The cavnessHR podcast – A talk with William Tincup

The PDF version of the show notes with the links back to the YouTube video is at the link below.

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William is the President of RecruitingDaily. At the intersection of HR and technology, he’s a writer, speaker, advisor, consultant, investor, storyteller & teacher. He’s written over 200 HR articles, spoken at over 150 HR & recruiting conferences and he’s conducted over 1000 HR podcasts. William prides himself on being easy to find on The Internet, Google him and connect with him via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

William serves on the Board of Advisors for Weave, Vervoe, Brazen, hirepool, Talentegy, Wellocity, Talent Ninja, Universum Americas, Engagedly, Echovate, VibeCatch, Continu, Hyphen, Recruit KARMA, Happie, RolePoint, Causecast, Work4, Talent Tech Labs, and SmartRecruiters. He was previously an advisor to PeopleMatter (sold to Snagajob Q2 2016), Good.co (sold to StepStone Q1 2016) Smarterer (sold to Pluralsight Q4 2014) and a board member of Chequed (merged to create OutMatch Q3 2015).

William is a graduate of the University of Alabama of Birmingham with a BA in Art History. He also earned an MA in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University.

The cavnessHR Podcast can be found at the following places or you can just type in cavnessHR on the respective app.

iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cavnesshr-podcast/id1289104534
Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-cavnesshr-podcast/e/51584359?autoplay=true
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-119338849/the-cavnesshr-podcast-26
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbiseCbRVbE
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/cavnesshr?at=2367155
Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Dc2wyf6tbzs65lgnwvdq326rc6y?t=The_cavnessHR_Podcast-The_cavnessHR_podcast
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6Fwn3z5I49eyeIK9OUDcAP
Pocket Casts: http://pca.st/ryVZ

Social Media links for William below!!

http://www.linkedin.com/in/tincup
http://twitter.com/williamtincup
http://www.facebook.com/tincup
http://instagram.com/williamtincup
https://www.youtube.com/user/jwilliamtincup/

Below are William’s book recommendations:

https://www.pinterest.com/williamtincup/read-re-read-before-i-die/

Jason: 0:01 Hello, and welcome to cavnessHR Podcast. I'm your host, Jason Cavness. Our guest today is William Tincup. William, are you ready to be great today?

William: 0:09 Absolutely.

Jason: 0:12 William is the president of RecruitingDaily. At the intersection of HR and technology. He's a writer, speaker, advisor, consultant, investor, storyteller and teacher. He's written over 200 HR articles and spoken at over 150 HR and recruiting conferences. He has conducted over 1,000 podcasts. William served in the Board of Advisors for companies such as Weave, Vervoe, Brazen, Hirepool, Wellocity, Talent Ninja, Engagedly, Echovate, VibeCatch, Continu, Hyphen, RecruitKARMA, RolePoint, Work4, Talent Tech Labs, and SmartRecruiters. William is a graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham with a BA in Art History. He also earned a Master's in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona, and a Masters of Business from Case Western Reserve University. William, you're a very busy person and you’re well-known in the HR industry. I know a lot of people say they’re an HR leader, HR thought leaders, but I believe you can truly say you’re an HR leader. I just want to thank you for everything you're doing for the HR profession. So, I want to turn it over to you. What is the William Tincup working on right now?

William: 1:23 Well, I’ll tell you what. Thank you for the wonderful introduction, Jason. I’m at the point right now where I'm looking at the hype phase that we're going through in technology around artificial intelligence and machine learning and bots and all kinds of ways that basically technology that's supposed to get better on its own. Or get better with our help that will inform us in ways that we couldn’t have been informed before. So, a lot of the technologies, as you well know, through the last 30 years, have been really kind of repositories. We place data in the ATS, we place data in the payroll system, we place data in the compensation application, etc. But we've never really had the expectation that those things tell us anything, inform us. There might be a dashboard or something simple like that. But the expectation that you and I are going to live through in the next couple years is that they're going to provide insight and that insight will also provide action. I'm excited and terrified all at the same time and why called it the ‘hype’ phase is I think we've got about two years of just pure hype. Us being kind of at a place where we don't really fully understand what's going on. We went through this several times; we went through this because twenty years ago, all the HR software was delivered on print. You'd get your CDs and HR IT or IT would load your software locally, manage it locally, and now most HR software is delivered to the internet – SaaS (Software as a Service). So, we went through a hype phase with SaaS, where the people that were really, really bullish on SaaS. That's all they talked about, SaaS, delivered through the internet, the software delivery mechanism. Then we went through another hype phase in social. Social, social, social. HR’s got to get social with Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and what are we going to do. HR kind of put their heads in the sand and hoped that it went away. The hype phase was really intense for two, three years and now we can look up and we say, “yeah, we’ve got to have policies and yeah, we’ve got to maintain a certain decorum and we're going to learn.” But we went through a hype phase.

