NICHOLAS LIVINGSTON ON SHAKE THE COSMOS
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How can you create a career that works for you and your ideal lifestyle? How has the changing world of work impacted recruiting? In this episode, Nick Livingston of Honeit joins me to discuss how hiring can become more efficient & equitable and how he has gotten to where he is today.
Nick enjoys helping companies recruit, hire and scale. Honeit turns interviews into talent insights.
As the Head of Talent Acquisition at TubeMogul (now Adobe), Nick and team scaled from 60 to 360 employees through IPO ($TUBE) in just 26 months. In the same two years, he received his MBA from UC Berkeley (evenings/weekends), started a family (three daughters) and co-founded Honeit Software.
At MTV Networks (Viacom) in New York City, he was the Director of Talent Acquisition responsible for global digital media, interactive technology and product management recruitment.
He’s worked at two HR Technology companies (Taleo, NextSource) and started his career as a tech headhunter in NYC.
MBA from UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business. BS in Applied Mathematics
Find him at honeit.com or nick@honeit.com
Also, did you know that you can get yourself a copy of the Shake The Cosmos Journal as part of the personal development course? Check it out here.
Episode Transcript
ABHISHEK: Hi everyone, this is Abhishek from shakethecosmos.com. My guest today is Nick Livingston, CEO of Honeit Software, and I’m really excited to talk to him.
And if you’re listening right now, now is a good time to hit the subscribe button, or follow button, and give this episode a rating.
Nick and I met originally, actually we met over the phone when I needed some help with my ideas, and he asked some intelligent questions to advance my ideas. And actually, I’ve implemented some of them in my Shake the Cosmos course, and you can go check it out at shakethecosmos.com.
So, enough about me, and I’m excited to talk about Honeit. We’re gonna talk about some relevant topics, how Honeit Software and platform has evolved, how it helps employers, as well as some job search strategies that Nick can share with us. So, thank you so much for being on this show today, Nick, appreciate your time.
NICK: Thank you, Abhishek. Nice to be here.
ABHISHEK: All right, so we’re gonna jump right into it, and I want to get into a little bit of the journey that you took, and also the pivots.
I imagine many people have an idea and they’re sort of stuck in where to go next and you definitely didn’t just have an idea, you made it a reality. What was your thought process, and like why did you decide to invest your time and money into this?
NICK: Great question. I kind of fell into the world of recruiting, as a lot of recruiters do. You don’t really go to school to be a recruiter, but it’s just this profession that kind of found me. I enjoyed technology, I moved to New York City to be a talent scout in the music business. But, I graduated at the time of Napster and all the challenges of the music business.
But I discovered that technical talent were kind of the new rockstars, so to speak. And so, the idea of how do you find a rockstar engineer and get them hired, that was all enticing to me, and so I got a job as a recruiter.
And, fast forward, I ended up going to Haas and business school and quickly learned about how other functions were using data to make better decisions. And then I’d come back to my day job and myself and my recruiters at TubeMogul, we were still scribbling notes and sharing opinions. And we wondered why the interview process and the hiring process was inefficient, and ambiguous, and subjective, and slow.
And so there was this disconnect between the way I think about things, and my math and physics background and data, to that of my profession, HR and recruiting. And I said, “There’s a gap. We’re not using data to make better decisions. We’re sharing opinions and scribbled notes.” And that’s not sufficient, if you’re trying to make good decisions and move quickly.
So going to business school at Haas was the impetus of, there’s a disconnect, and then when I met James and Kim, the cofounders of Honeit, here were two technical engineers who were frustrated with the interview process from talking to non-technical recruiters and saying, “Why does it take two months to get a job?”
So it was really good meeting folks who felt the pain from the other side, and then building technology that could help me as a recruiter, help candidates, help hiring managers move faster through the interview experience.
ABHISHEK: That’s awesome. And I think it’s essentially schedule, screen, and submit talent faster.
You mentioned James and Kim, I would love to know the story. How did you meet them? Please tell me this was at Berkeley business school or something.
NICK: Well, we went that route originally. I started trying to brainstorm with some other technical co-founders previously, like, “Hey, you’ve got this idea, how do you improve the interview experience, interview technology?” Kind of start and stop, right?
People are interested in solving the problem, but then maybe they take a job, and they get sidetracked. So, ultimately I actually found James and Kim on AngelList, which was an early website around matching startups and founders and things like that. So, we had a couple of coffee meetings and then a dinner, and then we decided to formalize everything.
