Navigating the Post-Pandemic Norms with Damien Filiatrault

...I was up on my laptop at night at 10 at night talking with my colleagues in San Francisco and I'd shut my laptop at 11 or 12 and I'd be going, "This isn't working that well, there's probably a better way." And when I came back to San Francisco, I started working with some developers in Latin America and it worked really well from both a time zone and a cultural perspective. And back in 2010, I founded Scalable Path. Since then we've grown to have 23,000 developer profiles in the system. And we've placed over 500 developers with 300 different clients.

                And so yeah, you mentioned Upwork, Scalable Path and some of the other companies in the premium talent marketplace space are a bit of a reaction to what's happened on Upwork where you've got to navigate a lot yourself. You've got to spend time, you've got to have the expertise to really know, to write a great job description. Then you've got to sift through a bunch of applicants and figure out, "Okay. How do I know these people really know what they're doing, especially if they're a developer? And then if I'm not a developer, how do I vet them? How do I know if the guy who wants $20 an hour is better than the guy who wants $150 an hour?"

Fletcher Wimbush:

What kind of clients do you find yourself working with typically?

Damien Filiatrault:

It's really across the board. I mean, it seems like every company has a software component these days, everyone's got a website and some clients that just need a simple marketing website, that's not typically our expertise we are more in the custom software development space.

Fletcher Wimbush:

So these tend to be smaller entrepreneurial type businesses to supplementing larger companies in their development teams or?

Damien Filiatrault:

It's both, I think our style really resonates more with startups. I tend to be just a scrappy get-it-done kind of person and probably the majority of our clients are startups. We do work with some larger companies as well like Buzzfeed and some companies that do have like thousands of employees and those relationships are great, but I think we're particularly good at helping people start from a pretty early stage. And that's one of the value add we have, I think.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Yeah. Are people like, "I've got an idea for an application that I want to build," and then I come to you or am I, had the idea went to Upwork, tried to hire a few people. And I think many journeys, I mean, I've had this journey. Go to Upwork and hire a developer and tell them, "This is my vision, build this for me." And then it didn't go very well. And now I'm like, "Okay, there's got to be a better way."

Damien Filiatrault:

Yeah. And we can do that early level consulting too and we've done it with founders where they have an idea... We actually have a process where we can take them through. "Okay. The first step is really defining your requirements." We've actually developed our own template for a requirements document that strikes the right balance between being agile but also planning. There's this tension between these two worlds where in the past in the software world, it was like, "Let's spend months writing everything down and documenting requirements," and then we'll throw it over the fence to a software team and then they'll come back in a long time and then we'll see what we got. And we might go, "Yikes. That's not what we wanted."

Fletcher Wimbush:

Well, not what I envisioned.

Damien Filiatrault:

And really the popular thing lately is going agile where you don't spend so much time up front planning, but you dive into it, you release quickly and then you iterate, you get feedback and that's all fine and well, but there is a balance, you don't necessarily want to just hire a developer and hope for the best, you need to know, "Yeah. This might take me three or four months and cost me X amount of money. Am I ready for this? I need to know what I'm getting into." And so taking a few days and really defining your requirements to the point where a software developer can give you a reasonable estimate is worth your time I think.

Fletcher Wimbush:

And I mean, you mentioned this, defining the job description. And I mean, this is what we teach, what we call fact-driven hiring system. So, getting that foundation, which is all about that job analysis, the job description, figuring out who that ideal [inaudible 00:06:49] is in the scorecard, how you're going to evaluate that you got that right person is the journey there. And that's a very, it can be a difficult task, especially when you start to venture into a zone of where you have no expertise like baby software, you are a founder, you're an entrepreneur, you're a business owner, or you have a completely different kind of business. Now you got this idea to develop an application of some sort, how do you even begin to create a job description, figure out that scope of work?

Damien Filiatrault:

I mean, it sounds like you've got some opinions on what makes a good job description yourself and a methodology yourself, but we-

Fletcher Wimbush:

It's feeling we're probably aligned.

Damien Filiatrault:

I mean, we definitely have, it's probably the most important part of our process. And every time we try to shortcut it, we regret it. Every time someone comes to me and says, "Hey, Damien, I just need a react developer. Who have you got?" And sometimes I'm tempted to just say, "Oh well, let me just show you a few candidates." And I always end up saying, "We need to go through and write this job description because..." And we have a tool that we use internally and it's got something like, I would say 15 or 20 parts to it.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Yeah, it's in-depth.