William: Then the last one probably not that far away from social was mobile where, traditionally, HR applications were delivered through the desktop. Whether or not it was local or whether or not it came through the interne. They were really built for guys and gals working at a desk in front of a terminal, in front of a monitor, and doing the bit in front of a monitor. With going through this phase of mobile, well now we have our HR applications that are built for phones and tablets and the desktop or all of the above – mobile cover of responsive design where they can actually fit on any screen. But there was a hype phase around mobile where mobile was the next best thing, it was the next killer app, it was the next thing. I think right now, Jason, what you and I are going through with all the HR technologies that are out there is this phase right now of let's just talk about artificial intelligence and just keep it around that. But artificial intelligence will save the planet. It'll change everything. It’ll get rid of all the recruiters, it'll get rid of everything you've done wrong in HR; AI will solve all your problems. It's almost like we’re going back to the 1850s and it's being sold as an elixir and guys are going town to town selling the elixir of AI – and you’ll grow hair, you’ll get taller, it'll attract women, it'll solve all your problems. That's just a hype phase.

William: I'm trying to figure out how long is this hype phase going to last and what do we see on the other side of the hype phase, when can we get to the point where we ask our practitioners, day-to-day practitioners, ask the questions, “What is artificial intelligence? What is it going to really do for me, and what insight is it going to prepare, give me? What action is it going to help me with?” Like the insight is going to be great because I do believe in my heart of hearts that AI will connect some dots that we don't connect normally. So, I like that. I don't know where in a hype phase we are, but I do like that thought. But I don't think it stops there. I actually think, like a lot of people, I think that it goes further than just giving you insight. I think it's going to actually create recommendation and create action and help us learn from the insight, but also what to do with the insight. So, I'm optimistic, absolutely optimistic, about the future of HR technology. It's just, right now, we're in this awkward little kind of a junior-high phase of we don't know how it's going to play out and could be because we're in the hype phase.

Jason: 7:10 William, when you look into your crystal ball, do you see you the AI or another type of technology changing how recruiting is done?

William: 7:17 Oh, absolutely. That I can already see. I'll take two tools – Pocket Recruiter. So, Pocket Recruiter is an AI-based sourcing tool and what you do is you put in your job description of what you want, you prioritize all the things that you need, it goes and scours the entire Internet and it brings back candidates and then it ranks ten of them, or 20 of them, or however many you want to set your aperture to. Then you could take those candidates and then run them through Vervoe – which is a different technology that basically puts candidates into a scenario, like a real work scenario – and all of this can be done with technology – no human touch. So, you could go out and scour the internet, it pulls back the best candidates, ranks them, you take that ranking, put them through another technology, put them all through a scenario, if you will, and on the other side of the scenario, you're going to know the three people you should actually spend some time with.

William: So, how does that change? Well, you don't have people having to do any of that; that's just technology doing that. So, yeah, is it changing that? Yes, it's absolutely changing the face of recruiting. There is a fear, Jason, and I think it’s a real fear, there's a legitimate fear that AI will get rid of recruiters. So, that is a fear – I don't believe it, by the way – but it is a fear. Like, people are afraid of snakes – I'm not of praise snakes, I live in Texas, I'm not afraid of snakes. However, I recognize that people are afraid of snakes. AI will not replace recruiters; it'll change what they do. So, instead of all of that hard work and sourcing and screening and assessment and all of that other stuff that recruiters had to do before. Recruiters are actually going to be able to spend more time with fewer candidates and go deeper and be able to make better recommendations for their clients and for their hiring managers, internally, and for third-party for their clients. So, I think it's actually going to raise the status of recruiters and get them back to doing what they do best as opposed to doing all of “plumbing.” So, I think it’s a simple question, Jason, “Has it changed?” Yes. “Will it displace HR or recruiting?” No, but it will change what they do, for sure.

