LinkedInLive with Bryan Passman

[00:00:00] Rhiannon Woo: Hello and welcome to TraceTrust Live. Each month our CEO Merril Gilbert and her guests will hold a 30 minute conversation. Topics are centered around adapting leadership for resiliency, building food systems for a changing future, and creating safe and reliable experiences with cannabis and other active ingredients.

[00:00:22] Rhiannon Woo: Merril is the co-founder and CEO of TraceTrust. She has 25 years of experience working in the food and beverage industry and has guided multiple startups from concept to table and shelf. She entered the cannabis industry in 2015 and has guided innovators, disruptors, and refiners to bring their idea to life.

[00:00:40] Rhiannon Woo: Our guest today is Bryan Passman, co-founder of a leading talent acquisition firm, Hunter and Esquire. They serve the cannabis and psychedelics industry needs for leadership, talent, and strategic human capital advisement. Bryan has spent his entire career succeeding in retaining executive search and has an eye for talent and fit.

[00:00:59] Rhiannon Woo: So with no further ado, turning it over to Merril and Bryan.

[00:01:04] Merril Gilbert: Thank you and welcome. We're so happy to start off our LinkedIn live today. And Bryan, I'm just welcoming you and really pleased to have you as our guest. And I'd love to just start with you having, you know, yes, we just read the bio, but tell us a little bit about kinda how you got to this journey, how you created this company and where it is today.

[00:01:31] Bryan Passman: Sure. And thanks Merril for having me. I think I'm your inaugural guest possibly, so really, really honored. Who would've thought we met some years ago we'd be here doing this? Yeah, so anyways, thanks for having me. And gimme a chance to talk about what we do here a little bit.

[00:01:47] Bryan Passman: So yeah, I, I've only ever been a recruiter. My entire career, like many recruiters, I did not aspire to get into it. It just sort of happened as it does. I think for me, thankfully it happened early in life. I mean really essentially right out of school. So I wanted to be a medical device salesman and I met a guy in Miami who ran a medical device search firm and who I was working with to get placed in a role which turned out to be an opportunity to join his team.

[00:02:22] Bryan Passman: So I spent 15 years with him, and moved up the ranks to S V P recruitment and our focus in medical device search was placing very technical leaders around the world for big and small med tech companies like GE Healthcare, Phillips Healthcare, and the like, all the way down to much smaller companies developing some really novel technologies. And it was quality and regulatory, clinical and medical affairs, very technical ops and R&D roles in, of course, very heavily regulated environments. And a lot of times it was a turnaround situation because the FDA had issued a warning letter or in some cases a consent decree and we were called up to help them bring in new leadership in a hurry to turn things around with a lot at stake, you know, not just billion dollar companies existence at sake, but the ability to continue to get lifesaving products to patients. So that was a pretty interesting inauguration to recruiting in a heavily regulated field. And along the way I met some people that I thought were pretty well positioned to score one of the vertical licenses in Florida that was gonna come up in, in cannabis.

[00:03:37] Bryan Passman: So I exited that other role to pursue that cause I do have a long time relationship with the plant. I'm very passionate about the cannabis industry succeeding because of my relationship with the plant and just, you know, of course, exciting to be part of building a new industry. So that endeavor didn't work out. We were assembling resources ahead of the original vote for medical in Florida, which lost by a slim margin. And so I had to go back to work and had a non-compete. So I landed in food and beverage, consumer packaged good search which turned out to be pretty fortuitous for a number of reasons. Two main ones being I got exposed to more of the commercial side, so still placing executives in technical and operational and finance roles, but also then got exposed to sales and marketing, which I had never touched before. So really learned how to vet sales and marketing leaders. And then of course, learning the food and beverage industry, primarily adult beverage. I worked a lot with beer, wine, and spirits companies, big and small, and there's a lot of similarities to cannabis. So I did that for about two and a half years.

[00:04:46] Bryan Passman: It was not really where I wanted to be. I really had continued to feel this pull into cannabis and kept trying to find a full-time gig on someone's team. And no one was looking to hire head of talent acquisition back then, and there were no retained executive search firms in cannabis.

[00:05:05] Bryan Passman: So I have a very entrepreneurial wife, Jessica, who had started up something with a business partner that she was exiting late 2016. And we were talking a lot in 2017 about the fact that I wanted to work in cannabis and I was afraid of starting a business. I was afraid of all of the administrative, all of the back of the house. And she's an entrepreneur and a lawyer and she's very organized and buttoned up so, she volunteered to handle all of that if I would muster up the courage to go ahead and do this thing. So we ended up launching it together in 2017. And we were fortunate to launch with a big MSO client and that turned into another M S O client and so on and so forth. So now it's a little bit over five years we've been at it. We've placed in just about every legal US market and a couple of Latin American markets and Europe. And our work is across all disciplines. We do retained executive search. And we focus on all aspects of what I call the cannabis economy. So plant touching science companies tech platforms, really anything in the cannabis economy. Then of course a little bit in psychedelics, but that's not really anything of scale yet. So we're still primarily placing leaders in cannabis. And we're based in Boulder, Colorado. We moved out here last year from Miami, Florida,

[00:06:35] Merril Gilbert: and I'm sure there's quite a shift in, in not only just the weather and climate, but just the overall experience of living in a fully legal state versus limited access. So I'm sure you've had lots of learnings in that, you know, before I go into asking another question, just in case we have some guests that are listening in today, maybe explain why, I know that if you're searching for a position the reason to go to a recruiter, but if you're an employer, why do you use a search firm? What, what is the advantages of that? And at times that could almost feel daunting in the fee structure, but I think there's value there that people might not necessarily understand.