Damien Filiatrault:

And like you said, there's... I mean, I don't know how deep you want to go in that right now, but it's crucial.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Yeah. I mean, I think it's a big part of it. I mean, look, am just like you I've skipped that step and I've looked at our journey in working with our clients and that's just like an overlooked step. We all just want to get to the hire. Like, "Oh, I need a salesperson, I need a developer. I need a whatever. Let's just go out there. Let's find him. Well, that person seems great." And every time you skip a step in the process, it really reduces your chances for long-term success. And this whole like getting the job description, the scope of work, the understanding of who you really need down and spending the time and we're all as leaders we tend to give up, we're so just like immediate satisfied. I know many of us just want it now. And it's so easy of a step to skip. How do we pause? How do we get that through our heads that we need to just slow down and really take our time with this planning stage before we jump into hiring.

Damien Filiatrault:

Yeah. It's always a reminder that I've skipped it when you're talking to candidates and you're saying, "Hey, I have this opportunity. Are you interested?" And then they go, "Well, tell me about it." Because really candidates these days are in the driver's seat. The balance of power has shifted in the talent space and-

Fletcher Wimbush:

Even with the offshore people?

Damien Filiatrault:

Oh God. Yes. I mean, it's all relative I think that offshore people have less access to tons of opportunities. But I mean, I don't want to go off the job description topic too far, but we can come back to that, but yeah, man. With COVID and everyone going remote I think people said, "Okay, I wasn't sure about being remote before, now I'm sure about it. It's not even a thing." And if I was willing to hire someone in the next city, why not the next country and what we found was that in geographies that we focused in, like Latin America, that a lot of companies were making that leap and competing more for those top developers and countries like Brazil.

Fletcher Wimbush:

So, you get into it, you have a fuzzy job description. You go to a temp, you go to a person who you think is your react or job, a person or whatever, and you go, "Hey, I got this great opportunity." And then they say, "Well, what is it?"

Damien Filiatrault:

Yeah.

Fletcher Wimbush:

You [inaudible 00:11:18].

Damien Filiatrault:

Darn it. I shouldn't have shortcutted this and now you got to go back and that's when you go back to the client and you go, "You know what, I wanted to just help you out and save you some work as the client or as the hirer, but it's going to behoove all of us." I usually say it takes only about 30 minutes collectively, maybe it takes one person's just got to do the draft. And usually, someone like the hirer has something lying around that they put somewhere else that has a starting point. And then we'll take that and say, "All right, and we filled in these gaps, took 10 minutes just to do that. Now you look at it for 10 minutes. You fill it in and then maybe we'll take another stab at it and we're done." And we're done in 30 minutes over back and forth, or maybe even asynchronously. And it's really not that much work.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Yeah. It's a bit of a tedious task, but at the end of the day, it's not that much work. And again, our lack of attention spans draw us away from doing these types of things. But taking that time to get that clarity is really big. What about setting measurable outcomes for developers? Some roles I feel like it's easier to do than others is something that you can do with a developer.

Damien Filiatrault:

Yeah. I mean, that's a great question. I mean, you touched on one thing which is scoring, and I don't know if that's what you were getting at, but one unique thing we do and I think it's easier to do with developers than potentially other more managerial roles. But part of our job description tool is we say, these are the required skills. These are the strongly preferred skills, and these are the nice to have skills. And then even within those sub-groupings we'll have, this is the skill level within that. So, let's say that it's a developer. They must have a level of expert here or that it's nice to have if they are a beginner here. And that really gives the person searching a much richer, true framework of who-

Fletcher Wimbush:

What you're looking for, who you're looking for.

Damien Filiatrault:

Who can fit? And where you're willing to be flexible as a hirer you might, instead of just saying, here's a list and here's 10 skills that I'm interested in. And I don't know what you're willing to compromise on. If you had to, what are the things you have to have and what things-

Fletcher Wimbush:

Yeah. People aren't unicorns, unfortunately. We'd like them to be, but the reality is in hiring that nobody's ever an absolute perfect match other than they're so imperfectly perfect, I think oftentimes. But yeah, I think that is exactly what we talked about when you talk about keying a scorecard, is you must have nice to haves, deal breakers I guess they're in there too. But oftentimes you start with a list of a bazillion things. And then it's like, "Okay, let's sort this more intelligently and meaningfully, and then hopefully you even eliminate a lot of those things.

