Tech Recruiter with over a decade of recruiting experience. 1k+ placements & $20M+ profit billed. Insights on careers, job search + memes. | @juicebox_work
Joined January 2022
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A PIP stands for performance improvement plan.
Treat it like a paid interview period.
They already had the meetings about you.
The decision's made. They just need the paper trail.
Unless you pull an equivalent of Knicks game 4, down 29 in the finals, you're not beating it.
Start interviewing.
Candidate just came to me crying.
“I’ve been unemployed 8 months. Please, I just need a chance."
I smiled.
“Deal”
I lowered the offer $25k.
They accepted before I finished the sentence, and even said thank you.
If they need it that bad, they’ll take less.
Did you know companies have "DNU" lists?
This stands for "Do Not Use."
If you land on here it means you can't be hired.
Sometimes for a short period of time, sometimes for a few years, sometimes even longer.
You can get on this type of list for a few reasons, mostly for what they'd consider burning a bridge. Some examples include:
• You worked there before and scorched earth before leaving
• Backing out of a job offer after officially accepting
• Quitting early after just starting the job
For example, at my current company, my main market is a tier 2/3 city where two banks dominate the job market.
If you work in tech here, chances are you're going to work for at least one of them in your career and interview at both.
I was working with a SWE who was coming out of the one bank. I told him I had openings at the other and we started trying to book him interviews.
But we couldn't, because we learned he was on that DNU list when we went to book an interview.
I called him back and told him, asked what happened and how he ended up on there.
He said last year he accepted an offer at that bank, but backed out because his current company offered a counter. They didn't live up to most of the promises they made so he wanted back out.
Tough situation to be in.
If you work in these types of cities where only a couple companies dominate the job market, you gotta think twice before burning bridges like that.
Things “immediate start” means:
• their last person quit mid-week
• nobody trained anyone
• the manager is drowning
• you’ll inherit a mess with training
• “we’ll figure it out together” = you’re alone
wrote out a list of who I’m looking to hire.
non negotiable
- 10+ years experience for a mid-level role
- “passionate about the mission”
- cool with a pay cut for the “opportunity”
- 6 days in office, no exceptions
- available nights and weekends
- thrives in ambiguity (we have no process)
- takes ownership (of our bad decisions)
- won’t ask about comp until the final round
- hates their family so they’d rather be at work
wrote out a list of who I’m looking for.
X, work your magic.
non negotiable
- 35 to 42 y/o
- healthy masculine
- smart, funny, lighthearted
- provider/protector mentality
- post economic (still hardworking)
- must be kind, generous, thoughtful
- no kids yet, decidedly wants kids
- on the healing path (history of serious commitment ex therapists, books, retreats)
- can meet anywhere but will not date unless live in the same city
- fit and sober because you care about your health
strongly preferred
- no prev marriages or engagements
- works in tech (comfortable with risk and career is blended into personal life)
Candidate offered to do a take-home project to “prove themselves."
I smiled.
“Deal."
They spent all weekend on it and canceled plans with their family so they could focus.
They even built a full demo and sent it in last night.
We hired someone else this morning.
But we kept the project.
Free labor hits different.
In my experience, there are four types of PIPs.
And only one is truly intended to help you improve within the company.
1. Performance theater where they're just leaving a paper trail to say they tried. They're banking on either you leaving voluntarily, or they give you the boot once they get enough documentation.
2. They're using it as cover fire for a reorg. They're reducing headcount, using terms like "right sizing", "efficiency", "getting lean".
3. Your manager is trying to cover his a** about something and using it as an insurance plan. Maybe it's political, maybe it's personal. It's about you vs your manager and not the actual company or team.
4. The real turnaround, they are genuinely giving you the targets so you improve. It's firm, seems hard, but objectively fair.
Managing Director and his nepotism hire
Great to welcome @jakepaul to the Treasury Department today.
Jake’s path from content creator to entrepreneur and professional boxer is a distinctly American story. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
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2. Hierarchical Story Planner: When writing a 500-episode story like Naruto, you need to plan 100s of sub plots. Rather than generating linearly, Sherpa decomposes narrative across discrete levels: season -> arc -> sequence -> episode -> scene.
Rather than generating everything upfront, like a generic LLM, Sherpa uses progressive planning and dynamic replanning. As the story evolves, it identifies what changed, traces the downstream impact, and replans only the affected parts.
3. Prose Engine (Trained on series' retention data): LLMs write robotically, but serial fiction needs emotion, tension, pacing, and dialogue that sounds like real people.
Sherpa's Prose Engine was designed specifically for storytelling. It was built on 1B+ tokens of Pocket's own stories, trained by learning from what listeners engage with, where they drop off, and what keeps them hooked.
Feedback is taken from specialized evaluator models that measure every scene against a 40-item checklist. (Evaluator models were benchmarked against human reviewers and matched them 80–90% of the time.)
_______________________________________________
Owning distribution and creation puts us in a very unique spot.
More shows -> More data -> Sherpa becomes better -> more creator success -> more creators -> more shows
Pocket FM has already seen one $100M IP. I believe Sherpa will soon lead to dozens of single-person studios creating billion-dollar shows.
Most people are scared of AI but I think it'll unlock more human creativity, help creators earn more, and bring the next great IPs to life. This will create millions of jobs and new income streams.
Early in my career I accidentally threatened to fight my boss and got away with it.