[00:07:23] Merril Gilbert: So if you don't mind just us going off topic for just a second to explain that, because I think it's a really important idea that needs to be expressed, that people don't always understand.

[00:07:32] Bryan Passman: Yeah, I'm happy to talk all day about why you should hire recruiters. Trying to do so from an unbiased place, but there is real value for a number of reasons.

[00:07:43] Bryan Passman: Well, if we start with talking about the cannabis industry where it is a startup industry and you do have a lot of first time leaders that have assembled leadership teams with a lot of other first time leaders, and sometimes these visionaries, these trailblazers then, as they scale, need help understanding what a certain profile costs or when to go about hiring a newly created position, of which there's a lot of that type of hiring in cannabis.

[00:08:14] Bryan Passman: And so if you can find a recruiter as you go through that process that, you know, also it gets excited about that human capital advisory aspect of it and gets involved in your workforce planning, then you can get a lot of value from that relationship. And, and we do that. That comes with the relationship. It's not a la carte. And we enter a relationship we do all of that and then we just pay the bills with the search. But we really enjoy that part of it. So that would be one reason.

[00:08:41] Bryan Passman: Another of course is to work with a recruiter that is very well connected because you can hire from your friends and family network to a certain degree, and you can put referral rewards out to employees to refer people for roles. And I do urge companies to try to hire that way first if they can. But then when you run out of those options, or don't have the time to go through all of the applicants from posting a job to meet all those new talents. Then you hire a recruiter whose day job is to go through all of that.

[00:09:12] Bryan Passman: So , what we do, and I think what companies should rely on recruiters for is to fill really difficult-to-fill roles and give them access to talent they don't have access to and help them. I guess prevents good talent from falling through the cracks, which can happen when that's not your job.

[00:09:29] Bryan Passman: And a lot of cannabis companies don't have the resources to hire a full-time head of HR and talent acquisition to focus on recruitment and spend hours and hours every day to go through talent. So if you really care about hiring the best possible person for the role, then you retain a recruiter or work with a recruiter in some way to make sure that you get the best possible person.

[00:09:49] Bryan Passman: Well, we do a lot of searches. We will go through eight, 900, a thousand candidates to get to the right slate. And that's really hard to do if that's not your full-time job. So that would be a reason as well as to ensure that you, this will be my last one, to protect your time building on that, not just from looking at talent, but to protect your time. Only talking to candidates that are very interested for the right reasons in the role, which your recruitment partners should do. They should vet, not only is this person qualify, but interested for the right reasons and educate them so that your interview process is less bumpy and you're not wasting time talking to people that are just kicking the tires. Because of course in the cannabis industry, you get a lot of that. People who probably don't belong in the industry, but are very canna curious and you can end up wasting a lot of time talking to those people as well. So hopefully your recruitment partner saves you that time and, and stress, I guess.

[00:10:51] Merril Gilbert: As we're in one of these interesting places in time, and you've really touched on, you know, part of the reason we started our company was, we are always looking forward and we really believe that the cannabis industry, touches on three different things. It is a plant, which is part agriculture, part growth. There's, there's a lot of systems there. There is it as an ingredient, as an active ingredient. And there's the medicine and medical side, which, we've barely touched the surface on. And those three things are this unique startup of an industry that we probably haven't seen and may not see again in this lifetime. The last one was technology. And this really is, you know, from this ground up. So we're trying to set standards and we're trying to be treated like all other industries when it comes to financing and insurance and ahead of FDA, right? Because we have a lot of regulatory people in all of these states that not necessarily understand all the nuances here, which is why experience becomes important.

[00:11:57] Merril Gilbert: But it's also, you know, from a company point of view, what is the true culture? What is the true vision of this company? And so this conversation is a lot about those leaders and establishing leadership and what are the qualities of that? And you use a term people sustainability, so talk a little bit about that.

[00:12:17] Merril Gilbert: Talk a little bit about leadership qualities and how important, cause you just touched on it at the end , of explaining that recruitment relationship. How do you match that talent, person and also guide your client in understanding , how to match up their what their vision and culture is to the right person and what goes wrong when it doesn't work? Cause that's equally as telling .

[00:12:45] Bryan Passman: . Sure. So I'll work my way backwards on that because I think covering the people sustainability topic is a lengthy one if we end up having the time. So, you know, for us, ideally, we work in a partnership manner. You know, other search firms work on contingency and don't partner as closely and that, can be a successful way to go about it. And a lot of companies do prefer that. It's less of a time investment. I think it's more of a gamble when trying to get the right long-term win-win fit.

