Blog

Here’s a question that won’t be easy for some companies, even though I’m confident they will figure it out eventually. If an employee can’t be seen, how do you know they’re working hard, focused on the highest priorities and well on their way to producing positive results for you? ...
Read More

In early May, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Diamond said he wanted people back at work because working from home “doesn’t work for young people.” In the same breath, however, he also spoke of some employees working under a hybrid model and even a tiny percentage of employees with specific roles working ...
Read More

We've frequently used hockey icon Wayne Gretzky's phrase, "Skate to where the puck is going next" to describe where technology and trends are headed, so as we face a return to work, school and life as we know it, let's do a roundup of where we see some vital "nexts" ...
Read More

Amid the talk of increased remote work post-pandemic and its potential impact on culture, teams, hiring and more, it’s smart for companies to consider how they can effectively elevate the skill sets of their teams. Particularly when those teams could be a lot more dispersed....With this in mind, how can ...
Read More

As we’ve been talking a great deal about remote work and how we expect it is here to stay post-pandemic, the first impression would seem that company culture is the loser of this evolution. At Roy Talman & Associates, we’ve always gone beyond viewing people through the lens of a ...
Read More

In our previous post, we talked about the dawn of “remote work immigration,” in which work reaches a level of mobility we’ve never seen before. It doesn’t mean you may say goodbye to the traditional office space tomorrow, but there’s little doubt that new and genuine possibilities for working remotely ...
Read More

As I was speaking earlier today to a gentleman who works in Japan, I had to reflect on how many people outside of the U.S. our firm has been talking to over the last eight months. We’re finding a significant difference in many ways. For instance, if I were to ...
Read More

A while back, I read a book that proclaimed a very simple formula of how to succeed in business. Imagine you’re in the year 1910 and you’ve found a way to add electricity to a new product you’ve invented. Electricity is still relatively new at this time as it hasn’t ...
Read More

“We’re entering an age of acceleration. The models underlying society at every level, which are largely based on a linear model of change, are going to have to be redefined. Because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at ...
Read More

In the dawn of a new administration trying to grapple with a pandemic and rebuilding an economy, it's only a matter of time before Washington returns to the question of what its relationship to Silicon Valley. Namely, will and should Big Tech companies such as Google or Facebook be broken ...
Read More

There may be a boom in the technical application of machine learning coming, but there’s also a problem that’s already here: One that has centered around the lack of people who know how to work with machine learning applications ...
Read More

Obviously, a pandemic has done its part to push us out of the office and keep us out for the majority of a year. COVID-19 made us stuck in our houses. But it’s not too optimistic or unrealistic to be thinking about the day and age when COVID, thankfully and ...
Read More

Remember when this forced working from home was going to last a few days? Then a few weeks? Then maybe just a month or two? All those markers have been left far behind, haven't they? If someone were to tell you, in February of 2020, that a large percentage of ...
Read More

We’ll let you in on some industry insight: When someone asks a recruiter how their business is doing, the answer is often a more complicated one than you might expect. You see, if you ask about one’s recruitment business, you’re really asking, “How many people have you placed?” ...
Read More

Amid a terrible and tragic pandemic, we have to look for good news anywhere we can get it as that’s a sign that we will return to normal and learn how to do things more wisely from this experience. One of those signs? There’s strong evidence that certain companies are ...
Read More

What if you’re a programmer who has been writing code in Python and one day, you don’t need the program anymore? That’s right. All you need to do now is deliver sample data into a machine, get the output type you want and analyze it. In essence, you become a ...
Read More

What both of these books have in common is a very optimistic view of where we are – a very rare thing, indeed. It may feel hard to relate to such optimism at this moment. Nonetheless, these authors believe that overall trends will be very positive and on a large ...
Read More

If we talk about how the world is changing in relation to the way we work and communicate, it’s vital that we consider the convergence of three significant developments: 1) For many of our jobs, there is a true ability to do that job remotely. People can be much more ...
Read More

We’re obviously in a tumultuous time with a lot of different changes. Still, even if your company isn’t in a rush at present to fill the next significant potential role, you can take advantage of the time to think about smart strategies for planning. Here are four insights we’re seeing ...
Read More

The reality of the world we’re currently living in is that our industry is continuing to be redefined. It’s true for recruitment. It’s also certainly true for the industries our firm serves, such as technology, financial trading and management consulting ...
Read More

We always hear debates about whether or not resumes will even matter in the future but I prefer to look at The Resume of the Future differently: Resumes as we know them may drastically change and if we’re going to operate in a world relevant to machine learning, then candidates, ...
Read More

The machine learning space represents a fast-moving market in light of a number of companies trying to upgrade their technology. New technologies are moving at a much quicker pace than the educational system training people in those new technologies.The perfect example of this is a platform called React, which was ...
Read More

Starting this year and beyond, one trend we will see more of is that companies will need to make membership on their platform more valuable over time. Case in point: How many more people can join Facebook? It has very likely hit its peak in the growth department. So now, ...
Read More

There was a big story recently in the Wall Street Journal talking about a company that has interviewed over a million candidates via video on behalf of companies interested in hiring, such as Hyatt Hotel and Goldman Sachs. The company raised $95 million in one round of funding alone. The ...
Read More

You’re about to go into a big interview with a prestigious firm and you feel like you’ve fully prepared for this moment. But…do you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are as prepared as you could be? What does “fully prepared” truly mean to you? Consider this: ...
Read More