Damien Filiatrault:

Yeah. You don't want to intimidate people too. We try to keep it at 10-ish or less skills. And our system actually has very structured data, so we can just push a button and it'll say, "Okay, rank all 23,000 people in our database on this scoring criteria." And then the system will say, "Okay, here's who I think are the best fit." And then a person chooses whether to invite them or not. But yeah, you've got that initial matrix and scoring, but then what we do, you mentioned measurable outcomes. And I think there's a couple points that come to mind there. I mean, you've got to treat every interview process the same. Everybody's got to go through the same thing so you can compare apples to apples. If you ask different questions or different people are doing different things, and then you kind of try to look, okay, we've got these five people. Well, how do you compare if you didn't put him through the same process? So, that's fundamental.

Fletcher Wimbush:

So, you set the foundation, or the framework, that's a job description analysis scorecard, what are we really looking for? What skills, qualities, experiences do we really need? And again I can never stop emphasizing how important it is to go through those exercises the 30 minutes, hour, a little bit of time, but just to really focus in on that. And so that sets you up to then begin to figure out how you're going to build your pool, track the folks. And now obviously that's a part of what you saw when it comes to coming to particularly tech talent sounds like.

                So, how do you track these people though? And it is a super competitive marketplace right out there, and we've got to be able to differentiate ourselves from one person to the next, or one place to the next. So, that's something that I don't... Yeah. I touched on it earlier even though they're offshore, I think there's a misconception here that these people are all eager looking for work. I mean, no, they're evaluating their opportunities too. So, how do you make your opportunity more attractive than the next?

Damien Filiatrault:

Yeah, I mean, I think that there's certain areas of the world that are becoming more globalized, more like hiring domestically and Latin America's one of them. And yeah, I don't think it behooves us to treat people in other countries as having that much of a different psychology about-

Fletcher Wimbush:

Work.

Damien Filiatrault:

What company they want to work with. I think that the motivators that you would find here are similar. Of course, you have money, that's a given, but I think that it sounds cliche, but I think that people everywhere are caring a lot about the mission of the company and feeling some purpose in what they're doing. And that is truly what retains people. So weaving that into your job description, I think is really important.

                You've got to sell it. And there's a section in our job description. Just tell us about your company and what your mission is. And that's where you can say like, "Hey, we're a stable company." Or, "These are some impressive metrics that we have achieved thus far." Or, "This is our mission, and this is why we're changing the word for the better." And you've got to think of your JD as a bit of a sales pitch in some places, and so that is the first step I think, to attracting people.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Yeah. Yeah. How do you deal with the culture aspect? I mean, just company culture. I mean, obviously there's these geographic cultures, but maybe Latin American versus north American or whatever it might be. Asian versus north American cultures, but more so the company culture side of that. Right. Is there how do you address that? How do you make that part of the attraction piece in dispersed workforce like this?

Damien Filiatrault:

That's an interesting question. I mean, I would say that as a person who's helping clients build teams or hire people, I tend to end up engaging myself with, or our company engages with clients that I think we feel have a good culture as well. And we can be discerning too in our jobs as recruiters or where you need to talk to-

Fletcher Wimbush:

Decide what projects to take on or which clients to take on.

Damien Filiatrault:

Yeah. Yeah. And when we are even having those initial discussions about, "Hey, this is how we tend to work, how do you guys work?" And you're having that initial call with the client, you're getting a sense of what their vibe is and are they a friendly person? Are they a flexible person? Do they have a sense of humor? And you start meeting some people and it tends to be, those are the type of clients we want to engage with. So, yes, there are sometimes clients that might have a... We've had clients where some of them have a developer on the team who's a gatekeeper, who's very serious or yeah. But I think a lot of that comes out in every process, at some point the candidate is going to talk to the end company in one or two, or hopefully you don't drag it out too long. That's a whole other topic. We call it interview fatigue.

                But they're going to get to know each other there in that interview. I think the best thing that I've got is to try to get a sense, capture that a little bit in the company description, in the job description and just see if the developer or the candidate just connects with the client when they're talking to them one on one. But I don't know if you have other thoughts on that.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Well, I think it's a difficult thing how do you even describe company culture? Is it even real, like you think it is. I mean, it's a huge topic and it's a buzzword, I think. And I think it is a real thing. I mean, I think it's a reality that there is a culture. So I am actually toying with this idea more and more myself. I think about what's in it for employees. Well, first of all, it's quality life. That's all we want. We're all human beings. We're all here on earth. We're all animals, we're all looking to enhance our quality of life. That'll something different to us. And the three drivers at work a lot of times are compensation obviously but career growth I think is the other one.