[00:13:14] Bryan Passman: I think when you allow your recruitment partner to truly partner rather than be a, you know, a vendor and a resume mill, then if they can really understand the culture and what fits and understand the personalities of the rest of the team. Then you can vet well beyond paper fit and just matching resume to role description.

[00:13:38] Bryan Passman: So how we do that is simple but not easy. You know, for us, we really get to know the candidates we work with to placement really well. And, you know, working as a retained search firm affords us the necessary time cushion to really get to know the candidates as we walk 'em through the process. And we really have the opportunity to measure their communication skills, written and verbal, the way they prepare for important conversations, meeting preparations important. Do they, are they taking this very seriously? Is it indicative of, are they professional? Cause what we're trying to do is place leaders of these companies to help them scale and professionalize. We're looking for consistency of messaging from these people.

[00:14:18] Bryan Passman: What's really important now from leaders is building trust through transparency. So we look for consistency of messaging and are they trustworthy and transparent? We look for how they're responding to adversity in the process. Because a lot of these interview processes, the best can be mapped out, start to finish soup to nuts, and there's always gonna be hiccups.

[00:14:41] Bryan Passman: So how do people respond to, you know, meeting times changing , or the cast of characters in the interviews changing and are they pivotable and adaptable and flexible to go with the flow? And we have some clients that purposefully change the interview process up just to, you know, throw a curve ball at the candidate and see how they respond.

[00:15:01] Bryan Passman: and so, in all the touchpoints as we go through the process where we're always going back to talking about situations and tasks and actions and results from their past lives that are relevant to the role. And because of the way we get to work on retainer, we have a lot of opportunities to talk to the candidates throughout the process.

[00:15:22] Bryan Passman: And we're always measuring their interest and deliverability and qualifications and, one thing I forgot to mention is, you know, we're looking for builder leaders for our clients. There's, I don't think anyone's in a maintenance mode situation in cannabis, so we're collecting examples of how people have built teams, how they've built new business units for established companies, or built businesses from the ground up.

[00:15:46] Bryan Passman: So , we're doing all of , those things over the course of weeks or months throughout first meeting the person. Delivering the interview slate and then managing everything through the interview process to offer. And by the time we've placed someone in a leadership role, we've become friends with them.

[00:16:03] Bryan Passman: We've really gotten to know each other so well through mutual sharing. And by then they've essentially proven to us that they're a good person. It's really hard to survive our process if you're not a good person. There's just , a lot of conversations they have to have with me. And I love people. I love talking to people, and I think that good people like interacting with other people. So if someone's gonna survive the process and talk to me as much as they need to, maybe they could fake it through and maybe not be a genuine good person and just really want the opportunity. And that's okay too.

[00:16:36] Bryan Passman: We're testing their fortitude. You know, good executive recruiter are really good at reading people. There is this intuition. You don't just become a great recruiter overnight cuz you decide that you're tired of selling, you know, beer or whatever it was, and now you're gonna go sell opportunities.

[00:16:50] Bryan Passman: There's this intuition that comes with it, and I think that's developed over time. It's hard to train. Maybe it comes more naturally to some people, but, you know, for us here, , we've gotten really really good , at trusting our gut and our intuition on what fits. And then of course always coaching the other side of the interview team on Watchouts.

[00:17:10] Bryan Passman: You know what the last thing I'll say on this topic is just we look for a really good long-term fit. So I think what our clients really appreciate about us is we will, call out the flags and make hiring teams aware so that they're making a fully well-informed decision. , we'll happily move on from a finalist candidate who's about to receive an offer if they raise a big red flag rather than place the person and hope it works out. We like stickiness and placements. And I guess this is a good segue to people's sustainability because the stickier your hires are, the better your organization's gonna perform because people are gelling together better, right?

[00:17:48] Bryan Passman: You see it in a sports analogy. You see sometimes a team with a lot of money goes out and hires a bunch of all stars and just smashes 'em together and figures it's a lot of great talent so of course we're gonna win a championship, but it really takes, you know, chemistry that's built over time amongst everyone and trust built amongst those people on the team , to win that championship.

[00:18:09] Bryan Passman: And, you know, we like our clients to be champions. Of course, the more they win, the more we win. So, we look for that. So it's not looking for, culture fits so much as culture contributors. There's always good and bad with companies and we like to understand what the good and the bad is. There's always warts on a company and an opportunity, so we wanna understand what those are, and help them hire people that can deal with the bad and accentuate the good and contribute to the positive aspects of the culture and help them deal with the bad, whether it's a lack of process, orientation or whatever it may be.

[00:18:46] Bryan Passman: It's really hard to get that stickiness in cannabis because, you know, it, it's the easiest industry, I think, to burn out in because of all the unique challenges tied to federal prohibition on top of the fact that, you know, people are just in general burned out already.

[00:19:05] Merril Gilbert: Oh yeah. There's a new term that you used there though, that I really like. Selling opportunities, I think is a interesting perspective. You know, that leads into something interesting though, right? So this industry you know, we've been in it since 2015. I think you said 2017. It feels like a lifetime.