Jason: 10:14 So, let's talk about recruiters for a minute. Recruiters get a lot of grief – some are probably deserved, some are probably not deserved. Why do recruiters get so much grief and what is one thing they can do to change that perception?

William: 10:26 Great question. Great question, Jason. I think some of it comes down to most hiring managers might not know what they want until they see it. So, it's almost like that old definition of art, if you will – “I don't really know if I like it until I see it, stand in front of it, and then I decide that I like that or yeah, this is great.” The clarity between a recruiter and a hiring manager. So, a hiring manager says, “okay, I need a software engineer that does this.” I think young in one's career as a recruiter, you take that and go, “okay, sounds good, I'll be back.” Then they go out and do their job and come back and then the hiring manager says, “yeah, none of these work.” So, the folks that have worked in recruiting for a while – they've been around a block per se. They hear a hiring manager say, “I want a software engineer, and it needs to look like this.” They don't run away; they actually stay there in that conversation to go, “okay, let's dig into this a little bit. How many years of software engineering do they need, do you have any preference of schools, do you care if they relocate or do they need to live here?” They take them through a battery of questions so that they basically understand. “If I bring you this person, this exact person that you've asked for, then you're going to take them into the process, correct?” “Yes.” “Good.” So, they really, really vet the process and they make sure that there's perfect clarity so that they understand what the hiring manager really wants and then the hiring manager has to articulate, and they force them to articulate.

William: The best recruiters I know forced hiring managers to articulate exactly what they want; none of that games of “I don't know what I don't know and I don't know until I see it.” No, no, no, that's a waste of time. So, you've got to actually define it and when you define it I'll go find it. But you’ve got to define it; and I'll help you define it, but you have to define it. I'm not going to go fishing for folks until I know exactly what you want. That's kind of a fun metaphor in Texas – you tell me you want a fish, I get you a catfish, “eh, I don't really like catfish.” You said fish, I brought you a fish. That's essentially what recruiters could do better, is hit the pause button, because everyone's in a hurry. It’s like, “we’ve got to get it now, we’ve got to do it now, time to fill, the job’s opening, we’ve got to get them, we’re losing productivity, we’ve got to get it now.” Rush, rush, rush, rush, rush. The best recruiters hear all of that and then slow down and then go, “yeah, I'm not in a rush until I know exactly what you want; you told me you want a fish, great, you want a bass fish, how big, let's get into the details.” Those are the best recruiters, those are the ones that have kind of been around the block the most. It's all predicated on making some bad experiences or having bad experiences because they've been out there rushing around trying to find stuff and brought it back and been rejected.

Jason: 13:51 Yes, I think that's great advice for our recruiters. Also, I think people forget that recruiters work for the company, not the candidate. So, unless the company embraces returning their candidates for a greater experience, I don't think there’s much a recruiter can do in that regard. At least that’s my opinion.

William: 14:04 Yeah. Some of the recruiters will tell you they work for both. But they became an advocate, internally, with the hiring manager because they're selling; they’re selling the candidate on the job, they're selling them on the experience, the values, the culture, the hiring manager, the work, they're selling that candidate. So there's a real bond, if you will, with candidates. But at the end of the day, they get paid by the company and so they also realize that they've got to go and sell the hiring manager on all of those things as well. So, they play a really good role, they play a really interesting role and they've got to work both sides; they've got to actually make sure the candidates are just as excited about that opportunity as the hiring managers are excited about the candidate.

Jason: 14:54 William, next, let's talk about the boards you're on – you’re on quite a few boards. How do you invest your time in all these boards? Like how much time does it take up?

William: 15:07 Great question. I get this question routinely. Okay, so, imagine you and I have a sandwich shop, and let's say in a given week we have a thousand customers. If Tuesday at three o'clock all thousand customers showed up, we'd be out of business. But if they show up over the course of seven days at different times and need different things from us, we can we can manage it. That's essentially what board participation – whether or not it’s with the Board of Directors or Board of Advisors (the difference between a Board of Advisors and a Board of Directors is the Board of Directors has fiduciary duty, the Board of Advisors doesn't). Typically, an advisor in a software company and interacts with the founder and is an in-between between the founder and the management team and the founder and the board. So, don’t have fiduciary duty, you can give them advice, they can take it or not, and I would tell you that it's an added flow. Sometimes, all of the different boards, they all need something different from me at different moments. I'd say like Smart Recruiters; I've been on their board for 7 years/8 years now. Jerome doesn't need anything from me, and we might talk once a year just to kind of catch up and things like that. But someone that I might have just took under my wing, they might need introductions to media, maybe introductions to some prospects or practitioners and so it might be a little bit more like an hour here or there. I have a day job, so I would tell you that none of them really impact my job because they don't all show up at the shop on the same day, thank God, and a lot of the stuff that they need is digital so I can do it at night or on the weekends and things like that.

