all a great fit for everyone. I would test a couple of platforms. So at one point in time we had five different programmatic companies running, not in the same location, not for the same job because you’re obviously competing with yourself there if you do that, driving up your own costs. But we had very similar markets in the same job that we could test different programmatic platforms and we could start to see one, how did their teams interact with us?
(30:44):
How did their reporting work? How transparent were they in different sources or conversions? What data did they need? And then how did the technology ramp up our jobs? Because we were kind of in the space where we had a really quick hiring timeline that most companies don’t have. And so we needed a partner that also could ramp up very, very quickly. And not all programmatic techs can do that. So I would tell people to reach out, test, ask for referrals from other clients. Obviously this has been around for a while, and so there’s a lot of companies that have used it, so ask for referrals and advantages that they’ve seen or disadvantages that they’ve seen, but realistically, you’re going to have to start somewhere. Amazon kind of had a motto or it was a leadership principle there, but if you’re going to fail, fail fast. And that’s always been as my thought process of try something. If it doesn’t work, pivot really quickly, but you’re not going to know if it works until you try it.
Shannon Offord (31:45):
That is definitely one thing I remember with working with you, we’re definitely like, let’s try it. If it doesn’t work, let’s move to the next thing. So one thing we like to do on the podcast is really close things out with some fun, just kind of questions to get to know you a little bit better. So just a few of those. So let’s start with those. So – talking or texting.
Michelle Rawlins (32:08):
Texting.
Shannon Offord (32:09):
Alright, I can get down with that. Best career advice you’ve ever received?
Michelle Rawlins (32:14):
I had a leader at Schwab tell me that I’m not curing cancer. I was in the midst of planning multiple candidate events to where Walk-in events. We were having huge hiring events across multiple sites and they were all within a week of each other. I was working really long hours. It was a very stressful period of time and he saw kind of the stress that myself and my team had, and he came into our office and said, Michelle, you’re not curing cancer. And I tell a lot of people that whenever they get overwhelmed with work, because it kind of puts things into perspective, like our decisions, while it does impact people’s lives because talking about jobs and that is very, very important. Our decisions typically are not life and death outcomes. And so when I get stressed, when my team gets stressed, when people that I work with that get stressed, that’s the advice I give ’em. You’re not carrying cancer.
Shannon Offord (33:12):
That’s really good advice. If you weren’t in the HR space, what would you be doing?
Michelle Rawlins (33:18):
I would open a restaurant, comfort food, only during the holidays. I have people that pay me to make them mac and cheese for their holiday dinners, and I cook all the time when I’m home. I make dinner almost every night, make breakfast every weekend for my family. So I would totally open a restaurant.
Shannon Offord (33:36):
The cool thing about you, you can not only cook, but you can also bake. Usually those two things don’t go hand in hand, so that’s kind of unique, but you’re very good at both of those things. So favorite activity on the weekend?
Michelle Rawlins (33:49):
So lately it has been kids’ sports. I don’t know that I would say it’s my favorite, but that has been our activity on the weekends. For years it’s been playing softball as you are aware of. I’ve played softball since I was real little. Haven’t played as much lately, but starting to get back into the swing of things. Nice joke, right? But I would say on weekends, being able to play softball with my friends and hang out at a softball park.
Shannon Offord (34:13):
Well, thank you so much for spending some time with me today. You’re super knowledgeable on this topic. I think your experience from being on the corporate side to now on the vendor side, obviously that gives you a lot of knowledge that I think you’re able to share with our listeners today. If people want to learn more about Nexxt or if they want to get ahold of you, what’s the best way to do that? And before you do that, I do want to mention Nexxt is a DE partner. And you have been for many years, we’re very happy we’ve been able to partner with you and offer some different things to our members through that relationship. But if they want to get ahold of you, what’s the best way to do that?
Michelle Rawlins (34:55):
Yeah, so I would say obviously you connect with me on LinkedIn, Michelle Rawlins, it’s R-A-W-L-I-N-S, no G at the baseball company. Or you can email me. It’s mrawlins@nexxt.com or obviously reach out to your DirectEmployers folks. They have my contact information even before partnering with you at Nexxt, I was a longstanding DirectEmployers Member company, so I am happy to continue to be able to partner with you and have the chance to do this with you, Shannon.
Shannon Offord (35:30):
Well, thanks again, Michelle, for joining us today. Your insights have been awesome.
DirectEmployers (35:35):
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