If you are not texting then you are not recruiting

• Website: grayscaleapp.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyabernethy/

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Jim Stroud (13s):
[Music] Hello. Jim Stroud here, VP of Marketing for Proactive Talent. Today on TribePod, I interviewed Ty Abernathy, who is the cofounder and CEO of Grayscale - a high-volume hiring platform that helps brands like Amazon, Wayfair, and Dick's Sporting Goods streamline their hourly hiring through SMS and automation. I had a curious question to ask Ty, which is this, if you're not texting, are you really recruiting? Find out what he said right after this. [Music fades out]

Proactive Talent (48s):
Recruitment marketing, as compared to maybe employer branding is all about getting your message and your story in front of the right audience. It's a lot to manage. And what Proactive Talent does for our clients is we help centralize, so you have one partner, one vendor to help you manage all those relationships. And not only that, we help you track the effectiveness of every media dollar you spend on hiring so that, you know, in real time that you're getting the greatest ROI for your marketing investment to attract great talent in your company. We help our clients with recruitment marketing in a couple of ways. One is improve marketing strategy. And with that, we really take the time to help you build the right strategy.

Proactive Talent (1m 32s):
And then we get mutual approval on that strategy before you spend a single dime. The other way we do this is through our agency of record service. This is a partnership with you where we're able to reach out to publishers on your behalf to negotiate better pricing, to execute on media campaigns, and really act as an extension of your team. Some of the benefits that our clients have seen working with Proactive Talent's recommend marketing services is an overall reduction of 30% cost per applicant. That's really significant. It's showing that wherever the leverage is, great technology, programmatic, and we're also flexible and scalable.

Proactive Talent (2m 15s):
We're platform agnostic. We're always going to use whatever the greatest and latest technology is. Whatever the best platforms are to help create efficiencies in your media purchasing so that you're always on the cutting edge. For more information on Proactive Talent, visit them online at proactivetalent.com or click the link in the podcast description.

Jim Stroud (2m 36s):
Hello, Sir. Thanks for joining me on the podcast. Tell us who are you and what do you do?

Ty Abernathy (2m 43s):
Hey, Jim. Thanks for having me. My name is Ty Abernathy. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Grayscale. We're a high-volume hiring platform. So we work with brands like Peloton and Wayfair and Amazon to help power a lot of their high volume hiring, whether it be for the warehouses or distribution centers, retail locations... We're really designed to help those recruiters solve a lot of their kind of pain points throughout the process of volume recruiting.

Jim Stroud (3m 17s):
Okay. So you do this high-volume recruiting. So you probably use text messages in your strategies, I imagine?

Ty Abernathy (3m 26s):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. SMS is a big part of our platform. So everything we do is, is mobile first and is generally SMS first from a candidate engagement platform. We find that SMS is just clearly the most effective channel with engaging with candidates, you know, particularly with hourly blue collar hiring, but we really, we see that hold true even for white collar hiring as well. Just SMS is the most effective channel to cut through the noise and to engage candidates throughout the entire hiring life cycle, even into onboarding we say.

Jim Stroud (4m 7s):
Now when I think of SMS for recruiting, I'm thinking, huh, in my neighborhood, there's a Hardy's and on their sign that says, "We're hiring. Text 1234 to whatever number..." Is that primarily how people would use texting to hire staff, just post a number and say, text me and we'll be in touch?

Ty Abernathy (4m 32s):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely a part of it, right? It's that look at that as like the top of the funnel, like how do you engage with candidates when they are engaging with your brand, right? So like the Hardy's example is like you're sitting there in the drive through and it's like, oh, Hardy's is hiring. And here's an easy way for me to engage and find openings, right? So that's a part of what we do, whether it be through SMS or QR codes or, you know, chat on the career side, it's like everywhere that there is a possible candidate engaging with your brand, you want to be able to engage with them there, right, in that moment in time, right? It doesn't make sense to wait until they get to your career site on that job to engage them.

