Takeover Unfiltered

Brianna Rooney:
Okay, welcome to another awesome episode of the talent takeover run filtered. Taylor's already laughing over here. we are, we are

Richard Borger:
We're all laughing.

Brianna Rooney:
oh, well they're here in a man voice there. Who's this man voice man. Voice is Richard Borger, who is an amazing employee over here at talent perch and diversity. And he actually went from engineer to recruiter. So, you know, we wanna talk to him. We wanna hear what he has to say, how you guys absolutely. Um, I'm doing good. Richard, how are you with Michael Jackson, Mike

Richard Borger:
yeah, for those that weren't listening. I, I use a sure. SM seven B, which is, you know, newer, newer version of micro Michael Jackson's thriller microphone. So it's obviously sounding like audible chocolate coming across the airwaves. I'm

Brianna Rooney:
Sure. Ooh, audible chocolate.

Richard Borger:
Yeah. That's gonna be an album title. it's gonna be an album title. I'm I'm

Brianna Rooney:
Sure I've never heard that before, but I love that audible chocolate that's

Richard Borger:
Oh my gosh. Audible.

Brianna Rooney:
Chocolate's that? I, I need to say that at the end of this episode, with my voice, with the, the voice, Brianna, the voice, you, you have the voice for sure. Audible chocolate. providing you some audible chocolate today. Um, but anyway, so happy to have you on Richard and I'm actually cannot wait till the end of the episode. Everybody's gotta stay and listen for your broke to boss tip of the week. Can't wait to hear what that is. Wait, did he not just say it that's right. It was not it wasn't

Richard Borger:
Audible. Get a nice microphone. Have sweet audible check.

Brianna Rooney:
Yeah. Sorry.

Richard Borger:
Spoiler alert.

Brianna Rooney:
have sweet audible check. I don't know why I love that so much.

Richard Borger:
Cool.

Brianna Rooney:
Welcome to talent takeover

Taylor Bradley:
Unfiltered.

Brianna Rooney:
When it comes to working hard and keeping it real, we know our, self care, happiness, inner peace and time. I'm Brianna Rooney. And this is Taylor Bradley. Hey y'all. And we have thrived in chaos and turned it into in art form. So, Taylor, what are we doing here today?

Taylor Bradley:
We're here to give you a raw under the hood view of all things recruiting and finally give credit where credit is due to a long underrated industry. That's full of quote unquote experts.

Brianna Rooney:
All right. Well then let's take this show to the road.

Brianna Rooney:
Let's get in it. So Richard, just real quick, like what type of engineer were you?

Richard Borger:
Yeah, so, uh, I went to school at the university of Florida from Florida originally and, uh, you know, getting outta high school. I was like, you know what, I'm good at math kind of like chemistry at orientation. They kept kind of saying, I think chemical engineers they're getting jobs right outta college. I was like, yeah, let's do that. I like both of those things. I think. So, you know, kind of combined the two strengths and, and likes at the time and, and went into chemical engineering. Uh, and that's when I ended me, ended me up at, uh, ExxonMobil for about nine and a half years doing engineering and some other analyst, uh, type work and stuff. So,

Brianna Rooney:
So why did you, uh, transfer over to the dark side? The recruiting, the

Richard Borger:
Dark side yeah, no, that's a very, very solid question. Um, basically, you know, I started as the engineer, right? When I got into Exxon, I had more engineering process, support type roles, a lot of troubleshooting in the plant, going out, crawling into vessels, like, you know, making big decisions to change rates and all that good stuff. It was a lot of fun, honestly, and really cool to be like in the action and, and like see those plants and how they operate and, and working with the guys out in the field and stuff. But slowly, you know, I started realizing like, I wanna see what the business side of, uh, the company was like. So I ended up getting kind of like a business, competitive analyst role where I was supporting, um, our plants globally to see how we compare it against other companies. So doing a lot more like data analyst type stuff, and creating a lot of presentations based on, um, some information we'd get back from a third party, uh, resource and right.

