Barry Shulman is a seasoned talent advisor, executive search expert, and Predictive Index expert with over 30 years of experience working with various executive teams. He began his career in New York City on Madison Avenue as a recruiter before founding his management consulting firm in Silicon Valley during the early 1990s, navigating the ups and downs of the tech boom and bust. Barry is known for his deep understanding of organizational dynamics and innovative use of predictive analytics to enhance workplace performance. His insights are sought after not only for recruiting and placing top executives but also for transforming organizational structures and optimizing team performance.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:47] How a family of entrepreneurs shaped Barry Shulman’s approach to business
- [4:19] Barry’s early entrepreneurial lessons from managing high school teams
- [9:38] Why relocating from New York to Silicon Valley was a pivotal moment
- [15:50] How Barry identified a market gap in Silicon Valley’s corporate communications and executive search sectors
- [19:12] Lessons from the dot-com bust and strategies for business resilience
- [23:37] The transformation Barry experienced after discovering the Predictive Index tool
- [27:32] The remarkable accuracy of workplace assessments in predicting talent fit
- [30:34] Barry’s satisfaction in solving organizational challenges
In this episode…
In today’s business landscape, finding and managing the right talent remains a critical challenge for leaders across industries. The complexities of building cohesive teams that drive organizational success can often seem daunting, especially when traditional hiring practices fail to yield the desired results. So, how do you recruit the right talent without making costly mistakes?
Barry Shulman, with his deep expertise in executive search and talent optimization, provides practical solutions to these challenges. By leveraging advanced assessment tools like the Predictive Index, Barry helps leaders design winning teams and secure top talent. His methodology focuses on identifying behavioral and cognitive patterns in employees and aligning their capabilities with the strategic objectives of their employers. Barry’s methods not only refine the hiring process but also enhance overall team performance and organizational health.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Barry Shulman, a talent advisor and executive search expert at Shulman Associates, about how predictive analytics can revolutionize talent management strategies. Barry talked about his strategic move to Silicon Valley and how he navigated the challenges of the dot-com bust. They also discussed the significance of the Predictive Index and how it transforms talent management.
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Barry Shulman on LinkedIn
- Barry’s email: [email protected]
- The Predictive Index
- Shulman Associates
- EO San Francisco
Quotable Moments:
- “I always liked telling people what to do, and I’m always very nice about it.”
- “The perfect resume can be a nightmare if their drives are not in alignment with the goals for the role.”
- “We’re in the precipice of AI taking over all over.”
Action Steps:
- Leverage Predictive Analytics Tools – Utilizing workplace assessment tools like Predictive Index ensures better alignment between employee drives and organizational goals. It helps avoid the common pitfalls of hiring based on intuition and contributes to forming highly effective teams.
- Embrace Data-Driven Hiring Processes – Transition from traditional hiring methods to a data-centric approach to improve recruitment outcomes. This strategy minimizes the risk of bad hires and increases the odds of finding individuals who will thrive in specific company roles.
- Prioritize Talent Optimization – Focus on aligning your personnel’s inherent strengths with their job functions to maximize both employee satisfaction and productivity. Proper alignment leads to a more cohesive team and a better workplace environment, driving upward growth for the company.
- Constantly Reevaluate Team Structure – Stay open to restructuring teams based on evolving company dynamics and individual performance assessments. Reassessment ensures that teams are always configured for optimal performance, encouraging innovation and agility within the organization.
- View Staffing from a Strategic Angle – Consider long-term organizational needs and culture fit when hiring, not just immediate role fulfillment. Strategic staffing helps build a sustainable workforce and maintains a cohesive company culture, which is essential for long-term success.
Sponsor: Rise25
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran 0:00
All right. Welcome everyone. Today we are talking about how to optimize your talent. We all want to optimize everything about our business. Well, what about your talent? How do you recruit? How do you hire, how do you train the right people for your organization? Our guest today is Barry Shulman. I’ll tell you more about him in a second. So stay tuned.