Jason: 17:03 How does a new startup convince you to be on their board?

William: 17:06 That's a great question. They can convince me up to a point. So, I have three things that I take technology companies – the entrepreneur. I have to love the entrepreneur period of the story. It's a no-go if I don't love the entrepreneur. I've got to be able to see their vision, I've got to see their excitement, their passion, I've got to see that they can do it, their competence, I’ve got to see all that stuff, I’ve got to be able to envision it. Then there's a go/no-go after that. After that then there's the tech. I've got to then love the tech. I typically do a demo, ask a lot of questions, ask a lot of questions about what's there, what's not there, what's coming, roadmap, etc. But, secondly, I have to fall in love with the technology and then that's a go/no-go. So the third is I have to be in love with the market opportunity. So, we've gone down the path; I love the entrepreneur, respect the entrepreneur, I love the technology, I respect what's being built there, and then the market opportunity. If the market opportunity isn't big enough, then it's a waste of time for everybody. So, it's a gauntlet, quite frankly, of those three things and I've actually had people that I love two, didn't love one, and I said, “no.” I’d say that every gal or every guy that does this type of work, either at the board level or the advisory level, they have their own kind of recipe for what they think success looks like. So, mine's pretty simple – entrepreneur, tech, market opportunity.

Jason: 18:57 William, I know you’re on a lot of boards now. Do more companies come to you to sell you on being a part of the company or are you at your limit right now?

William: 19:06 No, I'm actually in conversations with a couple other ones right now – ones that, again, you can never tell when you fall in love. I know you've been married for a while, I've been married for a while. I met my wife at a fraternity party that I was not invited to and I believe I was drinking beer out of a frisbee when my wife first saw me. So, you can't predict love. So I kind of look at it in the same way. If somebody knocks on the door tomorrow and I start to kind of ebb and flow and I like them, then I'm going to unlock the door. If it works out, great, if it doesn't, then at least I found somebody that I want to keep in touch with because things can change. I could maybe not like the market opportunity today or this week. They go away for a year or two, come back and, all of a sudden, the market opportunity is right on. So, I try to give advice to anybody that calls. So, even if a start-up calls and they don't necessarily want or they're thinking about advisory stuff. I still would give them the best advice I can. I don't look at it as like I'm trying to filter through and only talk to people that, because you just never know what conversation’s going to be kind of your next best conversation. So, I tend to take a lot of calls with technology just to kind of get myself and throw myself, because we end up back to your first question. I'm still trying to figure out this hype phase. So it's good for me to talk to damn near anybody I can get on the phone.

Jason: 20:53 Yes. William, now can you talk about time you were successful in the past, what you learned from this success and what our listeners can learn from this?

William: 21:01 Yeah. Years ago, this was a hundred years ago, I was working at Walmart out in Midland, Texas. I was running the domestics department and back then, again, this is late eighties, lamps were sold in boxes back then. If you can remember back this far, that these big giant bulky boxes had these lamps and lampshades in them. When I first took over the department our sales were down. So over a course of a weekend I rearranged the department and I put green felt all up a wall at the very back of the store and I put the little shelves up and did this whole bit. I worked basically the entire weekend, and then I took all the lamps that I had, every lamp back in the stockroom, and every lamp that was out on the floor and I ran electricity back there and I lit them. So, from the store – this is a big store, about 180,000 square foot Walmart – from the front door when you walked in, you could see lamps. It was like the glowing sun back in the very, very back of the store. First of all, I broke all the rules. This is not the way that has been there, this is not the way that the furniture buyers had intended their lamps to be, both merchandised or sold. So I threw all that out the window because I just didn't think that people would buy lamps in boxes (I know I wouldn’t buy a lamp in a box). So, I did this and lit the wall; lamps are flying out of the store. It's like we couldn't keep lamps there, and we buy more lamps and lamps will just be flying out the door.