ABHISHEK: That’s awesome. And in terms of, over time, what has evolved with the platform or yourself, it sounds like at Berkeley you started this. So what’s happened with the platform, and what’s happened with you?
NICK: Yeah, from a business perspective, we’ve gone through a couple pivots. That was challenging and difficult. Originally, we had built a platform to help job seekers practice interviewing, and get better at interviewing by talking to experts in their industry, and do mock interviews with an expert network. We realized that was too much to bite, kind of a three-sided network.
So we white labeled that, packaged it, tried another secondary approach at that. And then ultimately came back to what I know, which was schedule, screen, submit, as a recruiter. Instead of the back and forth scheduling calls, we built an alternative. It’s just a link that can automatically schedule interviews. Instead of frantically typing notes during an interview, you can record and transcribe calls, so it’s searchable, and indexable, and you can search questions, and answers, and insights contained in those conversations.
And then the submit or the share course is usually a recruiter spends 30 minutes on the phone, hangs up the phone, and has to then type paragraphs to try to express why a candidate… you know?
Again, we’re going from conversations to text, we’re losing a lot, we’re misinterpreting a lot, and a hiring manager doesn’t want to read that or trust a recruiter. So we’re sharing soundbites or snippets or highlights from conversations. Imagine hanging up the phone after a 30 minute interview and sharing a couple of key answers with someone else to listen to.
ABHISHEK: I also feel there’s a human component added all of a sudden now, because if it was just an email, it’s hard to tell the tone. But I hear Abhishek on the phone now all of a sudden, and maybe his passion comes across, and I’m just thinking out loud.
NICK: The tools that I was getting pitched as a recruiting director were all trying to remove the conversation from the process. They were trying to say, “Oh, send the candidate a checkbox to screen them out, or send candidates a one-way video interview tool where you can say, ‘dear candidate, thank you for expressing interest. Please use this link to record yourself answering these six questions and maybe someone will talk to you.’”
I’m like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. If you’re trying to recruit engineers and product managers and VP’s of marketing and talented folks, like the top talent, they’re interviewing you. Right? You’re not interviewing them. So if you add steps or homework or friction, they’re gonna talk to your competitors.
And so we were like, “How do we build a technology that’s still focused on conversations counting, but the data and the insights contained in those conversations?” So if you’ve heard of Gong, if you’ve heard of Chorus, they’re doing this for sales conversations. They recognize that the best sellers in the organizations do different things than the worst sellers. And they can analyze conversations to extract those insights and share those learnings with the best, the greater sales organizations to figure out how do we all level up?
Well, just like the best sports teams. They watch play tape to get better. If recruiters and hiring teams and interview teams aren’t capturing our interviews, how do we get better? How do we rewind the tape on a good hire versus a bad hire to see what went right and to see what went wrong? Interview data, interview intelligence, unlocks those conversations and lets us figure out why this person we hired who didn’t look good on paper turned out to be a rockstar.
ABHISHEK: Yeah, so this interview intelligence piece and this term…
what kind of changes can a company start to make once they realize that this is another piece of data that can be leveraged?
NICK: I think what we’re trying to get out there is the idea that interview conversations are content. Interview conversations, if you look at content, you can search content, you can analyze content. So it’s a bit of a leap and I think recruiting HR is behind.
Support teams have been recording conversations for quality control and training for 20, 30 years. Sales organizations have been recording conversations for five years, let’s say. Well, we think interview conversations are business conversations as well, and there’s a lot to be gained when you start to look into what was asked, and more interesting, what makes a great answer to any given question.
ABHISHEK: Yeah. What makes a great answer on your platform?
NICK: (laughs) Well, I think recruiters don’t necessarily know. And I think the fundamental disconnect in recruiting is that the hiring managers and the candidates speak the same language, whether it’s QA automation, or web analytics, or finance. And then you have someone in the middle who’s trying to explain an opportunity to a candidate, and there’s misinterpretation, communication downstream. Or, they talked to a candidate, now they’re trying to explain what that candidate said upstream to a hiring manager, and there’s misinterpretation, miscommunication in that direction as well.
So it’s like recruiters have been the interpreters and the translators, but we don’t speak the same language as the candidates and hiring managers we’re talking to. So I think with data, we’re able to solve that problem.
And actually to the Honeit system, we’re seeing candidates being able to answer interview questions in their native language. Like, imagine being able to answer in your native language and not your second language. I speak a little bit of Spanish, but tell you what, I would not want to interview in Spanish, you know?