Richard Borger:
You know, it's funny enough, cuz I actually never like asked to be put into recruiting at Exxon. I was actually wanting to get into sales, you know, I thought like, oh, I'm a people person. You know, like I feel like I make good connections with people kind of naturally, like this might be a spot I could shine in, you know, and like had those good relationships. And uh, my boss at the time was like, yeah, we'd love to do that, but there's no rules. Um, how about you go into recruiting? It's like selling the company. I'm like, you could try and spin it like that. I suppose I'm like, okay, let's, let's go sell the company. And, and uh, you know, it was kind of interesting. It was just, um, they like to put engineers in the recruiting roles at Exxon because, uh, wow. You know, we know the, the, um, the people that are working at the plants and the managers and stuff like that.

Richard Borger:
And technically me coming from those roles that I'd be recruiting for, I can kind of gauge like what might be a good fit for some of those other engineering positions. And, um, it, it was cool and it was, it was unique and it's so different now compared to other recruiting that I've been a part of now, like I don't know many engineers that do the recruiting for their specific company, as much as, uh, people doing recruiting for recruiting. So anyway, that was interesting. It was just unfortunately at the completely wrong time I got into it right at the end of 2019 and then, uh, 2020 hit with, with vengeance, I call it. So, um, yeah, we went from a re I like to call it, we went from a recruiting organization to an anti recruiting organization really quickly and, um, had to figure out how to make, do with what we had and, you know, eventually a part of the company that's, non-revenue generating by nature and then not recruiting because we didn't have any targets was an easy cut when it came down to like their big three or 4,000 people cut across the company at the end of 2020.

Richard Borger:
So, uh, but that's what kind of led me into it. Honestly, I, I, I took the time I, I, I, I actually did like it. I liked meeting new people, especially like the recruiting university level, which is what a lot of Exxon did. Uh, we hire people fresh outta college to kind of build them in a career growth standpoint. Mm-hmm um, and I just got lucky enough after that to, to kind of say, you know what, I really did enjoy that. I want to continue doing that in some form or fashion, got a little lucky, getting a contract position with a company called Ventiv to help support their technical recruiting and then got picked up by you. Lovely folks. So

Brianna Rooney:
Lucky us.

Richard Borger:
Uh, yeah, no, I mean, it's only gotten better too, which is what I love, you know, like just yeah. Compared to Exxon and inventive. And then now, like, I, I've just been like, this has been the happiest space I've ever been into, so

Brianna Rooney:
Aw, well

Richard Borger:
That

Brianna Rooney:
We didn't pay him to say that.

Speaker 5:
I was just thinking that I was like, but technically it's getting paid right now.

Richard Borger:
Technically, yeah, I'm on the job. So no,

Brianna Rooney:
Love it, but I love going back to Exxon. And you said that this is something that they do, you know, they have engineers, they like to put, involve engineers and recruiting, or have engineers in recruiter roles. I'm thinking to myself like how progressive is that because of the time when they did that. But then I'm also thinking back on my us steel days. And that's one of the things that we did too. We heavily heavily marketed and targeted fresh grads and new grads. And we would actually specifically for those engineering roles and we would do the campus recruiting where we would take those engineers with us so that they could talk to people and have like kind of a day in the life conversation. So there was interviews and then it's kind of those day in the life conversations. And I think back on that, I'm like, but we never made them recruiters. You know, they kind of just helped out in that regard to speak about their role and again, provide a day in the life. But I'm interested to know, you said Exxon did that a lot. So with you, they did that officially, you were officially moved into a recruiter role. Yeah. Did they do that with a lot of employees or did they have them kind of just help out like how I described?