                And then culture, and culture being one of the hardest ones to define and to describe and to evaluate, we want people to culture fits. But as an employee, you're going to spend 40, 50, 60 hours a week in this environment. Is this the place where I'm going to enrich myself? Is it going to be aligned with my values? Are they going to be aligned with mine, or can I be aligned with theirs? Can I get excited? Can I feel like there's a community here? Maybe that's a better way to think about cultures, communities, this place I want to be a part of. And how do you describe that? Is it real? Is it more than just core values on a piece of paper?

Damien Filiatrault:

Yeah. Well, I think some of this stuff you're touching on might be icing on the cake like, "Okay, do I really, really click with everyone on this team and feel this certain energy." But I would say that if that's the frosting or the icing, there's a cake which underlies all of them, which are just values that I think every person and company should have, which are things like empathy, trust. Are we treating each other like humans? Are we being flexible? Are we being reasonable? I don't think you necessarily have to feel like you want to go and get a beer with everyone in your company afterward, but if you're being treated with respect and reasonably, and you have as you said, a good quality of life I think you can still be very happy in a job.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's important and I think it, I mean a lot of people argue, particularly compensation. I mean, obviously compensation is a direct correlation to my quality of life. Right. You know what I can afford the flexibility or how I can take care of my family and things like that. But you hear about this oftentimes people highly compensated take lesser jobs because of that maybe that's the environment, which is culture. It's all part of that. Or even career growth. I mean, people get stagnant in that and I think developers probably are a big that way too. I think they're really big on, and that may not mean like going to become CTO. It's just like, if they're doing the same thing over and over and over every day, they get bored.

Damien Filiatrault:

They get bored and they know their skill set is becoming less relevant. You're always got to be learning. You've always got to be keeping up to date with the newest technologies and if they're not using those new technologies, they may feel they're falling behind, but people do like learning. Another thing you touched on, which again, it's not some abstract culture thing, there's just fundamentals like, "Am I being pushed too hard? Am I having too much stress being put on me? Unreasonable deadlines, those that kind of bad culture, if you can eliminate the bad things, I think that can go a long way.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Yeah. Yeah. So, I think a big challenge with dispersed workforces. Now, a lot of people deal with this or can't get their head around it and I get it. I mean obviously you have everybody in the office, many of us in the office have gone fully, fully remote. We did, I'm sitting in my spare bedroom like everybody else, and we've embraced it. But I have a lot of clients, they just can't get around it. They're just like, "We've got to everybody in the office." And you are advocating obviously for a fully dispersed or at least a portion of the team being dispersed. How do you make that work, I guess?

Damien Filiatrault:

If people are transitioning to remote work or how do you make it work if part of the team is still in the office and the other part is remote?

Fletcher Wimbush:

Yeah. Well, let's tackle that. I think that's particularly challenging because you're probably facing that more with this outsource developers. We started that way and now we're all remote. So, now we're all equal playing field, but our development team has always been remote.

Damien Filiatrault:

Yeah. Well I think that's key. I mean, I'm a big believer. I'm drinking the remote Kool-Aid admittedly, I just read the book Remote by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried, that would be a book I would recommend to people who are not embracing it. But one of the points in that book is like you mentioned having a level playing field. It can not work well when you have that dynamic where remote people are somehow not first class citizens and they have certain disadvantages. I think that it works better when you can do a test project, they recommend taking a subset of people. And maybe you don't have to go full remote off the bat, maybe doing a couple days away from the office.

                But ultimately I think it does work better if you deploy it evenly across your team, just because they can go in the office doesn't mean... If they're local and they could, that doesn't mean they should, they might really enjoy working from home part of the time. And, and that might level that playing field, if you were going to hire a developer in Brazil and you had a developer in Chicago, well, let the guy from Chicago work from home too. And then they're starting to use the same communication techniques and everybody feels like they can contribute equally on a meeting because they're using the same style.

Fletcher Wimbush:

You said something earlier that really resonate to me and I'm totally guilty of this, or my early days of hiring remote workers. It's kind of treating them like second class citizens. Right. And you know how do people, I mean, A, don't do that. I mean, it's terrible. And again, I have to admit I've been guilty of that. And I've learned it took me a long time to learn and but how do you get over that? If you're new to this, or you're starting to do that change your mindset, but how do you change that mindset, I guess?