Ty Abernathy (5m 15s):
You want to engage them wherever they're engaging with your brand. And so that's where Grayscale begins is that top of the funnel, but we're also really designed to help create a really high touch candidate experience really designed for speed throughout the process. So we're leveraging channels like SMS throughout the process, along with a good deal of automation to help really kind of streamline and speed up the hiring process. Because oftentimes it's, especially in a market like this, it was such a, you know, candidate driven market, it's typically the best, the first offer is the one that wins, right? So candidates are on and off the market so quickly, and there's so much noise.

Ty Abernathy (5m 54s):
And so we find SMS to really be an effective channel, really through to onboarding. And yeah, so it's kind of used [inaudible].

Jim Stroud (6m 4s):
That's cool. Cause I like the idea of texting and opting in to receive job alerts, especially if I were staffing a fast food company, because then I could probably target people in the area. So I imagine it's easier to recruit people to work at a particular McDonald's if they live a mile or two away from the location. And with text messaging, I can do that.

Ty Abernathy (6m 33s):
Yeah, absolutely.

Jim Stroud (6m 34s):
Have you... Now you mentioned earlier that not only for high-volume hiring but also for white collar jobs as well, give me an example of that because I tend to associate text messaging with high volume, fast food retail, stuff like that. Tell me about some white collar examples.

Ty Abernathy (6m 52s):
Yeah, well, I'll preface that with, you know, really our focus is on volume hiring. So, you know, that kind of puts us in scenarios where like most of our customers are staffing up for, you know, clinicians for their clinic or their hospital, or they're staffing up for, you know, hourly hires in the field retail locations, you know, and on and on that typically are more volume based. But there are some white collar roles that are, you know, that can be larger volume, whether maybe it's hiring and sales or other areas that we see SMS working really well. But also, we do have some customers that will use us for lower volumes type things, or maybe their retail team is using us for high-volume stuff.

Ty Abernathy (7m 35s):
And they kind of spread us out throughout some of their lower volume and incorporate hiring as well. So we have a lot of data around like how effective is SMS for more white collar type of roles, you know, whether it be in finance or sales or marketing, you know, those types of traditional roles and universally across the board. It is extremely effective. The one caveat where we tend to see some kind of reservation from customers, which we get is like more executive level hiring. And we just say there that if you're using SMS, like just, you know, you kind of want to earn that trust of an executive before you start texting.

Ty Abernathy (8m 17s):
That's sort of the one caveat, but really we just kind of see it working. And then we're seeing this big shift where TA teams are really at a very rapid clip adopting SMS, really seeing the benefits, maybe the acute problem is for their volume hiring, but they're seeing it. They're also seeing value in spreading it out throughout their entire TA team for even some of the lower volume areas as well.

Jim Stroud (8m 43s):
Another thing that strikes me as interesting about recruiting with texting is that I imagine it removes certain biases, and then there's an increased sensitivity to hiring diverse candidates these days. And I would think that recruiting people through text messages, you sort of remove the bias away from that, because you're not looking at the person. You don't even see their resume yet, but you're able to get a message to them about opportunities. Have you found that to be true or is the opposite true?

Ty Abernathy (9m 16s):
Yeah, it's definitely true. Now, a lot of our customers do kind of weave in whether it be video interviews or phone screens, or, you know, an assessment into the mix as well. But, you know, so it's oftentimes a blended strategy that includes SMS, but, you know, again at the top of the funnel, really leveraging SMS to kind of determine early on, are we a good fit or not to engage, does reduce some of the kind of biases that can kind of come into the place, especially when you're having to make quick snap decisions, you know. So leveraging SMS as a channel, we find can be very beneficial, particularly, you know, higher up in the funnel to minimize recruiter bias.

Ty Abernathy (10m 2s):
Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Stroud (10m 3s):
What's the response rate with text messages compared to email or phone? I mean, I imagine they're much higher.