Richard Borger:
Um, yeah, they, so they have a big like university campus recruiting effort that just gets people who went to those, especially people who went to those schools to go back to those target schools, to tell them, yeah, target schools. Um, they have obviously like their top some number, but they, they sent them all over the place and with a company that has like 50 to 60,000 people, you end up getting a widespread of people to send all over the place. But yeah, they, they picked them up from the university. I, I went back to Florida a couple times actually to help do that. Um, share my experience, go to all the, like, you know, Shep events, the suite events, everything else to just get, um, you know, people interested in Exxon at the career fairs and career showcases. And I think that's been like one of the biggest differences, uh, coming into like tech recruiting and, and, and, you know, maybe supporting startups and stuff. It's just like they don't build the careers quite like that. As Exxon was like a very career oriented company that started fresh, you know, started people fresh.

Brianna Rooney:
I feel like a lot of the oil and gas companies are, they do, you know, I have a heavy background in that too. And I come from Odessa, you know, oil and gas countries. So I feel like that's something that they do and it's ingrained to them, but they're also the, they don't, they don't pivot as quickly as other industries. They kind of are more set in their ways I

Richard Borger:
Find yep. Antiquated and, and a lot of red tape to make changes and stuff like that. But I guess the one thing I did appreciate about Exxon that led me to recruiting is that I did have good bosses and good. Like the company was open enough to move me around a different position. So they weren't like, you're an engineer, you do engineering, you

Brianna Rooney:
Pigeon hold.

Richard Borger:
Yeah. I could, I could have chosen, stay technical or go managerial. And I kind of chose this path that I created on my own to be like, let me just explore what the company's like and see like what really jives with me and, and recruiting was that thing at the end, end of the day that I was like, wow, I really like this. And then it ended with them. So, but that's okay. Cuz it led me,

Brianna Rooney:
I was just gonna ask, is there ever a part of you given that you started, you know, was it engineer, then you went into that analyst role. Was there ever a part of you after, you know, you saw, you already talked about the department and recruiting's typically the first cut, you're not wrong. Yeah. Um, but was there ever a part of you that's like, oh, I should go back to engineering because that's safe. That's steady. Was there ever a moment that you in 2020?

Richard Borger:
Yeah. Well, not, not, not necessarily while I was in recruiting because I honestly had some sort of discomfort that I was like, ah, they're not letting go of people. Like Exxon's cruising through the storm, you know, where everybody's gonna be fine,

Brianna Rooney:
Exxon.

Richard Borger:
Yeah. Yeah. Almost that, that was kind of a thought process. Um, but my expectation actually after that recruiting role was to go either finally get into that sales role or kind of jump back into some sort of plant role or something like that. Um, maybe even move into a supervisor position and start, you know, um, supervising over some technical folks back at, at one of the plants or at least there on the campus, up in spring, Texas. So yeah, it just, uh, working out,

Brianna Rooney:
But you didn't, you stayed in recruiting. So I, I did write down also, um, what Taylor kind of touched on is non-revenue teams. Like that's the stuff that we hate to hear that recruiters are non-revenue because we are the ones that bring in the people that build the other revenue that they absolutely have to have. Right. We are finding those, those people. So like, I guess how, how would you address that right now to say like how we're not, we are involved in revenue, how is recruiting involved in revenue?

Richard Borger:
Yeah, no, I mean for now, you know, being further along in that recruiting and kind of like feeling, you know, what we are building the, especially at, Exxons like building the careers from the ground up, you know, we're building these people that are gonna be lifers with the company and ideally we're doing the same thing now, even though they're more experienced folks, we're, we're trying to find people for these companies that are going to be here for the long term and, and be good fits and provide that support, uh, and maybe innovation in new, you know, future forward thinking, that's gonna bring those companies to, you know, be better and make more profit in the end of it. So like yeah, of course. When you think about it, you know, realistically like, yeah, we actually are contributing to revenue. We are contributing to companies moving forward and being innovative and diversity of thought and bringing all that to the company. So yeah. You know, I say that, cuz that was kind of the, the things that were being said at Exxon I'm like, well, yeah, it's a, non-revenue generating like exon, like boxy and cut and dry and stuff. And now it's like, you know what, we're, we're more than that. And like, especially being here and learning a lot more about like, just recruiting as like a, you know, it, it's not just an organization within a company it's like a, a life force almost, you know?