[00:19:24] Merril Gilbert: In between that we've had all these states, get legal access. We've seen Canada have full adult use. We see other countries coming on board. We see all the research and information coming out of Israel. There's so much going on in this real global industry from the ground up.

[00:19:42] Merril Gilbert: However, we are also went from at the beginning of Covid as an essential industry to just a lot of uncertainty in the economy where things are going. People having mixed experiences, particularly when they are in states that don't, you know, aren't fully matured like California and Colorado. . We have plethora of safe products and manufacturing. But what's interesting is when there's growth in these new states, there's pullback in other states. Cuz we, we've had several impactful economic indicators. And I'm not talking about the bigger, I'm talking about just the financial commodity valuation of the flower itself. And then everything that goes along that.

[00:20:32] Merril Gilbert: And what I'm driving at here is the first things that people start to cut in a growth mode even is marketing and people. . And so one of the things that you and I touched on is there's two things that kind of still need to happen here and should not be overlooked.

[00:20:53] Merril Gilbert: And I want you to talk about, if we were the executives that you were trying to give the landscape of where we are right now, why it's important to develop a workforce for the future and look at talent today and not as something down the road. And why, if you have an opportunity, it might not be a full-time position, but to start building those relationships because now's the time because it's still moving forward. It's not gonna stop.

[00:21:24] Bryan Passman: Yeah. Yeah. It, it, it's an interesting thing because if you look at numbers from the Department of Labor, they'll essentially classify us, I don't know if it's still current, but recently I saw we're at, what they call zero unemployment. When unemployment's below 4%, I think is how it goes.

[00:21:44] Bryan Passman: But at the same time, it seems like there's a lot of great people who are unemployed. And so I do believe in being opportunistic as a organization with ambitious goals to scale. And it doesn't mean go out and hire all the good people cause that's silly. And we're seeing a lot of cannabis businesses right now go through this right-sizing to put it nicely because they, you know, overscaled and were overhired and scaled irresponsibly.

[00:22:13] Bryan Passman: You want to, you definitely wanna make a lot of friends and reach and engage with talent. I refer to it as always be recruiting and having a great brand makes it easier to always be recruiting. And I don't endorse posting bogus positions out there just to build a resume database. But you know what a lot of people do now is , they look for places they wanna work based on brands they like.

[00:22:36] Bryan Passman: So you don't have to post bogus jobs to collect resumes. You have to build a great brand and then have people come to you. Cuz a lot of great talent searches for jobs in that way. They create a list of companies that resonate with them that they like for whatever the reason is. And then they reach out to decision makers there. And I think companies need to have a great process in place to track that talent, to respond to them, ideally engage with them in some meaningful way to not just put a resume in a database, but add , some insights about that person and give them a warm and fuzzy that they were seen, they were heard, they were acknowledged, their interest was acknowledged.

[00:23:17] Bryan Passman: And, you know, you can create brand ambassadors out there with talent because, you know, a lot of companies don't do that and it's not easy to do it, but it's also not terribly difficult to do it. It's a little bit of an extra time investment. That'll save companies much later if you have someone in-house to revert back to your database of talent when positions open up along the way.

[00:23:40] Bryan Passman: So I really think that having a process in place internally, and not always relying on recruiters, but you know, building your connectivity to talent and creating a sort of magnet , and talent orbit around your brand by being a, a good company that gives back that treats its people well. So they're talking to their friends and their family about how great it is to work at, you know, x, y, z organization, you know, is a big deal.

[00:24:06] Bryan Passman: And I think, circling back to people's sustainability, , you accomplished that through succeeding in the people's sustainability aspect of employee relations. And, you know, sustainability has been a hot topic or a buzzword, if you will, for a really long time. And, you know, the events and the past couple years have really done well to shine a light on the need for more of a people sustainability focus.

[00:24:31] Bryan Passman: Cuz it seems like, you know, again, a lot of us are finally courageous enough together to admit to being burned out. And that is certainly the case and our startup industry, which I think is more difficult to succeed in , than others. I'm sure everyone's heard of quiet quitting.

[00:24:48] Bryan Passman: And I think that's just the way that the media has chosen to label this burnout. But if we were to look at people's burnout as being quiet fired by these companies, that maybe don't care or just don't give the attention to caring about their people's personal and mental health, you know, that probably is a good way to flip the quiet quitting, which I think for the most part is subsided.

[00:25:17] Bryan Passman: But I see it every once in a while still and turn it back around on companies to maybe inspire them to understand that no, people are just feeling a certain way because we've all been through a lot and a lot of things. a lot of the way people are working, it's not sustainable and people want to miss out less on, you know, family events, and hobbies and personal aspects of their life and not, you know, die at their desk anymore.