Ty Abernathy (10m 10s):
Yeah. Yeah. So we see from a response, from an open rate standpoint, we see it's, you know, 99 points, I think it's 0.6% open rate. So virtually all of your messages that are being sent are being seen, right? And then for us globally, across our customer base, we're seeing a 51% response rate to SMS messages sent to candidates. And we actually... We look at that first message when making that calculation in isolation. So if you calculate the response rate over the course of you message, someone messages back, and then there's like a flurry, like, you know, response rates are really high once someone's engaged, right?

Ty Abernathy (10m 53s):
But if you look at the first message that you send out in isolation and kind of say of all of our first messages, how often are candidates responding, it's a 51% clip. So, and that's compared to 7.3 via 8% via email, right? So just a very stark difference between email to SMS.

Jim Stroud (11m 16s):
I imagine with your texting system, well, anyone who's using texting to recruit, they would include some sort of AI or chatbot to answer questions. How much is the system automated or should be automated versus how much of it should be human-operated?

Ty Abernathy (11m 38s):
Yeah. That's a fantastic question. I mean, it's certainly one. There's a kind of... It's a philosophical question as well, right? Like what is the right level of human-to-human interaction in a scenario where you're trying to design a process for speed, right? You want a good experience for candidates. You want to move as quickly as possible, and you want to keep the kind of human element there. So it's something we think very deeply about. And you know, for us, we've kind of, we've designed Grayscale to be, you know, let's think of it as an Ironman suit for your recruiting team. Like if they can step into it, it's going to really supercharge what they're able to do through the use of automation, but it's going to kind of extend them as individuals and make them so that they're able to send the right message at the right time to the right candidates.

Ty Abernathy (12m 35s):
And that's where kind of automation comes in behind the scenes to help facilitate a lot of that. But the recruiter is still in the driver's seat, right? And I would say that's, and, you know, think in contrast to, you know, a chatbot, like let's say paradox or something where it's really like your entire process is driven by a chatbot. And you're kind of outsourcing that process to the chatbot and the recruiter, the human only gets involved in certain escalation moments. So we're kind of thinking in fundamentally different terms, as far as the experience for designing that keeps it human to human, really high touch, but in like really scalable ways, you know.

Ty Abernathy (13m 15s):
Amazon's pharmacy division was able to, when we first started working with them, their candidate-to-recruiter ratio was one recruiter could handle about 100 to 125 candidates at a time. After implementing Grayscale, they were able to hit one recruiter to a thousand candidate ratio. And again, that felt to the candidate, like they were engaging with the recruiter the whole time. It just allowed through automation to really scale up how efficient, you know, a single recruiter could be.

Jim Stroud (13m 51s):
Wow. Wow. Wow. I think sometimes texting in recruiting can get a bad rap because people sometimes think of it as being used negatively. Not necessarily recruiting, but just negative uses that HR have used... Negative ways HR has used texting in the past. And I'm thinking about Amazon, when you mentioned Amazon that came to mind. What is an urban legend or not, I remember reading something that Amazon fired people by text in their warehouse. Have you heard this story before or stories like it probably?

Ty Abernathy (14m 30s):
Yeah. And I've heard this story. Yeah. And, you know, there's kind of two parts to that story because Amazon got in trouble too for, they had kind of created their own homegrown sort of AI, you know, chatbot that was really kind of end-to-end automating their warehouse hiring. And what they realized is that that AI was, there was some bias that was sort of brought into the equation that was selecting candidates and they had to kind of shut things down and kind of scrap the whole project. I think what you're referencing was part of that project as well, sort of, I think it's a few things that were like the spirit of what they were trying to accomplish, I think you have to commend them for.

Ty Abernathy (15m 16s):
But I think, you know, kind of devil's in the details, so to speak, and I think it it's had some unintended consequences all around. So, yeah, when we started working with them, it was a sort of a blank slate, let's start fresh. What's the... How do we solve this to where, you know, again, with Amazon, it's like customer first is their mantra, right? And so in recruiting their TA function, it's like the candidate is the customer. And how do you create this customer-centric experience while knowing that we have to scale to very aggressive ratios to make this work, right?

Ty Abernathy (15m 59s):
And so that's where, yeah, so that's sort of how we started working with them and sort of how that journey went.