Brianna Rooney:
Oh, I love, love that. Love

Richard Borger:
That we really feel that here at talent pro I do so like I, I feel a lot more like impactful and valuable than I did even, even at the last two companies I, I worked at for recruiting. So

Brianna Rooney:
Yeah, no, that was definitely the common theme in, in COVID that like TA teams got, let go. And then, uh, we were actually just talked about another episode of that now they're they were caught with their pants down and then had to literally overpay, um, a bunch of recruiters to come in and help save their save their day. Because like that's the whole thing is like, we are the ones that, that build this. So with all the layoffs happening again, you know, here we are again. Um, how do you feel, you know, how secure do you feel in your recruiter role?

Richard Borger:
Good question. bosses. Uh, oh, um, no, uh, it's funny cuz I, I, in some areas, you know, you see getting hit really hard and you're seeing on the news, a lot of these tech companies like laying that off and, and crypto getting absolutely dumb. Don't

Brianna Rooney:
Talk about that.

Richard Borger:
I know I don't look at my portfolio right now. It's I'm modelling for life and it's like, if I lose it in hand, whatever you, but it's not an amount I'm too worried about either way. Um, and then there's other companies that are like, Hey, we just raised more serious B funding, serious E funding. It's like, there's always gonna be this balance. Some companies are gonna go, some companies grew too quickly. Mm-hmm um, so there's like this breathing life of the industry and, and of our, of what we're doing. So, you know, last year we had the more, more recruiting roles and tech roles on, on LinkedIn this year. You know, we'll see how that goes on. There's probably gonna be more people looking for recruiter roles than, than, um, you know, others. So I feel secure in the sense that, you know, we're, we're providing something, uh, that companies need, especially companies that are growing really fast. And it's just a matter, you know, of staying competitive and, um, connecting with those companies that need it, you know, before other ones or showing them that we're the ones that are gonna be the best

Brianna Rooney:
well, in addition to that though, but like, we'd see what's going on with gas prices right now. Yeah. So if we take it back to my experience, your experience prior to this, we're like, that is a hot market right now. Like they're probably hiring engineers by the truckloads right now. Like they're beefing up. So I really do think it's industry specific too, you know, there's companies right now that again, I have a lot of ties to Odessa. It's all oil and gas and I mean, they are, they're literally paying to relocate people really they're in that moment right now. Yeah. I mean it's so I think it's also industry specific. I think, as you see other industries slow down, others are really ramping up right now. And so, you know, to, to all of our points, there's always a need for recruiting always.

Richard Borger:
Yeah. In some for another. Yeah. So it absolutely one thing it's not a, it was another idea I had for broke bust, but it's more just like, what I think has helped me in recruiting is kind of being a little bit of that Jack of all trades in terms of knowing a lot of different industries or just talking with a lot of people from a lot of different industries and coming from a different background engineering now and recruiting, and then generally my like hobbies and stuff that I do outside of, of working, you know, rock climbing music and all this other stuff that like being the Jack of all trade kind of for recruiter is really nice because you get to like connect with people early on with something, you know, mm-hmm, like, I, I find it often when I'm either looking in LinkedIn recruiter at people or when I get on the phone with them, like I try to pull out that one or two things that I'm like, oh, let's connect about this either I've been to their, where they're living or, you know, traveling is another thing that helps a lot with it.

Richard Borger:
So kind of having that like little bit of touch of everything really helps in recruiting. I feel to, to connect with people quickly.

Brianna Rooney:
Yeah. Humanizes you that's the, yeah, for sure. Like that's the best part. I think that's the funnest part. So which brings me to, I mean, I, I know we gotta, we gotta wrap up in just a bit, but um, which is like so fast. Ah,

Richard Borger:
I know I was like, how long was this?

Brianna Rooney:
Wait. Okay. What was more fun? You know, engineer or now a recruiter.