Damien Filiatrault:

Well, I mean, I'd come back to my previous point, which is if you are thinking that this person is somehow different because they're remote, then maybe everyone should try working remotely a bit. I think if you ask most people, they would enjoy working remotely part of the time. And why not give that to everyone? Why it's such a if you have a job that requires in person, for some reason, like you're selling phones at Best Buy, okay. Yeah. You're not going to do it remotely, but most jobs, they don't have that component. So, why are we holding onto this, this gas, guzzling, 30 minute, hour, long commute. It's not good for the environment. It's not good for our ergonomics sitting in a car. It's not good for our productivity. There are so many-

Fletcher Wimbush:

More inter-family lives.

Damien Filiatrault:

Yeah, family life.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Being able to see your wife and your kids, or significant other. And be able to just spend a little bit of time with them at lunch or whatever, or to take them to school where maybe you couldn't do that before. I mean, that's that's huge quality life factor.

Damien Filiatrault:

Or even to get uninterrupted focus work done. The office is more full of distractions.

Fletcher Wimbush:

I love that.

Damien Filiatrault:

I mean, I'm definitely grabbing things from the book Remote, but if you ask people, where do you go when you really have to get an important big task done, it's typically not the office.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Yeah. Yeah. Let's save it for the weekend.

Damien Filiatrault:

Yeah. Or I go in before anybody's there.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Or I stay late. Oh, you know that's right.

Damien Filiatrault:

That's when someone can come over and tap you and be like, "Hey, what's up?" And you keep getting interrupted. So, yeah. I think it's the future, really.

Fletcher Wimbush:

That was one of my biggest Tiffany's. When we went fooling around, I'm the worst boss ever. Tap on the shoulder like, "Hey, I got this great idea." Like, "Oh, man." I'm just killing my own productivity. And I think the benefit of remote for us is that it forced structure. I mean EOS fan, right.

Damien Filiatrault:

Oh, we're on EOS too. Yeah.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Yeah. Or some version of it. I mean, it won't be perfect. I mean, you don't know but, but it creates structure to how you communicate and how you interact? And how you tackle goals and objectives. And being in office actually is counter to your ass in some ways, because it allows you to be totally unstructured about how you do these things.

Damien Filiatrault:

Right. You need to get your rocks done. You don't need a bunch of sand and pebbles going into your jar and that's what happens at the office.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Yeah, exactly, right. And so yeah, I think productivity and also I think just as if you are a manager like me, who's really enthusiastic I got a million ideas helps keep you under control and let people do their job. And just to inspect at appropriate intervals, which is daily. I mean, we have stand-ups every day, we're looking, we're tracking, we're also have to strengthen our tracking our metrics and things like that. Right. So, it, actually, everything becomes a lot more transparent actually, in some ways when you do this, but it is a learning curve. You have to really force yourself to do it and to embrace it, I think.

Damien Filiatrault:

But it is very freeing and it can lock you in to never letting go of work. That's actually the bigger risk. It's not that work's not going to get done. It's that you're never going to stop working. And that's what I have to be careful about.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Yeah. Well, I know you want to talk about the biggest myth about hiring, and we'll close on that and then I'll ask you then three things we can do tomorrow if we want to consider hiring remote developers. What is the biggest myth about hiring remote developers and what do you see from your clients or people when they start talking about that?

Damien Filiatrault:

Well Fletcher, I think we've covered a lot of what I would have talked about if you asked me that at the beginning of the podcast about treating them as second-class citizens, or that they would be less productive or things like that. So, I think you've tapped me out on that subject already.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Well, I think the funny thing part about that is it's so true no matter who you're hiring, I mean, all of these myths, all these issues that we talked about, whether they're remote and they're in central America or India or wherever, or they're here in California in your office, I think they're so true. It's so universally true. And I think that is really the myth we've got to bust and you think you're right. You nailed it. That's really, really pretty cool.

Damien Filiatrault:

One thing that comes to mind that it's not only applicable to remote, it's just a myth is I think in the hiring process, there has been a bad practice traditionally of giving people questions or exercises in a vetting process, whether that's in an interview that are these really esoteric problem solving things, like for programmers you might be asked to write code on a white board, which you would never do as a developer, for example. Or write some complicated sorting algorithm to really prove that you know that some really niche thing you remembered from computer science school that you would never use day to day. And I think that whether you're hiring for a developer or any role, I think when you're vetting people, you want to give them real-world everyday challenges.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Practical stuff.