[00:25:44] Merril Gilbert: You're talking about such an interesting point of view right now, and I'm so glad you brought this up because the work we do is a little different. It's much more on the investor side. We work with investors on, before they deploy money, either in a facility due diligency, you know, is this building really set up to do what you wanted to do? How much will cost to retrofit it? But also operationally. Because an investor team usually has their, person to look at the numbers and their person to review the data, and their real estate people. But can this team, this person that I'm investing in, can they execute this vision? where are the gaps? Where's the opportunities? How much time and resources do they need to build this out? The other side is, we work with a lot of founders, whether it's in the beginning phases of their company or scaling their company into whatever they're trying to create, whatever that is. And we often touch on the importance of the team. You cannot be everything, you cannot do everything. And what we've come out of these last three years in is maybe you don't even wanna do everything. So how do you build that around you?

[00:27:02] Merril Gilbert: And I'm curious in what you just were saying is, Is that a conversation you're having with some of the leadership in your clients?

[00:27:10] Merril Gilbert: Like, we still have underserved people, right? We still have women who, you know, back in 2017, 18, held a lot of positions in the C-suite have dwindled and particularly in cannabis, less than women being able to access money, people of color being able to access money.

[00:27:30] Merril Gilbert: And we work a lot in justice and equity and inclusion and diversity in our, in our world. But there's a lot of talk about these things. How is it, happening you know, behind the scenes? Are people, what are they looking at in this senior leadership right now? Not just in people sustainability, but the overall what do they expect from people? What do they want? How do they develop leaders? How do they feel about their leaderships? Where does leadership and resiliency fall into my company going forward from where it is today?

[00:28:05] Bryan Passman: Yeah. Well, that's a lot. It's all good stuff. I think the good news is that I mean for us, all of our clients put a concerted effort towards building diverse teams. So first and foremost I'm proud to say our clients really acknowledge that it's important to have diversity mindset in terms of mindset , and you're gonna do better as an organization when there's some healthy friction in there and it's not a echo chamber of people that, you know, all look the same and have the same past life experiences and are all just , saying yes to each other and not challenging each other in healthy ways. , we've entered a lot of women leaders into roles in cannabis. We're a woman owned business.

[00:28:44] Bryan Passman: I love working for my wife. She's a great woman leader. And I know a lot of people out there that are high performing are doing it because they have great women leaders above them directing them. So, you know, how we tackle that in part, I mean, we can't tell a company who to hire, but how we tackle that is we typically agree we're not gonna start interviewing till we have a diverse slate. That's it. It just, can't be a slate of talent that all looks the same. It has to be a completely diverse slate before we start interviewing and then may the best person win. So, you know, that's the role that, that we play.

[00:29:18] Merril Gilbert: And was that a value that you and Jessica talked about? So, you agreed you're gonna start this company together? Was that your own values, setting your up your own company values, like, it wasn't that you had the skills, you knew you could do this, but it was what was, you know, that part of your vision as a leader as well, both of you?

[00:29:37] Bryan Passman: Yeah. I wish I could say that five or five to six years ago, we said, oh, we're gonna do this to put more women back to work, or place, more women in minorities and leadership roles. It wasn't that so much as I wanted to run my own recruitment business to ensure we only worked with good people and made the right placements.

[00:29:57] Bryan Passman: I worked at a couple of great search firms before, but I was not in charge of deciding who our clients were. A lot of times I worked with some people at companies that I didn't think were genuinely good people. I didn't like working with them. I thought they only wanted to hire in a certain type of way, which was, flawed, in a lot of ways, such as not believing in the value of building diverse leadership teams a or, or making snap hires, or being responsible for quickly pushing a company to a hire before they were ready.

[00:30:28] Bryan Passman: Because we had to hurry up and get this project off of our desk. I wanted to work in a different type of way. So maybe in a inadvertent way, you know, we didn't exactly say we were gonna do that, but we wanted to work in a more meaningful way with companies that were trying to scale in a better, friendlier way.

[00:30:48] Bryan Passman: Jessica and I were talking about when we launched the business and her business before this, she spent 10 years building up a women's networking organization when she was impacted by the 2008 recession.

[00:30:59] Bryan Passman: And she was a real estate attorney and no one really needed a real estate attorney for a long time. And she got tired of going to networking events in Miami that were a lot of times hosted at bars and it was really just people hitting on each other a lot of times. She and this other woman developed a group to facilitate network networking, for women. And, they opened up chapters around the country and then outside the US to create safe spaces for women leaders to get together and network with each other and share ideas. So she did that for about a decade and inadvertently learned how to be a recruiter while doing that as the COO and general counsel, because she was the first line of defense to vet a woman that wanted to open a new chapter in a new city, to grow that footprint and facilitate that further.

[00:31:48] Bryan Passman: So you know, maybe wasn't talked a lot about, but that was, I think in our, in our DNA as a couple. . I mean, she, you know, she lived that day in, day out for a very long time, so, you know, maybe she was thinking about it more than she verbalized to me.

[00:32:04] Merril Gilbert: It sounds like it. So in this world we're in, going back to what are you hearing from just the industry as a whole when it comes to where we are, our talent, our future? Where do you think things, are headed? As we get more states, but just, you know, where we are in, in the industry as a whole? I'm just curious and I want you to touch on the psychedelic part, right?