Jim Stroud (16m 6s):
Any success stories or successful case studies you can relate to me, where people have used texting to take their recruiting to another level?

Ty Abernathy (16m 15s):
Yeah. I mean, I think the Amazon example we just touched on is a good one. Just being able to kind of see the level of efficiency that they were able to see while still kind of keeping the candidate experience at the forefront, you know, but also, you know, thinking about, you know, brands like, you know, Peloton, for example, which, you know, they're staffing up for their, you know, for field recruiting, which encompasses their, you know, their retail locations, their warehouse and distribution centers, their call center, all their high-volume stuff. And for them, it was, you know, really about like, how do we, we're having so much drop-off at each stage in our process, right?

Ty Abernathy (16m 60s):
From our assessment stage to our interview stage, from our, even to like offer stage and beyond even just like, we're having candidates that are applying that are qualified and won't reply to us when we reach out, right? Like, so all sorts of things just around, like, and so, yeah. So we started working with them really around like, how do we help boost those conversion rates at each step in the funnel? Yeah. The combination of leveraging SMS plus automation so that communication is going up sooner, you know. Follow-ups are automatically happening. So if you need to kind of nudge the candidate along, it's a lot of volume hiring tends to be like a little bit of herding of cats, you know, where you're, you know, hey, just following up to make sure you're doing this, or, hey, are you still planning on doing the assessment or, hey, you know, those types of things.

Ty Abernathy (17m 49s):
And yeah. So there's, you know, they've been able to really boost their conversion rates around the assessment stage and a few kinds of key stages where they were having significant drop-off. But yeah, I think those would be some kind of good examples to start. I mean, kind of keep digging in if you'd like in a few different other examples as well.

Jim Stroud (18m 11s):
Well, actually I want to bring some to your attention. This is from an article from a company called Software Advice. They did a survey of job seekers and the title of the survey was "How do job seekers feel about recruiting via text?" And this was a key finding, and I want to get your reaction to it. So according to job seekers, inappropriate texting scenarios with recruiters include texting during non-business hours, which was 14% of the respondents. Texts unrelated to job hunting 12%. And texting the results of an interview 10%. What do you think about these numbers in job seekers in general?

Jim Stroud (18m 55s):
How are they responding to texts in your, from your point of view?

Ty Abernathy (19m 0s):
Yeah. I think that all those stats make sense. [Inaudible], you know, we, as far as texting outside of hours, I think it's certainly a very good, best practice with the few exceptions of you have a late-stage candidate and it's, you know, not too late in the evening, and it's something pertaining to an offer. You built trust, rapport, you know, a little bit different, but yeah, I totally agree with that. You know, I think texting about non-job-related things, I mean, yeah, that's a big one, right? Like you don't want your recruiters texting about, you know, grabbing dinner on Friday nights or anything else that might be sent on, you know, non-work-related.

Ty Abernathy (19m 44s):
Not one that we've heard before from any of our customers, but definitely something that is, you know, I understand that. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, generally just as far as candidate experience goes, it's like, you know, it's pretty basic. Just treat people like you would want to be treated, right? And that applies to SMS. It's like, if you're even just like how you communicate, like, you know, it's the difference between like, alright, I send you a text jam and it's like, you know, job available, you know, here are the details, are you interested? You know, versus just talking to you like a person, like, you know, "Hey Jim, we have, you know, an open role for this warehouse coordinator position, you know, thought you might be a good fit, any interest in a quick chat, right?"

Ty Abernathy (20m 36s):
Like, so things can feel spammy, whether someone's, you know, whether you've opted into communication or not, like, it doesn't matter. It's like spam is sort of, we associate it with a certain way of communicating, right? Which is like essentially what it is, is like me as the employer and like just pushing something at you, that's in my best interest, right? Versus engaging in a dialogue involves two people of equal value coming together in an exchange, right? And so communicating in that manner is sort of where the magic is, right? And so yeah, that's sort of how we think about it. And I think, you know, again, it's whether you are letter of the law, spamming someone or not, it's all about how you're communicating at the end of the day, you know.