ABHISHEK: Oh, man. I didn’t think about that. How interesting. Are there Spanish speakers, I guess language being a barrier sometimes, are you getting requests from people wanting it in other global languages?
NICK: Well, I mean, recruiting is global, right? And we know the world is flat and the talent is now, especially with remote interviewing and remote hiring, it’s only accelerated the last seven or eight months.
So the idea that a recruiter can sit anywhere, and talk to a candidate anywhere, and for companies to essentially hire people anywhere, this idea of remote interview communication gets really interesting really quick. And the idea is how do you then as a team, when there are multiple people involved in the hiring process, let’s say a recruiter, and a hiring manager, and two or three interviewers, panelists, and then maybe an executive or a co-founder who’s the final decision maker. How do you get all of those people aligned and involved in what a role is, like what’s the job we’re trying to fill, and make sure everybody’s on the same page there, and the inputs of what this candidate has said so far. Instead of all of us repeating ourselves and answering the same questions, let’s build upon each conversation, and even remove some steps from the hiring process by collaborating.
ABHISHEK: Yeah, and I’m also thinking sometimes people want a summary of the candidate instead of just the insights, instead of everything at once as well. So it’s nice to have that.
NICK: Yeah, I think we’re all human beings, we like to hear it for ourselves and we know talent when we hear it. But historically, that’s required seven separate conversations with the same candidate for everybody to hear it and get to the ah-ha.
Well, when you start to think of interview conversations as content, as data, you can now share it. So one person can facilitate a great technical interview and share some insights, or highlights, or soundbites from that call with three other people. And now you’ve got four people who can hear the same answers, and then assess a candidate from one conversation, potentially, rather than seven separate conversations, which takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money.
ABHISHEK: Oh yeah, so it’s essentially very scalable in that aspect too. Interesting.
NICK: Yeah, yeah. And especially an external recruiter, let’s say. They talked to a great candidate looking for a job, they can now share a few highlights with four clients. And each of those four clients can listen to a few key answers and say, “Wow, you know what? Abhishek sounds great. That was a great answer to web analytics. Let’s get him on site, or let’s skip him to a call with the VP. We don’t need to do the two other phone calls.”
So, timing is everything, and it’s all about how do we efficiently screen and assess candidates together?
ABHISHEK: All right. I want to shift, we were talking about remote as well, and of course I want to understand your own journey as well a little bit. I know this is international conversation right now.
NICK: Yeah, I lived in the Bay Area for a number of years, while working at TubeMogul and going to Berkeley Haas in the evenings and weekends, and then had my third daughter, and ultimately just the cost of living in the Bay Area got to be a lot, and we were bootstrapping Honeit.
And so the idea of bootstrapping a company is nearly impossible if you’re living in the San Francisco Bay Area. So there’s this conundrum around how do you get to a point in your career when you have enough deep insights into a particular problem? Yet, without raising around, or raising venture capital money, how do you start a business?
Just like going to business school part-time, it’s hard to quit your job, and quit working, quit making money, to do something. Similar to pursuing the night program or the weekend program at Berkeley, we’ve been bootstrapping Honeit, and I moved to Costa Rica four years ago. And we’ve been doing this thing as a remote company, and cost of living is better, school is great down here, healthcare is cheaper down here, they’ve got fiber internet down here. We’re two hours from Houston, so the time zone is great. And you forget that you can get things done and you can do things globally, as an organization.
ABHISHEK: Yeah, I feel like more than ever now, especially with a lot of things being remote. Was that a tough decision to make? And what was the planning like to just to move… It’s not like just the Bay Area to San Diego, this is like the Bay Area to Tamarindo, which is a beautiful town. I've been there.
NICK: Oh you have? Okay, fantastic. Yeah, little surf town. It sounds like it is, right? But I think ultimately it wasn’t that crazy. It was like, let’s rent out our house, let’s sublet our house for six months to see if we can do it. We put our stuff in the garage or the attic, and we sublet it for six months, and then we said, “Hey, this is going pretty well. It’s not that different.”
You wake up, you get your kids into school, you have your coffee, you log into the computer and you’re on the computer all day anyway. And so then we extended for six months. And then we extended for a year. And then we sold our house and we kept on keeping on.
We met families down here that sell everything, and sell all their furnishings, and take the leap. We didn’t do it. It was a bit more of a structured approach. But once you get down here, there’s a lot of expats down here from the US, from Canada, from Europe, from Australia who all either have jobs that are virtual or start businesses down here.