[00:32:32] Merril Gilbert: Because I think we're still there's definitely more conversation, right? More adult conversation about its benefits, and again, not this dropout culture of, the past. This is really significant options for people right now looking at it as we deal with a lot of mental health issues, right?

[00:32:52] Merril Gilbert: And that we don't even see because we've, we just saw another person take their life this week that absolutely no indication that they were suffering. So, you know, where's that conversation happening and where's it happening when you go out to, like, who's hiring for that? So just give a perspective of where you think cannabis and psychedelics and what's going on and what we can look forward to.

[00:33:16] Bryan Passman: Well, first and foremost, we have to acknowledge the capital crunch that's hitting these industries. Cannabis in particular. I don't think the pinch is felt as much in psychedelics because you have a different investor community in. For a lot of psychedelics companies where they're looking at the more of the life sciences sector.

[00:33:35] Bryan Passman: So you have a life sciences investor community that is not as I guess negative on these nascent plant medicine industries as other investors from, you know, C P G and retail are from, you know, losing big on cannabis investments, right? So at the same time, you don't have opportunities to really scale commercially in psychedelics.

[00:34:01] Bryan Passman: So you see a lot of money being raised to invest in IP and regulatory pathways tied to clinical trials. And that gets me very excited because that's my roots as a recruiter working with people like that. So you know, for us trends we see they're placing very sciencey roles, as we call it, and roles in legal and finance and investor relations. There's not, you know, not much operationally or commercially happening in that space yet. Whereas in cannabis, you know, you do see a lot of hiring in commercial and operational roles because this is the get your shit together or else phase in cannabis.

[00:34:41] Bryan Passman: I mean, you know, these companies have to really figure out how to build something that is sustainable and become more of a real business and of course generate , more revenue and capture more market share, or create more market share because speaking to a friend of mine that leads a business in this space who brought up a good point the other day, which is, I think some businesses in cannabis are flawed, are thinking they can only grow at a competitor's expense.

[00:35:08] Bryan Passman: And there's really smart businesses in cannabis that grow by creating market share. And it's not us or them. I have another friend in the industry that uses this word co-opetition a lot that I really like. Right? There is a lot at the table for everyone to share around.

[00:35:23] Bryan Passman: And I think that is the only way, for this to be sustainable, because there's a lot of parts of the cannabis industry that cannibalize each other and organizations, and lobby groups and companies itself, and leaders that hate on each other, and that's just not sustainable. So, bringing it back to what is sustainable for the cannabis industry, because that's where we have, all of this, this good traction is, I think more of the aspirational businesses in cannabis are getting focused on rewards and boundaries.

[00:35:55] Bryan Passman: Great leaders in cannabis have found repeatable ways to track and reward their teams. Not just achievements, but soft skills. Such as, you know, being emotionally intelligent and creative, and other top qualities and communicative and collaborative. And if you're consistently rewarding those activities and characteristics, you're inspiring people to improve upon those.

[00:36:19] Bryan Passman: And it's creating an easier workspace for everyone instead of just waiting till the end of the year. And do we hit our numbers and just rewarding, with a bonus. While you know, boundaries create, sustainable teams where, you're setting clear expectations that, are upheld with dependable predictability and that helps working experiences become more sustainable.

[00:36:43] Bryan Passman: And, you know, those conversations are happening more and more at cannabis companies. And even on the front end. I think some of our best performing MSOs really focus a lot on that, where the magic happens with the hourly wage worker and hiring around when people are gonna wanna work and not just saying, well, we're gonna pay 19 an hour while our competition's paying 16 an hour.

[00:37:04] Bryan Passman: So therefore we'll get the best people and we'll retain them. No problem. You have to go further and, hire based on understanding, what hours your store is open, or when you're running your cultivation. And hire and understand from those workers when they like to work, when they do their best work and schedule them on shifts, that fit in that way, instead of just saying, no, they'll just be happy they have a j o b and a paycheck coming their way.

[00:37:28] Bryan Passman: That's not good enough anymore. That's, where, the lack of sustainability and all the rapid turnover hits and, and all the burnout is just perpetuated when you forget to do that part.

[00:37:38] Merril Gilbert: We talked about how we help guide some of that planning conversation. And it's also interesting, when we talk about hourly employees, right?

[00:37:46] Merril Gilbert: You're hiring in these leaders that are going to be responsible oftentimes for an hourly workforce. And I think we have a lot of fear about the kinds of questions that we're allowed to ask these days, right? Because, oh, is that too personal? Or is that, you know, even legally required?

[00:38:02] Merril Gilbert: Obviously you, you can't ask like, you know, who do you love? ,

[00:38:05] Bryan Passman: you love the one you're with, right?

[00:38:07] Merril Gilbert: Yeah. Love the one you're with. But what are some of the good questions that people can ask , in that screening process that we oftentimes forget about or are afraid to ask because we're unsure. And we're trying to get a deeper, you know, we don't want the yes and nos, right?

[00:38:24] Merril Gilbert: How do we get a little deeper with somebody without crossing a line? Are there any good little tricks you've picked up?