Jim Stroud (21m 23s):
That's interesting. I can get a scenario of, cause I'm wondering if someone's listening and they're probably thinking, well, how can I create an effective, you know, text message to send out to candidates? Maybe it would be an interesting exercise to sit down at a coffee shop or something, and just go up to someone and talk to them as if you are texting them and see how they react. [Both laugh] And if you can engage someone...

Ty Abernathy (21m 55s):
Alert! Alert! I have an opening that I'm trying to fill. Apply today! Apply today! Can I send you the link?

Jim Stroud (22m 3s):
Yeah. You know, that would be like... [Inaudible] It's like a funny YouTube video. [Both laugh]

Ty Abernathy (22m 10s):
I love that.

Jim Stroud (22m 11s):
But I think people don't realize that's what they're doing. You know, I think people forget because technology is so convenient and so ubiquitous that it's easy to just send out a message and you expect people to respond back like a machine instead of spawning back as a person. So it might be a good exercise just to go up to people and talk with them with your text script in hand and just go up, maybe even go up to coworkers and just, you know, try to figure out, look at, engage their reaction and then come back at them later, talk to them like a person and then say, okay, how can I translate what I said as a person into a text message that can be of interest to a candidate?

Jim Stroud (22m 54s):
What do you think of that?

Ty Abernathy (22m 55s):
Yeah. I love that. I mean, any way to build empathy, right? Because yeah. I think especially anytime when you're leveraging automation or communicating in like a one-to-many fashion, there's the risk of introducing that like there's a wall up and I can sort of push something over it and then let people interact with it. Like, I mean, you're active on social media, right? Like, think about how a lot of people treat Twitter. Right? Like they just like post, they communicate in a way that they never would, if you were face-to-face with someone. Right? And it's just very like, you know, it's self-serving, right? And I think that's the same with SMS, you know, you're doing something, you're automating something or you're communicating to a group, you know, through via campaign or something else.

Ty Abernathy (23m 46s):
Like, you know, you have to stop and say, how do I think about that one person, Jim, who's going to be experiencing this? And what's that experience for Jim going to be like, right? Versus this kind of big nebulous, like this group of people that, you know, probably need jobs and I'm going to send something to them about how they can apply, you know like it's a very different type of relationship. Right?

Jim Stroud (24m 11s):
Sure, sure. It probably would be helpful for a lot of people if they saw some data around what is the best, which text messages receive the most replies. I know there's research out there around email, like what are the best subject lines? When's the best time to send someone an email? Stuff like that. Is there an industry white paper out there somewhere? Or is there a lot of data around the best way to approach candidates to recruit them out there that, you know of?

Ty Abernathy (24m 42s):
Yeah. We don't have a white paper. We do have some kind of stress test templates that we found and some best practices that we found that worked well across, you know, millions of messages from our customers. And, you know, really it's quite simple as far as the advice, right? It's you know, personalize every message that goes out, right? And you can do that through like, you know, mail merge tags, right? Which is very easy. So everything should be personalized if you're using a platform like Grayscale or something else, like make sure it's personalized, keep it short and to the point, right? A lot of times the natural, I think, any method of communication, it's to over-communicate and to say too much.

Ty Abernathy (25m 24s):
You just want to think, like, what's the minimum thing I need to like communicate or what's the one thing I need to communicate here, right? And oftentimes that might just be to, you know, get someone to respond and say, yeah, I'd like to talk, you know, like, and so you don't need to put all the details of the job in that text message. Keep it, you know, keep it really short. A sentence or two with a question. And those types of messages get the highest response we find.

Jim Stroud (25m 55s):
Is it appropriate to use emojis or shorthand like SMH or OMG, LOL?

Ty Abernathy (26m 2s):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, it's talk like a human, right? Talk like you would communicate with a colleague, right? I mean, it's, you know, obviously don't be unprofessional, but there's unprofessional on like, that's like on one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is so sterile and buttoned up that it's not clear if you're even a real human, right? And there's kind of somewhere in the middle, whereas like you're being conversational, right? And you're talking like a human, like to another human, and which, you know, that type of communication is what will give you the best outcome.