I think one of the coolest things about living in a small town is that you forget how entrepreneurial small towns are. This is the family that owns the restaurant, this is the family that runs the hotel, this person is the bartender that also makes something and sells it at the Thursday night market. Everybody’s hustling to build something, and it’s pretty exciting. You don’t really think about small towns having that entrepreneurial energy.
ABHISHEK: Yeah, and I think I remember going to Berkeley, and I commuted from Sacramento, and I actually used to worry about that. Like, do you have to be in this particular area to always feel innovative, and all this energy as well? But I liked being in Sacramento sometimes, and just being on my own, as well.
And this small business angle that you’re talking about, and I’m really intrigued by your journey as well. It’s interesting you mention this, because there have been people approaching me about… The people are really looking at the world as options. Where can they, how can they do this? So this is cool.
NICK: I think it’s fascinating. With COVID, obviously it’s scary, and the uncertainty around everything can be scary, but I think it’s also an opportunity for us to look at education, and to look at healthcare, and to look at all these institutions that we’ve done a certain way for so long.
And the idea that kids can login and… Like our kids right now, with COVID, the Zoom stuff didn’t work so well 100%, so we created a little micro school with a few kids. There’s an online curriculum from the States that’s accredited, and they can learn from a teacher here. But then we have a physical teacher supplementing, and making sure things get done, because any parents who tried to do the Zoom thing from home, it’s as much work for the parent as it is especially with young kids.
But imagine being able to learn from the best teachers in the world about a particular topic. I think that’s what education could be. And we’ve got the technology.
So I think this world of “remote” really is opening opportunity for people to not necessarily have the house they can’t afford, and do the job they don’t want, to pay the mortgage, and just that cycle that we all catch ourselves in. You can live in a small town in Kansas and still work for an interesting company.
I’m from Kansas originally, and great people, not a lot of tech companies. But there’s a huge opportunity to pay less in rent and still solve interesting problems. But solve the problems you want to solve, not the problems that you feel like you have to to get the salary to pay for the mortgage, et cetera.
ABHISHEK: I’m sensing very strong problem solving abilities over there, Nick. In terms of solving this recruitment problem for employers, but then also you designed your own life for yourself in Costa Rica as well. And I love that.
What do you see as the future for recruiting now with this dynamic environment?
NICK: You know, I think it’s interesting. I think the world of work has shifted. Now there’s been a lot of layoffs, there’s been a lot of downsizing, there’s a lot of active job seekers, which is kind of scary. What are the new jobs that are gonna be created that get people back to work? Or is it gonna be more split schedules, where people can work that three to four day week that we probably all would love, if we sacrifice salary?
Again, if we don’t live in the expensive cities, we can live off of three days’ salary or four days’ salary. So there are some opportunities there around shifting work.
ABHISHEK: Totally. I think the shifting work is definitely interesting, and it comes back to the personal preferences people have. Like, I just met a guy who works at national parks, and he was like, “You know, I don’t get paid a lot, but guess what? I get to be in nature all the time, and people pay to be in nature.” So, it was interesting how perspectives matter.
NICK: Think about all the people that have a day job that would rather be doing their hobby, or their art, or their craft, but only get to do that a few hours on the weekend because they’ve got their day job.
My wife and I, we both have full-time jobs in the Bay Area, and getting home at 7:00pm, and both having full-time jobs to be able to have someone else raise our kids. And it’s just a decision you have to make. Here, we can live with one salary, let’s say, or do consulting work or whatnot.
But I think the other thing that’s interesting is companies are probably reevaluating, and this could be good or bad, reevaluating how many people they need doing certain things in their company. How many marketers does it take to create a campaign? How big does your marketing team need to be, with new tools, and marketing tools, and things like that?
All that is amplified with this idea of the gig economy, and being able to hire someone who’s really good at this little thing without hiring someone full-time to do that thing.
So I don’t have an answer for you, Abhishek, but I think it’s all very confusing. But I do think the idea of the ability to do things that you want to do is probably more interesting than ever. And I think the ability, then, to have a family life or to focus on some of the other things that are important to us are probably more possible than they’ve been in previous years.
ABHISHEK: Totally.
And I wonder, you being on the other side of the hiring practices and stuff, what secret tips would you have for candidates looking for jobs today?