[00:38:30] Bryan Passman: Yes. Well thank you for allowing me to highlight, another reason why you need a recruiter.

[00:38:36] Bryan Passman: And I did shut down my email. I don't know why I'm getting these pings and dings. I'm sorry about that, everyone.

[00:38:41] Bryan Passman: So not to say you hire a recruiter to ask all of the ugly, dirty, illegal questions that you know your in-house people can't ask. But, recruiters can ask questions that hiring companies can't, or at least be more creative with asking them or not have to ask them and inspire people to open up about certain topics by sharing. , my style is I sprinkle in a lot of sharing and a lot of humor just to lighten up the conversation cuz it's heavy talking about, you know, new work. It's risky no matter where you're going. There's a high level of risk involved and, it's nerve wracking for people.

[00:39:19] Bryan Passman: So I try to you know, lighten the mood of, of those conversations, which usually leads to more sharing. But I, to answer your question more directly, I guess most importantly is the why. You know, beyond the qualifications on technical hard skill fit is, I think more and more companies should be more intentional about asking why. You know, why are we here having this conversation?

[00:39:44] Bryan Passman: Why do you want us, why do you want this opportunity? If they're coming into the cannabis industry for the first time, why do you think you wanna work in this industry? And really challenging people on that. And, you know, you can learn a lot about the person, once you open that can of worms and get them talking about their inspiration and their why.

[00:40:05] Bryan Passman: So now you're taking it beyond the professional and the financial, and you're getting into the personal bucket, which we need to somehow understand more of. There are scorecards that companies can ask people to fi to fill out and, and they can fill out buckets that are not just personal, or sorry, professional and financial, but personal as well, because I do think business needs to become more personal. And we see it on LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn's become social media. There's a lot of personal sharing and everyone is agreeing that, you know, everything is related to business. Everyone's views, and we talk about diversity and people's different, even though it's not great to talk about religion and politics, that shapes people. Of course we have a long way to go to have healthier conversations around our different religious and political and other views. That's like the next phase of our evolution that hopefully isn't too far away.

[00:40:59] Bryan Passman: But having more why conversations is just, is really important. And then I guess I'll take it one step further is, just understanding, what, not trauma, but what challenging, what difficult, situations people have been through if not professionally, but personally cuz all of that shapes us.

[00:41:16] Bryan Passman: And because hiring a, a diverse leadership team doesn't necessarily mean everyone is a different color and different gender. It can mean people can look alike but have massively different backgrounds and past life experiences. So understanding what those are and how it shaped them and bringing on people that can positively contribute to what you're trying to accomplish by bringing in healthy methods of challenging the status quo and pushing the envelope and being curious about why are we doing this thing.

[00:41:49] Bryan Passman: I talk a lot about the Thomas Edison Soup test. I dunno if you've heard of that. So, yeah. Thomas Edison would hire a lot of apprentices and he would always interview them over a bowl of soup. And he would notice if they would salt their soup before tasting it. And if they did, then the interview was over because they were too assumptive.

[00:42:12] Bryan Passman: Right? So taste first before seasoning it, cuz it might not need it. So curious over assumptive and I think especially in cannabis and psychedelics there's only room for curiosity and people that want to understand why are we doing things this way and what's a better creative way, to do this thing?

[00:42:29] Bryan Passman: And that could come from. you know, someone of any, you know, race, religion, gender, skin, color any things.

[00:42:37] Merril Gilbert: Of course. So Covid life after Covid. Is Covid even part of a conversation these days in this interviewing process. Have we, you know, now three years down the road, been able to just go on and say, tell me about you now.

[00:42:50] Merril Gilbert: , or is that still shaping their view or even maybe why they're thinking about coming into this industry? This massive interruption to our lives happened to everybody. It wasn't like nobody wasn't affected by it.

[00:43:08] Bryan Passman: Right. I think we can all agree that's the truth. , I wouldn't say covid in a immediate direct way impacts talent acquisition and retention anymore. I mean, it wasn't that long ago where we did have clients that would not hire someone if they weren't vaccinated because it was risky to get together.

[00:43:29] Bryan Passman: Right. So after everyone started getting teams back together and events came back. It was a thing for a while where, we were tasked with asking people about their their booster status or otherwise, which that, you know, that got us sideways in some conversations for sure, . But companies relied on us to ask that question a lot.

[00:43:50] Bryan Passman: That was, that got weird for sure. But we've moved beyond that now. I mean, it feels like we have this, this wave of covid coming back and a lot of people are getting sick. I'd say that's impacting it right now. We've had a lot of interviews canceled recently cuz people are sick and testing positive.

[00:44:06] Bryan Passman: But we're not hung up on are they vaccinated and boosted anymore. I think how it's really impacted is just the way people work and the way people feel about work. Right. So most people wanna work remote. There's a, small sample size of people that just really miss going to an office full-time.

[00:44:24] Bryan Passman: For the most part, people do not miss that for any number of reasons. I, I sit in the middle and I think a lot of other people sit there with me in the hybrid model, right? And a lot of our clients wanna hire in a hybrid way where, you know, people are ready and willing to come to a physical office, but don't need to do it just because, just because we said so.