William: Well, one day, it’s probably about six weeks later, Sam Walton, whom I knew pretty well, actually visited the store and I was on an end cap fixing something. I don't know, teaching some employee how to do something, and Sam comes up. Taps me on the shoulder and at the time, mind you, I've got long hair – I've got hair all the way down to the very bottom of my butt, braided and earrings – so I did not fit your typical Walmart executive, if you will. He comes up, he said, (my first name is Jeffery), he said, “Jeffrey!” I turn around and I’m like, “Sam! What’s up, how’re you doing?” He goes, “tell me about this wall, what's going on here with these lamps, what's going on?” He had like a thousand questions, I could barely keep up, with what's going on with this wall, what are we doing, I don't understand, this is not normal.” I said, “Sam, let me tell you the sales.” So, I just pivoted the conversation back over to sales. I said, “let me just show you what's been going on; since we did this, here's what sales have been in lamps.” He's studying the same piece of paper I'm looking at and he goes, “why'd you do this?” I said, “Sam, why would anybody buy a lamp in a box – you’ve got to see it, you’ve got to be able to touch it, you’ve got to be able to feel it, you’ve got to look at the light, how it comes out of it, you’ve got to look at the lampshade. It's experiential (which I don't think I used that word, it's a nickel word) but you’ve got to be able to touch it, you’ve got to be able to do this stuff.” He looks at me and he goes, “you're right, you're absolutely right, you're absolutely right, Jeffrey.”

William: He gets on the phone, calls Bentonville and has the entire furniture buying team fly down. So, imagine 70 suits showing up two hours later and they all walked in and I'm like, “oh, man, I'm so fired, I need to get my resume, maybe Kmart’s hiring, I’ve got to get my resume together.” They all came in and, of course, in the same battery of questions – why'd you do this, you didn't follow the modular. We study these things and we've got data from customers and blah, blah, blah. I threw all that stuff out the window and I just said, “yeah, I hear you, but here I am in Midland, Texas. Here's what I know and here's what I did and the sales are backing me up. So, I hear what you're saying, I apologize that I didn't follow your rules, I don't want to be disrespectful, however, those rules didn't work here and so I had to do something different because sales were down. We weren't moving any lamps and I had to do something different. I did it, we're here now, what do you want to do? Sam goes, “well, I'll tell you what we're going to do, we're going to light lamps in every Walmart – that's what we're going to do.” From that moment, literally, like the decree was made, Sam Walton spoke, and I think it was probably within six months, every Walmart (at its time, I think we had 2,200 store stores worldwide) lamps were lit after that.

Jason: 26:37 That's a great story.

William: 26:39 So, I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. But it's a taking risk. When you know you're right or you feel you're right. It's hard to say that you know you're right – but when you feel you're right, I mean, I walked into a situation where furniture sales were down, in particular, were really terrible, I had to do something different. I couldn't just live with it and go, “well, that's not how retail works.” So, I literally tore up all the rules and did something different, and I could have been easily fired. My store manager could have fired me, district manager, regional manager, Sam, any of the furniture buyers. I could've been fired 18 different ways to Chicago. But because I had a little bit of data – I only had six weeks of sales data – but I had some data when I could prove it was a good idea, at least for Midland Texas, it literally changed that part – that little, tiny part – of Walmart forever.

Jason: 27:48 That's a great story, William. Next, let's switch to a time you failed. Talk about a time you failed, what you learned from this failure, and what our listeners can learn from it.

William: 27:57 Well, I fail everyday. Let's start with the obvious. I pride myself on taking a lot of risks and failing and then learning from it. But I'll tell you one of the ones that I still remember is I was selling into a RPO group in Boston and it’s at Fidelity. Fidelity used to own this RPO and one of the rules was if you're going to go to Boston. If you’re going to be in front of this group of executives at Fidelity, you had to wear a suit. I’m kind of a pear-shaped guy, I don't look great in the suit and I've never really worn a lot of suits. So, I've never really gotten comfortable in a suit. I love seersucker; so, if it was seersucker, I could probably pull it off because I love seersucker. But outside of seersucker, wearing just your traditional two-piece/three-piece suit, two-button/three-button, it's just not my bit. I love guys that are in suits, like I love looking at guys that really, really look great in suits, because I envy that. It's like, wow, I wish I could look great in a suit, but I can't. So, they forced me to wear a suit. And I failed.