Last month, I was reading an article in Forbes in which the author claimed that the golden age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) was upon us, confirmed by a survey of more than 1,000 executives. Adoption of AI is up 72% this year compared to 48% last year! 93% of executives ...
Read More

There’s plenty of talk about how “smart” machine learning systems are. The problem with these systems is that they're really narrow – and let me explain what I mean by that term. Let’s take a healthcare environment. With today’s machine learning systems applied in healthcare, if you have just the ...
Read More

A certain company you’ve probably heard of called Facebook was fined $5 billion recently and it’s understandably causing a great amount of chatter across the country. Is the hammer going to drop on big companies in the tech space now that it came down on Facebook? The answer may surprise ...
Read More

The word “expert,” is one that’s used by many but it’s hard to say that any of us can definitively agree on what does and does not make an expert. The closest I’ve heard is the definition from Malcolm Gladwell: It takes 10,000 hours of learning to become an expert ...
Read More

At our firm, we have a real process called “The Talman Way” that’s fairly extensive but nonetheless vital to the ideal fit between candidate and client we’re striving to achieve. When a technical candidate has reached a certain point later in that process, they’ve often taken a series of tests ...
Read More

Without question, one of the most popular topics in our business right now is how to get a job working with artificial intelligence / machine learning. At one level, we have clients that want cutting-edge, top-of-the-line researchers. Fair enough. However, there is one issue we’ve seen arise in lot of ...
Read More

While there has been an issue with how expensive it is to build machine learning systems and “feed” them, there’s good news to be had in that we foresee the cost of building these systems and feeding them continually going down. And as that happens, their usefulness and applicability is ...
Read More

As we’ve written a few times on the challenging, ever-evolving H1B Visa process for employers and international candidates, a minor but interesting change to the H1B Visa program has occurred that’s worthy of you to be aware of if you hire people from that program. There are two types of ...
Read More

As we’re frequently dealing with senior people in high-frequency trading shops and hedge funds, it’s not uncommon to see many of them face a non-compete situation that can last as long as 18 months. This person may be privy to a process that is material to generating revenue, so a ...
Read More

For a very long time, we've heard about shortages of people with specific skills but most of those skills in question tend to be on the newer side of the spectrum. For example, if you listen to people at Google and Amazon, they're in dire need for machine learning talent ...
Read More

In the last 18 months, with a variety of tech companies facing a solid amount of turnover – as in people leaving after only a year or two – you’d imagine that many candidates don’t need to put a whole lot of work into the entire interviewing process. They’d just ...
Read More

In one of our recent posts, we wrote about the coming revolution in machine learning that candidates have to prepare themselves for. In truth, we’ve heard a lot of talk about it for several years now, but we still haven’t seen a lot of activity utilizing machine learning in many ...
Read More

Many times, we’re preconditioned to think of hiring for talent that’s right in our own backyard. It’s convenient and let’s face it – there’s less to consider in the way of relocation expenses if it’s local and “home grown.” However, if we’re going to always be looking not only for ...
Read More

Recently, Google had a massive walk-out – about 20,000 employees – over its handling of cases of sexual harassment and misconduct. It’s part of a shift we’re seeing in tech environments in what some are branding, “tech worker activism.” Employees in the tech space seem louder than ever, essentially saying, ...
Read More

Before I get started about what I foresee in the tech space for the coming year, let me share my favorite line about predictions, from Niels Bohr: “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” So while you may take some of these predictions with a grain of ...
Read More

When Amazon chose the markets of New York and northern Virginia for its HQ2 company headquarters, a number of cities on the short list asked the same question: “Why not us?” Based on the chatter around town, Chicago was no different in asking this, especially since it appeared at one ...
Read More

Until recently, Amazon had an AI-based tool to screen candidates that probably sounded really good at first on paper. In fact, it seemed like the Holy Grail: You give the tool 100 resumes, it helps screen for the top candidates and, wow, look at all the time we’ve saved! Right? ...
Read More

Someone recently came into my office with a background in database management for the financial industry over many years. He asked, “I’m not seeing a lot of needs that entail the use of Oracle products…why is that?” My answer, basically, was that a heavy background in Oracle didn’t matter because ...
Read More

A few months ago, Facebook signed a new lease in the Loop comprising a whopping 263,000 square feet – a space that many speculate can hold 2,000 employees or more. Around the same time, we learned that Google was planning on adding 100,000 square feet of office space. Pinterest leased ...
Read More

In our last post, we talked about how some people are drawn to the idea of making it big in an expensive area like New York or San Francisco while working for one of the top companies in the tech space. We often refer to this idea as “winning the ...
Read More

I’ve written before about the concept of “The Lottery” as it pertains to certain people who want to have it all in their careers. What’s winning the lottery to them? Living in a big house in a highly desirable location like San Francisco or New York with a wide range ...
Read More

I was reading a fascinating story in the Wall Street Journal focusing on a very large software-specific private equity firm that has a unique strategy – when they buy a company that happens to be based in a high cost area, they subsequently try to diversify the geographic location of ...
Read More

If there’s one observation that can be made in regard to the average job tenure at a company, it’s that these days, people generally don’t stay in one place for very long. By now, the assumption is made by many hiring managers at tech companies that within two or three ...
Read More

There’s a school of thought among some in the technological space that as advanced as we humans have become at coding, code generated by machines is getting better all the time. Still, the future lies with people who can leverage the code that machines are generating for us. We still have such ...
Read More