Damien Filiatrault:

Yeah. So, what we do is we just-

Fletcher Wimbush:

Like a working interview, or a project.

Damien Filiatrault:

Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's spend an hour and say, "Okay, for a developer, if you're interviewing to be a backend Python developer, who's going to be building APIs, let's build a backend Python API." You can use Google, you can use your own computer.

Fletcher Wimbush:

You can ask questions.

Damien Filiatrault:

Yeah. We can talk about it. You can do whatever you want, just like you were actually building it. And that's how we judge you. Not put you under a spotlight, you get really nervous, something you don't do all the time and your best self doesn't come out. So, I want to get rid of that.

Fletcher Wimbush:

And you're, and you're dealing with introverts too. And I have a whole retirement hour, on that I have clients coming all the time and say, well I didn't like their personality. You're hiring an introvert for an introverted job. No offense. They're not going to like... They're actually quite wonderful people. I'm married to an extreme introvert, my favorite employee is Weston. He is the most introverted guy I've ever met but they are actually really interesting people when you get to know them and create an environment that's inviting for them to open up. But that's not their natural... They're not going to be here the life of the party type of person.

                And we hold that against people for some reason, it's crazy. Yeah, they get nervous. They're thoughtful. You ask them a tough question. They're not going to just bounce back with the answer. Maybe some extroverts like me would do. They're going to stink and be methodical and careful. And that's exactly what you want right out of these people. Right. You want, that's why you're hiring them. Cause that's the quality that makes them great. They wouldn't be a great developer if they just off cuff, I had to lid everything they did that's why I'm not a developer.

Damien Filiatrault:

No, I totally agree.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Yeah. So, no, I think it's really interesting point there. So, if you were going to start hiring offshore remote, even remote workers or developers, what are three things you could maybe begin doing tomorrow in order to be more successful at that. Rehash on what we've talked about.

Damien Filiatrault:

Yeah. I think you've got to write a strong job description that not only really describes what you need and sometimes that makes you think about what you really need yourself and go through that exercise, sell it, sell the position a bit, and then you've got to decide how you're going to get the word out there. I think you asked me about that earlier and we didn't really touch on it. I mean, there are tons of job sites out there that you can use. You've got LinkedIn, of course, it's expensive, but you can do that. Or you can try to engage with, with a company like us who can help you.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Specialists.

Damien Filiatrault:

But you've got to promote it in some way, and then embrace, I mean, this may be obvious, but you got to have to come up with your virtual interview process. And ours involves for example, when people apply, they answer a questionnaire. But to develop and determine a repeatable, consistent interview process, and you have to do that remotely and take good notes, record interviews, and then you'll be able to, when people go through that process, you'll be able to compare apples to apples and make a decision.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Yeah. So, you got to get clear. You got to promote the opportunity. And there's lots of different channels there. We didn't talk about that too much, but it definitely, when you're talking about roles like this, I do encourage clients to look at specialists. And as part of one of the recipes there, there's five channels, but hiring a head who knows what they're doing in that vertical or that space that you're in is important too many times. People hire ones that are generalists. Right. And having a structured selection process is huge. And again, many of us make that mistake, no matter what role we're hiring for if it's not structured right. It's off cuff, it's adlibbed and that creates inconsistent results. Right. So yeah, I think you, I think you nailed it. And I always love having these conversations with people like you, because we tend to be more generalist, but we're talking, we say the same things.

                Yours is very laser-focused and such great things, but it's so universally applicable, no matter what roles you're hiring for, what you're doing or dispersed or not dispersed, and all these principles are still exactly the same. And I think that's the biggest myth that hopefully we're able to bus today a little bit for folks and maybe have somebody can have an aha moment you're about that. And so if we need your help, where do we find you and how do we get in touch with you? And of course, we'll put all this on the page as well.

Damien Filiatrault:

Yeah. If you're a client looking for software developers or designers or project managers, you can go to scalablepath.com, check us out there. There's the Hire Now button where you can click. It makes it really easy to tell us what you're looking for. Or if you're a software developer or a designer or a project manager, and you're looking for work, you can also create a freelancer profile there. So yeah, scalablepath.com is where to find us.

Fletcher Wimbush:

It will walk you through a lot of these steps that we talked about then.

Damien Filiatrault:

Exactly.

Fletcher Wimbush:

Yeah. What you talked about. That's great that you make us go through those hoops even if we don't want to. So, I love it. Well, Damien really nice chatting with you. Thank you very much. And we'll end it here.