Jim Stroud (26m 50s):
Definitely. Definitely. Are there certain protocols in place I'd imagine [inaudible] to protect a user's privacy? So that just, I mean, I imagine, so could you talk about protecting the privacy of candidates who receive text messages?

Ty Abernathy (27m 6s):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, certainly there's the, you know, things like TCPA, which is sort of the governing legislation around...

Jim Stroud (27m 19s):
What is that, TCPA? Can you explain that?

Ty Abernathy (27m 19s):
Telephone Consumer Protection Act. It was passed back in 1991. It has been updated a number of times since then, but basically, it's just the, you know, protects consumers from spam, essentially. And making sure that these types of channels, whether it be a phone, email, SMS are being used appropriately, right? And so that's things like, you know, handling opt-in to communication opt-out of communication, right? And so all those things are very important and things that we support our customers with. And yeah. And so those are the main things that you want to be mindful of.

Ty Abernathy (27m 60s):
And, you know, you find a good platform that integrates with your ATS and you kind of really can kind of solve that problem from an opt-in opt-out pretty seamlessly, but certainly, something to consider.

Jim Stroud (28m 14s):
Should I think of that sort of like GDPR in a sense? I guess what I'm asking is let's say I opt-out of a message, out of a recruitment message. Does my phone number automatically get deleted from the employer's database? And I'll never hear from them again? Or is it just that it puts it aside, and they will hit me up later when I've forgotten about them?

Ty Abernathy (28m 40s):
Mm, got it. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, GDPR is another important one as it CCPA and the acronyms will keep coming, right? [Jim laughs] But yeah, that's certainly something important. The way our integration works with ATS is, you know like a workday or success factor or something like the, a lot of that, you know if a candidate reaches out and says, I don't want to be communicated or whatever, if anything happens in the ATS, it just updates Grayscale downstream. So data gets wiped, anonymized, et cetera. So any data requests, things like that, all just kind of trickle downstream, or we just update based on how the ATS is, but you can also come into Grayscale and manually do those things.

Ty Abernathy (29m 20s):
But if you, we also handle all like unsubscribed for candidates as well. So they say they want to opt out, we just automatically unsubscribe them without a human needing to do anything. And then they're permanently unsubscribed. So they'll never receive communication again unless they opt back in, which there's a way for them to do that. But yeah, otherwise they'll receive no further communication from that customer.

Jim Stroud (29m 45s):
Okay. Okay. What are some things that people don't consider when they are considering using texting for recruiting? And there are a lot of pluses, of course. The only negative I can think of right off are the policy issues, which you just addressed. But what are some other concerns people should be thinking about, but typically don't think about when they are going to go this route?

Ty Abernathy (30m 6s):
Yeah. I mean, I think it depends on, there are a couple of different sort of profiles we see. One is, you know, maybe one that's, you know, coming to the realization that like, hey, you know, we need to be texting or like texting's working in the sense that like my recruiters are grabbing their phones and texting with candidates and we need some way different way than that to scale this up. And they're maybe looking at generic business texting platforms. And I'd say for that type of person, like, you know, I think one of the challenges or one of the pitfalls is kind of underestimating the importance of it being integrated with your ATS to maintain some of the things we're talking about before, like around compliance, just around opt-in opt-out like if you have two separate systems that aren't communicating with each other in any way that that can cause challenges.

Ty Abernathy (30m 52s):
Also just from a usability standpoint, if you're having your team have to jump into another system, to use a separate tool, to engage candidates, all the context is lost. It's a new tool. There can be a real rob there. So I think one is finding a tool that can like integrate really deeply in the ATS you have. They can wrap around what you're doing. So you're not having to jump into another system. That's very important. And then, you know, two, I think thinking in terms of SMS and other things, and another type of profile is someone that's like, cool, we want to do SMS. We're going to integrate. But then often, and we're doing, let's say high-volume, I think then what gets underestimated oftentimes is the importance of automation because SMS is a really effective channel.