I wasn't even a senior person or top biller at the time. I was only in my second year in the business!
Here's what happened:
There's a thing in our industry called "candidate ownership."
This essentially means if you speak to a candidate about a role today, I can't call that same candidate 5 minutes later and submit him to my role.
This scenario creates a lot of friction within recruiting companies so theres usually some sort of policy around this.
Ours at the time had a 2 week policy, so in this example if I wanted to call your candidate, I would either have to split credit with you if he gets a deal or find someone else.
At the time, we hired this new junior sales person in our NJ office (let's call him Mike), and our managing director in our NY office was a total jerk off (let's call him Gary).
Mike sent a resume to Gary. He had notes documented in our ATS and emailed it to him, but he didn't follow our "official process" to present the candidate internally to Gary.
An hour later, I help Mike follow up with Gary, but we see that the candidate has an "official" client submission with another recruiter in Gary's office. We scroll the candidate's profile in our ATS and there are no notes.
So clearly Gary said screw the other recruiter and gave the resume to his NY recruiter so if it works out he gets full credit.
We bump this up to my boss and he tries calling Gary. Gary ignores him. We work in HQ so bumps it up to our SVP but he essentially says "figure it out".
Gary finally calls our boss back and says technically we followed the process and the candidate is ours.
Our boss caves. I freaked out. Even though it wasn't my candidate, I was mentoring Mike and felt like I had skin in the game.
I immediately reacted "WTF, you're just going to let him push you around like that?" in front of everyone.
My boss responds "Calm down."
Like the moron I am, I get up from my desk, slam my phone, and yell "WTF are you going to do about it?!"
The whole office stopped.
My boss froze. But I also immediately knew what I did wrong and almost sh*t myself.
Thankfully, the woman who was mentoring me took my boss for a walk. My other mentor pulled me into a side room to talk through what happened.
I thought I was getting fired, but I'm convinced the woman mentor saved my job on that walk.
Fast forward a few years later...
That boss is like a second father to me. I still call him weekly to this day although we're at separate companies especially when I'm struggling about my parents.
Gary may have either deleted his linkedin or blocked me because I can't find him at all.
That woman mentor quit for a competitor, she did well for a while but left the industry to become a realtor. We still keep in touch every now and then and joke I'd be homeless if it wasn't for her.
"Mike" in this situation became one of the best sales reps in our company after that and is still a good friend of mine.
I kept my job, became the best recruiter in the company, and all was good in the world.
One piece of career advice my father gave me was "You catch more bees with honey than vinegar."
Even if you’re right, the wrong tone alienates everyone.
Having the right idea is half the job. Getting people to buy in is the other half.
When most people in Corporate America don’t get their way, they kick and scream like a little kid, then wonder why no one wants to work with them.
For example, one of the main reasons I got hired at my current company is I had a lot of experience recruiting for X bank, a new client for them.
They’d had the account before and struggled. It was my biggest client at my last company before I got laid off.
To make traction I told the team we needed two things on every submittal:
1. Reference checks
2. A technical screen
They were reluctant as it required more time up front to get them through the process.
I reminded them politely that doing the same thing and expecting a different result is insanity, and working with this client using their previous process was a waste of time which is a mortal sin when working off commission.
Extra time might ding some KPIs, but logging more interviews with a client that pays a lot matters more.
Some bought in. Some didn’t. Fine. I led by example.
My submittal volume dipped. My submittal-to-interview and interview-to-hire ratios went through the roof.
3 placements with that client in the first month.
Once they saw the gross margin I was making, everyone else bought in.
5am workout = SMASHED!
Solid week at work so far.
• #1 in client submissions
• #1 in interviews booked
• 1 official offer accepted, 1 verbal offer accepted pending paperwork
Great workout at the gym, my shoulder is finally almost back at full strength and listened to a really good playlist filled with house music from 2010-2014. Brought back so many college memories.
This weekend my wife and daughters are having a girls trip with my mother in law and sisters in law so I got the house to myself.
Plans tbd but have a great weekend everyone and finish the week strong!
Running a search tonight for yet another SWE for a large bank in NYC.
Setting up a campaign to source and stack rank 50 candidates for me to look at in the morning on who fits my criteria the best.
This will save me at least a few hours vs. traditionally using linkedin recruiter or our ATS.
Now, time to pour a glass of cab sav and watch Josh Allen dominate for my fantasy team.
Employee just came to me crying.
“The commute is 90 minutes each way. I’m barely seeing my kids."
I was surprised to hear this.
So I made hybrid 4 days in the office.
If he needs more flexibility, he'll have to choose between his real family or his work family.
Your job posting says 'wear many hats' and 'takes initiative.'
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A new client of ours does coffee interviews for the final round.
They already know you can do the job.
Now they want to see if they can get along with you and if you'd fit into their culture.
They're looking for cues like how you treat the barista, o what you order i.e. most expensive thing on the menu vs a cheap bottle of water.
All of those signs are tells.
We used to do this when I hired entry level recruiters for my day job since there’s only so much you can screen for.
It's hard to screen recent college grads for hard work and determination, so we used to take them out for lunch interviews.
Conducting interviews in a relaxed setting like this puts their guard down so you get to know "the real them."
We looked at how someone treated a waitress & the bus boy, what they ordered i.e. a fat steak vs something reasonably priced.
Huge determinant.