William: The presentation was terrible; I got up in front of all these seasoned executives and I was not myself, I took things defensively, I couldn't answer their questions with clarity, I didn't have a grasp of the data, I was just all over the place, I wasn’t myself. I’ll tell you that when I'm not me, this is just in general, when I'm not me, I fail. But when I allow myself to be me – good and bad, (I haven't yet cursed on your podcast because I want to be respectful of you) but I curse like a sailor, like that's just a normal language, I don't even think about it. I don't try to do it to make people mad, it's just how I talk. What I learned from that is they forced me into a construct where I wasn't comfortable and I wasn't in my own skin and I couldn't get comfortable; no matter what I did, I could not find a comfort and so I completely failed. We didn't get the deal, it was terrible, I was terrible, I was all to blame, it was all my fault. It was because I allowed someone else to force me into a position of not being myself. All the times that I failed in my life, I can almost, kind of to a tee, go back to that exact kind of mantra of if someone else is going to box me in and not let me be me, then I'm going to fail. Now, on the other side, if people will allow me to be me, I’ve got a reasonable chance of being successful. I’ve got more than a 50-50 chance.

William: But if I'm boxed in, I can't be myself. I was speaking at an Arkansas SHRM a hundred years ago and I remember that right before I go onstage a gal walks up with this program in the conference, she goes, “William, this is a very conservative crowd; you really can't curse.” I thought to myself, like I'm literally walking onstage, I've just been miked up and now you're telling me this. First of all, I thought it was just kind of a terrible timing, but I went out and, in the first thirty seconds, I cursed. Because I thought to myself I'm not going to allow that person or that audience to then say, “yeah, William, we love you, but you can't be you.” So I tell people, first of all, you’ve got to find your comfort zone, you’ve got to find your skin, you’ve got to find whatever that is, and that takes years to experience failure success, all that s**t. But you've got to find it. Once you find it, don't let anyone take you out of that, don't allow anyone to kind of dictate what you perceive is your own kind of success. So, yeah, Jason, I do on the small failures, micro failures, I fail every day and I kind of look at it as one of those bits that I try to learn from every failure, even though I know I fail every day, make a mistake, because I've got two kids – I've got an 11 year old boy, 7 year old boy, I’ve got a wife, been married to for 24 years now – good gosh failures abound. So, I try to learn from those failures as best I can, as well.

Jason: 33:04 That's some great advice and a great lesson you just gave us. I really appreciate that. William, talk about somebody who's helped you in the past and how they helped you.

William: 33:13 Wow. So, I'll preface it like this: because I give very, as you can probably already tell, I give very pointed feedback. So, when someone asks me, I will tell them my version of the truth. So, I don't do a whole lot of unsolicited feedback. So, if your audience would pull out a piece of paper and draw a square with four boxes. Feedback is either on one axis – it's either positive or negative – and on the other axis – is either solicited or unsolicited. I tend to not do well with positive feedback. I know this is going to sound really crazy so just bear with me. When people tell me, like after I give a presentation or after I do something, and people say, “hey man, that was great,” I tend to not listen to that because I know myself well enough to know if it was great. I know it was great. If it wasn't great, I know it wasn’t great. So, I tend not to take unsolicited feedback in either positive or negative forms; if I don't ask you for your opinion, I probably don't really care about your opinion and I'm not really going to listen to it anyhow. However, solicited – if I ask you your opinion and you tell me positive or negative, I'm taking it to heart, I'm writing it down, I'm thinking about it, I'll probably dream about it, I'm going to really take it to heart. So, I did a presentation in Chicago this was probably 4 or 5 years ago now, and a gal that I just absolutely love and respect I asked her, after the bit, I asked her, I said, “okay, it’s just you and I, what do you think, and what could I have done better, or what do you think went well?”

William: She said, “well, here's the deal – you're great on stage because you're funny, you're entertaining, you can juggle, you whistle, like you’ve got an entertaining value. But your examples weren't deep enough and so you lost some people because you stayed at kind of a safe level of just kind of placating. But just kind of staying on the safe level with examples, and I think people tuned out; they liked you, you're going to get great scores, people like you and they’re probably going to invite you back. But if you really wanted to engage that audience, you really should have gone deeper and give them more concrete; you’ve got them, you’ve got the examples, you chose not to go there.” It hit me in the heart, Jason, it was like someone just punched me right in the heart. She was right – I did, I stayed at the safe level. It was funny and laughable and I had the audience doing a bit and I stayed safe. People don't learn that much in that safe zone. It was kind of a they were going to give me a B, I'm going to give them a B and we're all going to call it kind of the day. Since that presentation, I've then decided no, I'm going to go deep; I'll start shallow and I'll start safe, get people kind of warmed up into the bit, but I'm going to go deep. If the criticism is [that] I went too deep, okay, I'll live with that. But she gave me that advice and she looked me in the eye and I know that she loves me, I know she respects me and she just punched me right in the heart.