Ty Abernathy (31m 37s):
The challenges, it can become, it can create even more noise for your team if you're not careful, right? Because it's, and so that therein lies the importance of needing to be able to leverage automation, to kind of scale-up SMS, to channel really effectively for a kind of, you know, high volume type of scenarios. So those are the kinds of two scenarios we see as far as like buyers and sort of the, you know, their, you know, maturity as far as suspending the market or whatnot.

Jim Stroud (32m 11s):
I tend to think that everybody texts pretty much, they text more than they talk on the phone, a lot of things. And I'm thinking of a time when my daughter could be on the sofa, watching TV with her friends and they're texting each other instead of talking to each other. And that's just a generational type of thing. There's texting as a recruiting channel. Does it limit the number of people that you can engage with? Because I don't imagine older people say, not older, let's say 40, 50 plus aren't texting like the 20 somethings are.

Jim Stroud (32m 54s):
So if that's the case is texting recruiting, are you limiting the demographics you're targeting because older people tend not to live on text. Does that make sense what I'm asking there?

Ty Abernathy (33m 7s):
Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm pushing forty. So I resent that 40 to 50 classes or the older generation. [Both laugh] No, yeah. I, you know, again, I'll go back to what I said before. It's more of like, you know, I think the really only thing that I would kind of look at it in isolation is maybe like executive recruiting, like, you know, hiring for an executive, you know, someone that's certainly more seasoned. They might be used to kind of the experience and process going a certain way. You know, it's also just less relevant, right? But the numbers are so like, you know, it's, you know, there are generally white-collar roles that are generally pretty quick to respond to email, that are generally sort of used to things going a certain way.

Ty Abernathy (33m 56s):
You don't have any like really compelling pain points that really justify needing to use SMS. Unless maybe someone doesn't respond to your email and an offer is going out and, you know, "Hey Jim.." Just, you know, you fire off a text, you know, "Hey Jim, just double-checking, you got my email, any questions?" You know, like light things like that. But otherwise, like that would be the big thing I'd say. But beyond that, you know, we all, you know, getting, you know, from an age standpoint, you look at like truck drivers, right. They're going to come from all walks of life and ages, right? But like what's universally true is they, like, they want to get, you know, they want to get a job as quickly as possible. And they text with their family all the time and it's easy and convenient and quicker.

Ty Abernathy (34m 36s):
And so let's do that, you know? So the best experience is often speed and just engaging on whatever channel, you know, they use every day. So we don't really see it necessarily from an age standpoint, you know what I mean? Like how many, I mean, all of our grandparents text with us anyway. I mean, you know, it's just sort of a universal thing.

Jim Stroud (34m 57s):
Yeah. Yeah. I see that. And I imagine, [inaudible] actually, I see some stats on this, where it says consumers have increased their personal screen time by 75% since COVID-19. [Laughs] So it's another good reason to use texting because everybody's on their screens more so now than ever. I really enjoyed this conversation. If somebody wanted to get in contact with you to learn more information about you and what Grayscale has to offer, how can they reach out to you?

Ty Abernathy (35m 34s):
Yeah. Well, definitely check out our website, grayscaleapp.com. And then I'm on LinkedIn, Ty Abernathy. It's a great way too. But if you're looking to learn more about Grayscale, either message me or we've got an easy kind of book form where you can schedule time with us via our website as well.

Jim Stroud (35m 54s):
Cool. I will leave the information on how to contact you in the podcast subscription. So dear listener, just check out the description and the link will be there. Thank you, Ty, so much again for your time. I do appreciate you.

Ty Abernathy (36m 14s):
Thank you, Jim. I appreciate you having me today.

Jim Stroud (36m 17s):
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you a thousand times. Thank you for listening and subscribing to our podcast. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please send them to us. You can reach us at TribePod that's T R I B E P O D at proactivetalent.com. We look forward to hearing from you.