NICK: That’s a good question. It’s funny, when you say that, I flashback to me moving to New York with my guitar, wanting to work in the music business. And I remember applying to all these director-level jobs. Like the Director of Music Licensing. That sounds cool, I’d love to do that. And just realizing now, I was super unqualified for a lot of those jobs I was applying to.
And maybe just reset and think, okay, that’s a cool job at an interesting company. But maybe I’m not qualified for that. Let me use a tool, like LinkedIn, to see who the hiring manager might be for that job. If it was a director role, maybe it was the VP. If it was a manager job, maybe it’s the director at that company. And let me take a second to think a little bit more about if that’s not the right role, what other roles in that company are currently available? Or, what would I have to say to some hiring manager to have them maybe flex that role? Maybe they don’t need a director. Maybe they could get away with someone at half the salary, who’s super ambitious, and super motivated to help them out because of x, y, and z.
There is flexibility with jobs. And a lot of times a company posts a job description with what their ideal candidate is, but knowing the 16 bullet points are probably all not gonna be checked off by the person they hire. What are the most important bullet points for this particular role? When people are making hiring decisions, they ultimately want to hire people who are super motivated to solve the problem and work at their company.
So I think when you’re expressing interest in a job, it’s answering the question, maybe you’re talking to a recruiter of why you want to work there. And if the recruiter hears it, and can pass that along to excite the next person, that can better your odds.
I know that’s kind of a roundabout question, but I think it’s what’s realistic, based on your experience, and what would someone pay you for to do that thing, at this company. And then, too, for a job seeker to think about if you’re interested in sports, you could go work at a sports company. If you like baseball, go work for a baseball company. If you like badminton, go work for a badminton manufacturer.
Whatever it is, and you can tie your interests to the role that you do for a company. I think that’s best in case. And I think if you can articulate that in a cover letter, or if you can articulate that in a LinkedIn message to a recruiter, to a hiring manager, I think that’ll stand out from the competition, and again, answer that question of, “Hey, this person wants to work here, they’re just not looking for any job.”
ABHISHEK: I, myself, am an example of your device actually. I think about your tip number one, just looking at jobs. If it’s a director-level job or a role as a VP, and approaching them. And I remember looking at product management jobs, and when you’re trying to get in, I would apply to an associate product manager job.
And sometimes during the interview, they’re like, “Oh, this guy’s really good. Why don’t we final offer? He’s actually going to be a product manager.”
So it’s interesting you talk about this flexibility companies have about jobs.
NICK: See the other strategy there, Abhishek, is a lot of folks that graduate from college, they’ll want to work at Facebook. And again, you’re also thinking about, “Wow, everybody’s thinking that.” So your chances of getting that product manager job at Facebook, if you haven’t been a product manager at another sophisticated tech company with a scale of millions of users is probably unlikely.
Well, what if you could be a product manager in another industry, or maybe a less popular software company? And you cut your teeth, you learn the foundations, you get a three-year job on your resume of being a product manager at a web company doing this thing. And then you use that in a couple years, to leverage, to say, “Okay, I want to go from a company building something like this, to a company building something like this.”
Or once you make that next move, you can say, “Hey, okay, I’m working at a consumer-facing software company with two million users. I want to take a lateral move to get that product manager job at Facebook where I can impact a billion users.”
The other thing I’d probably share with someone is you’re probably changing jobs, maybe only focus on changing one thing. If you want to change location, maybe you do take a lateral move in the same industry. And then you just focus on changing that location. If you want to change industries, maybe you stay in the same location, stay in the same role, but now you want to go from health tech to ad tech. And you just focus on changing that one thing.
And that’s gonna be less risky for the employer, less variables for a recruiter to consider, when they’re considering you. Or if you want to level up, and go up the ladder, stay in the same location potentially, and the same industry, and now go for that director-level role.
ABHISHEK: Interesting. And as we’re wrapping up here, how can people get in touch with you, and any exciting things, how can people get in touch with you?
NICK: Honeit.com, my email is nick@honeit.com. Feel free to send an email. Happy to chat about recruiting, happy to chat about hiring. It’s something I’m super passionate about, trying to improve that experience for everyone.
ABHISHEK: Thanks so much. And if you’re listening, Nick’s email is in the podcast description as well, so hit him up. All right. Thanks so much, Nick.
NICK: Thanks, Abhishek. Have a great one. Thank you for the opportunity.
ABHISHEK: Hey, everyone. Thank you for listening. Please hit the subscribe button. We’ll be back next week.