Chad Franzen 0:20
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders and thought leaders, and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran 0:36
All right. Welcome everyone. I am the host of this show, and you know, if you’ve listened, every week we get to talk to smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of different companies. And you check out the archives, we have some great episodes for you there. And of course, this episode was brought to you by EO San Francisco. EO San Francisco is the local chapter of Entrepreneurs Organization, which is a global peer-to-peer network of more than 18,000 influential business owners with 200 some chapters in 60-plus countries. So if you are the founder, co-founder, owner or controlling shareholder of a company that generates over seven figures a year in revenues, and you want to connect with other like-minded, successful entrepreneurs, well then eo is the right fit for you, and the EOSF chapter was founded in 1991 today has over 120 members. 20 members in industry, ranging from marketing to agriculture, tech and professional services, to learn how it works or to come to a test drive. Come join us at eonetwork.org/SanFrancisco, and before I give an intro to our guest today, I’ll just tell a little bit about myself.
So my name is John Corcoran. I’m a member of the Board of EO San Francisco. I’m a Co-founder of Rise25 which is a company that helps B2B businesses get clients, referrals, and strategic partnerships with done-for-you podcasts and our guest today is Barry Shulman. He’s a talent advisor, executive search expert and predictive index expert. We’ll talk about what that is, if you don’t know what that is. He has over 30 years of experience working extensively with different executive teams, serving as both a retained executive search consultant and a leadership coach. He started his career on Madison Avenue in New York City recruiting executives. Later established his own management consulting firm in Silicon Valley in the early 1990s and so he’s seen a lot of ups and downs over the years, and we’re going to talk about all of those. We’ve seen a lot of that. But Barry, a pleasure to have you here today. And I love to hear about how people were as a kid, what they were like. And I know you grew up in a family with a lot of different entrepreneurs. Your father was an entrepreneur. You had a lot of family members that were entrepreneurs. Take us back to what that was like growing up with that kind of atmosphere around you.
Barry Shulman 2:47
Well, John, you know, short of the Sure, the abject neuroses that I endured growing up in a family full of entrepreneurs, you know, immigrant entrepreneurs, right? So nobody had a job like nobody worked for anybody. Everyone was starting their own businesses. So, you know, my dad basically was an insurance broker. You know, he just started a brokerage. He was just selling insurance. I had an uncle who started a newspaper. You know, everybody started small and got really big really fast, you know. And Anne started a design business, and all of a sudden had many people working for her. It was just normal for me to not see people get up and go to jobs. Yeah, work, but they didn’t go to work.
John Corcoran 3:42
And so, when you were in high school, you started a company called Helping Hands, where you actually had caterers who would pay you an hourly rate, and then you would recruit your friends and pay them a lower hourly rate. That probably wasn’t all that abnormal for you. For me, I can say, having interviewed, you know, well, over 1000 different guests. It takes a lot of people a long time to realize that calculus. A lot of people will just, you know, do the work themselves for a long time before they realize, Oh my gosh, I can hire other people, pay them, you know, a little bit less, and then I make the difference. So you realize that at a young age.
Barry Shulman 4:19
I can’t believe I’m talking about this online. This is something that I’ve not really shared with anyone for 30 years. So good on you. I mean, basically what happened was I had a part time job working for a caterer, and they called me all the time, and I didn’t want to work all the time, and they kind of bamboozled me to work. So at one point, the light went off and said, God, you know, I’m missing out on all the social time with my friends. And you know, they want to make money, and I have more money, and I’m always loaning the money. So what about me?
Don’t like to say I picked out my friends, but ultimately, everyone just got together and we went to the caterer I worked for and several others, and said, Where’s some cheap talent for you? So they billed us at, you know, $15 an hour, and maybe they paid us a little less, and I kept little more than 50% about 50% and gave the other half to my friends who were thrilled. It was all cashed under the table. And it was fun. We were, you know, we, we, we joked around and had fun and ate great food. And, you know, have, I mean, sounds like a good tell me, yeah. It was, it was, it was a good gig while it lasted. And I made a point. It was a weekend that I had like 45 people out working, you know, like over the summer, like, Memorial Day, Labor Day.