Jason: 37:19 But sometimes that's what we all need – that little punch.

William: 37:22 That’s right, that’s right.

Jason: 37:25 William, can you recommend a book for our listeners?

William: 37:28 We talked about it pre-show, I am and have been, for probably about five years now, I've been going back and reading all the classics. So, I’ve built a list, and this is going to both fascinate your audience and also just kind of make them laugh a bit – I built a book list of the 250 books that you should read before you die. It's a lot of stuff that you already know; these are the classics – Tolstoy and Oscar Wilde and stuff like that. So, I built it and I put it on Pinterest (of all places). So, if you go to Pinterest and then you put in my name, William Tincup, and you scroll through, there'll be a board and it'll be 250 books. Right now I'm in Hemingway (and so I'm pawing my way through Hemingway) to me, is my type of writer because it's very simple and complex but it's very descriptive language, short words, short sentences, very descriptive.

William: I just love Hemingway. But I think I'm going to move on from Hemingway and then do Michener next. Obviously, Michener wrote about Texas and I want to read about Hawaii as well. Business books are great and I have no diss, at all for business books and that's probably to set that up and I say it that way is I have three degrees – so, I have a Bachelor's and two Master’s – and whilst in school for eight years of my life, I read nothing but business books. There was a period before ’97, I read every book on branding ever written, every Harvard business case study ever written. Like, I’ve kind of almost got my fill because I read, I threw myself off the deep end into it, I read so much that now I'm kind of bored by business books. I mean I'll every once in a while catch something, a synopsis of something that really makes me think or I'll watch a TED video and it really gets me to think differently. But for me, there's nothing like the classics like The Catcher in the Rye. You want to learn something about business, read The Catcher in the Rye. You’ll learn everything you need to know about business. So, I'm kind of at that phase, I know it's a little odd but then again I'm absolutely a little odd, so it fits, but yeah, if you're interested in the classics in that way, go to that go to that Pinterest board and go take a look at that list and start at 1 and go to the other. Read them all before you die.

Jason:40:23 William, can you provide our listeners with some of your social media platforms so they can reach out to you?

William: 40:27 Oh, absolutely, Jason. Thank you. I'm really easy to find on the Internet – I've kind of made that decision – and my name, William Tincup (Tincup like the movie or like the whiskey, T-I-N-C-U-P), if you put that into any of your favorites, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, if you just put William Tincup into Google, you'll find my email address and/or my cell number. So, I am super easy to find on the Internet. It won't be hard for you to find me.

Jason: 41:04 That's great. For our listeners, we’ll have all the links to everything that William’s talked about on our show notes. William, we’ve come to the end of our talk. Can you provide any advice or wisdom for our listeners?

William: 41:19 The thing is, especially back to this AI stuff, take it slow. Whenever you're talking to vendors and you're talking amongst yourselves and other practitioners, take it to the not how it works. So, the best example I could say is like a Tesla. I don't know how a Tesla works, but I've been in a Tesla and it takes me from point A to point B. That's going to be a lot of HR and recruiting technology in the future – you don't really need to know how it works, you just need to know the outcomes of what it does, what insight you can get and what action is it going to help you with. I think that, not only listening to vendors because vendors are good, they're going to sell you on a lot of this stuff, but talk to your practitioners, talk to your peer group. Really, really spend time calling each other and saying, “hey, we're using this for this, what do you use, how is that working, what insight are you getting?” I think the more that the practitioners talk, I think we might get through this hype phase faster.

Jason: 42:33 Yes, that's great advice. William, thank you very much for being on the cavnessHR podcast, you give us a lot of valuable advice and a lot of great experiences that you've had in the past to help us succeed.

William: 42:44 Absolutely. And, hey, you when you get down to Arlington to see your daughter, I want you to come make sure we go out and have coffee.

Jason: 42:50 Yes, yes. Definitely. And to our listeners, thank for your time, and remember to be great every day.