Richard Borger:
I personally am having a lot more fun recruiting because of the teams and the people that I'm meeting along the way. Um, I will say don't get me wrong. I think my favorite role actually back as being an engineer was being like in the process, contact role, one, the guys in the field, like the people working, the operators, working in the plants, man, those are the funniest people you will ever meet in your life. Like they are God. So funny. Like I just , I could just sit down at the console, like we're working, but then we're just like shooting the. And it's like, uh, it's just really, really cool to be part of that and like go into vessels and go in the field, like seeing this huge equipment, doing this crazy stuff, like yeah. In my, in my like environmentalist, my now I'm like, oh Exxon, why was I working here?

Richard Borger:
You know, I'm like this wasn't so great. And, but at the same time, I felt really cool being the subject matter expert on something really technical and being kind of like a go-to person mm-hmm for that unit in like knowing ins and outs of it, like to a level of like, yeah, let's do that. Let's not do that. Let's come up with this solution. Or here's an improvement being that subject matter expert is really awesome. And I've found that I really like that about anything I do really like whether it be music production or rock climbing or in this case recruiting now I'm like getting my wheels on tech recruiting specifically and getting better at it and learning more and learning how to search better and all that other stuff that helps me now be a coach to some other, which was one of my strengths. Love that from my five. What was it called? The top five. The genius. Yeah. The genius. Well, well was that what it was called? The five, the five? No,

Brianna Rooney:
It was it's called high five. It's called

Richard Borger:
High five high five. There you go. Sorry. I was like, I know it's five something. Uh, coach was one of them as well as chameleon. So those was two kind of, kind of like, yeah. So yeah.

Brianna Rooney:
Nice. All right. Taylor, do you wanna wanna broke to boss at you two L loop? Yeah, mm-hmm I will let Richard take it dying to hear what your broke to boss tip of the week is cool. Late on

Richard Borger:
This, I'm laying it. Um, mine was kind of two parts, but main, main one is kill with kindness. Um, I always try to get on the phone in an upbeat, positive attitude. It's it's the feedback I've gotten a lot of times from being on those preliminary calls or whatever they, they, they send back. Oh, thank you for your like positive, enthusiastic, upbeat attitude. Like you really shared all the information and like connected, I, or even just in my InMails, like I find that thing that really connects with people, like I said, and, and try to be upbeat and happy about it. Um, so they kill 'em with kindness. Yeah. Just, just be, be as nice as possible. And, and obviously if somebody's treating you kind of bad, you can kind of take your steps back, but come in with a positive attitude before you come in with a negative attitude,

Brianna Rooney:
Absolutely be relatable.

Richard Borger:
Be relatable. Yeah. Treat everybody as an equal, you know, don't, don't think you're better than then. Don't think they don't have the skills. Don't think you have the skill, you know, it's like, we're all on equal footing here. So

Brianna Rooney:
Love that. I love that was like four broke to bosses.

Richard Borger:
I know it was yeah. Wealth of knowledge. What

Brianna Rooney:
Love that brag,

Richard Borger:
Humble brag,

Brianna Rooney:
Super fun. And, and he, uh, by the way is also a musician and his, uh, jingle is on the millionaire recruiter and in diversity. So yeah, that's him for sure. Uh, and I'm sure we we'll put in the bio, you know, uh, how to, how to plug everything that you do because you are definitely a chameleon, super talented and he's distributing that sweet audible chocolate and various forms. with that

Richard Borger:
On like a late night talk show, like thanks for listening to our sweet audible chocolate. This

Brianna Rooney:
Is audible chocolate brought to you by Tay. It's like, I think about those shows that you would listen to. I just, this is hilarious to me. Yeah. I'll never ever let you live down audible chocolate.

Richard Borger:
perfect.

Brianna Rooney:
Love it. Stay next Tuesday.

Richard Borger:
Thank you guys so much. Appreciate.

Brianna Rooney:
Thanks guys.

Richard Borger:
Yep.