John Corcoran 5:52
Yeah, that’s amazing. You must have gotten a reputation in your high school. Go to Barry if you need a job.
Barry Shulman 5:57
Well, this was in the senior year and yes, let’s leave it at that reputation.
John Corcoran 6:07
I mean, that’s amazing that you had figured that out. Because, I mean, as I said, I’ve seen so many people that take a long time to figure out that lesson. Okay, so you’re basically kind of like stepping into the talent solution space. You’re helping a company that needs talent. You’ve got the connections to that talent. So you’re, you’re placing that talent. So the next natural step, of course, from here, is to start a company where you’re bronzing baby shoes. You’re gonna talk about that too absolutely. Have a listen. Explain to those who don’t know what bronze and baby shoes are, because I remember my grandfather having bronze babies. I think they’re still at my parents house.
Barry Shulman 6:48
John, we not only bronze, but we porcelain, silver plated, gold plated, whatever I’ve done Dennis glares and football cleats and whatever. Basically, I’m in college. I need some extra cash. I’m looking in the New York Times, and there’s a help wanted ad by the Barrie company. So it caught my eye. So I called the guy on the phone. There’s no internet. Obviously, we’re talking about the 80s. And he said, Yeah. He said, I’m looking for a sales rep in Philadelphia. I was at Temple University. I said, Well, tell me how this works. And he said, you send me something. I bronze, pewter, you know, gold, silver, plate it, and you sell it for whatever you want.
So I had some samples made up. I set them up, and basically, women’s clothing and shoe stores around Philadelphia, I paid the owner of the store, think, four bucks for every card that was filled out with a name and a telephone number. And they call me when they had three or four, and I go and I pick them up, and I make a phone call, and I ended up spending a lot of time in the living rooms of you know, young moms with screaming kids who were really willing to pay me back in those days, like 50 $75 to have their kids shoes, usually porcelain. Played it because they wanted to write the name or whatever. But, you know, at the end of the year, I was able to buy a car, and I had friends who were like, walking into the IBM training program, and they were making, you know, $58,000 a year. And I was doing more than that, doing this. I mean, it was mindless, right? I mean, it was soul sucking. I couldn’t do it indefinitely.
John Corcoran 8:47
But yeah, yeah. And it sounds like it was, it was kind of like an irresistible offer when you went into these stores, because I don’t know what your arrangement was with the stores, but you’re kind of providing a service for them that allowed them to serve their customers in a deeper way.
Barry Shulman 9:01
They got cash in their pockets. I mean, some stores, I would have to give them 3040, 50 bucks, you know, every couple of weeks, because they would have that many, you know, names for me. So anyway, look, I mean, working on my own has never been an issue.
John Corcoran 9:19
Yeah. So you end up going, you work in Madison Avenue, and you get into, I guess, more officially or formally, into the talent advisory work. So talk about some of the early work that you did because that then led you to going west, going to Silicon Valley in the early 90s, right?
Barry Shulman 9:38
So in spite of, or despite my falling into management consulting by accident, I was responding to an ad in the New York Times again for an account executive position with at the time, what was the country? Largest independent public relations agency was called Rubenstein associates. Howard Rubinstein used to get names of the streets changed in New York for anybody who was a client, who was a big power broker. I was working at the family newspaper at the time, and decided it was not for me, and so I answered an ad and took the train up to New York, put one of my aunt and uncle’s addresses on the resume so they didn’t know I lived in Philly.
And I showed up, I got called in for an AE interview, an account executive interview, but I ended up at the address that was not the agency, and I was in the MetLife building, standing there in the office of a guy who was a recruiter. And I’m like, Wait, I thought I was interviewing at Rubenstein. He said, Well, I will recruit them. And within 15 minutes of the conversation, he said, I want you to work for me. And I basically looked at him and said, Wait, what do you do? So, you know, I was, I was 29 years old, so I ended up working for him. I always said that if someone successful wanted me to work with them, I would do it. And my way of measuring success for him was it was like on the 23rd floor of the MetLife building, and he had leather furniture.