[00:44:43] Bryan Passman: It's to have a more collaborative meeting or for some other purposeful reason, not just because, so, I guess it's worked its way into our process because, we have clients that sit in all three areas where they believe in, you know, one of those three things have to be the way we have to work moving forward.

[00:45:02] Bryan Passman: And so it is a new interview, you know, type of question, I guess, or another vetting level with candidates to understand, you know, how they wanna work and what their willingness to travel a lot and go into an office is. And there's there I'm willing to go with the flow and I don't hold it against anyone.

[00:45:18] Bryan Passman: Whatever they're into is fine to each their own. I, I get it. It's a little bit confusing sometimes when people are interested in roles that really physically require you to be somewhere, but then refuse to be in that place and want to do the job from their kitchen or living room. That doesn't make sense because they're responsible for producing some widget.

[00:45:38] Bryan Passman: And how do you do that from home? There are some people that don't understand.

[00:45:42] Merril Gilbert: I'm a the belief that you have to manage by walking around. Right? You can't just rely on if you're in that kind of a role. Oops. Rihanna's popping back in. Cuz I think we're getting close to the end here, which I know we could go on.

[00:45:55] Merril Gilbert: So, sorry to interrupt that thought. But yeah, I think there is this hybrid mix. I think, you know, we're still getting our grounding about being with people again. It's very exciting. I think you and I, when we tried to see each other in Las Vegas recently at MJ Biz and just the massive amount of people I hadn't seen for so long and getting from point A to B was, was a challenge.

[00:46:20] Merril Gilbert: I think the last thing I would just, before I hand this back over to Rhiannon and for us to close on is, you know, in 2023. One of the things, again, when we started this company was we always wanted to have thought leadership. And you talked a little bit about competition and, you know, we're all about collaborating with our competitors.

[00:46:39] Merril Gilbert: We did that almost two years ago when we called our competitors and said, Hey, you know, we're all trying to lead this conversation about safe and reliable experiences. We're all working, doing very similar things in our companies. So we would have a better conversation and stronger influence overall on the industry if we did this together.

[00:46:58] Merril Gilbert: And we created the Cannabis Compliance Alliance. And that's just one example. We had a symposium that we've been wanting to get off , the ground for years to have thought leaders come together and talk about cannabis as an active ingredient. The innovation around it, the, the depth and breadth of what that is.

[00:47:15] Merril Gilbert: But leadership is a big part of that. And, I would just love you to take a another minute and just kind of just tell us what you're really looking forward to and, and where you think some opportunities are and how people should reach you too because I dunno if we have a slide for that, but, how do they contact you after this conversation if they're not very connected to you on linkedIn?

[00:47:36] Bryan Passman: Yeah. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I, I spend a lot of time on there. Our website is hunteresquire.com. There's a link to contact us. It's hellohunteresquire.com and my email's [email protected].

[00:47:55] Bryan Passman: Yeah, I, well, for us, we do look excitedly to next year to do more work, in cannabis outside of the US. We are excited to do more work in Europe and Latin America and cannabis and to place more people into the psychedelics industry. We, did a light amount of work this year on that.

[00:48:13] Bryan Passman: So I look forward to that and I look forward to really companies in cannabis just continuing on the right track. I the industry's come a long way in terms of professionalizing, the people experience. There are a lot of strategic human capital leaders in cannabis. I mean, I don't know if there were any, when we started this five years ago, really, you could probably count on one hand how many there were.

[00:48:33] Bryan Passman: There's bunches now that'll continue, More accomplished leaders that value talent, that understand that people are a company's best asset, and in most cases, only appreciating asset will continue to enter the space, and professionalize the experience for candidates and employees and continue to treat people well.

[00:48:52] Bryan Passman: Because at the end of the day, the great product, the branding, the real estate, all of that is great, but doesn't mean anything if you don't have people in there to continue to steer the ship. So I'm excited about that continuing to happen. It's a bummer that we're going through this rough patch, but we will come out of it at some point next year and then there'll probably be another one after that.

[00:49:10] Bryan Passman: And after that it'll be an up and down this, on this for this rollercoaster ride. But, you know, if you're in this, if you're in the space succeeding, it's probably cuz you enjoy the ride and you've just gotten used to it. Right? And we're managing through it. It's, it's early days of building this, there's a long way to go.

[00:49:25] Bryan Passman: It's really bumpy, but it's it's part of the fun. I, I caution people when they come in the space, look, you may have worked hard before, but this is the hardest you're, you're ever gonna work. I promise you that. And a lot of times they don't believe me. Cuz they've worked really hard to get to where they are

[00:49:38] Bryan Passman: And then they come in and they, oh yeah, that's right. That's what you were talking about. So, it'll shake out and, you know, you'll continue to cooperate with competition and collaborate and we will too. And you know, some of them will be around months and years from now and some won't. And new people will come in and the circle will continue and, you know, this industry will, will be fine long term.

[00:50:02] Bryan Passman: So I just look forward to helping people find their way in cannabis more, and helping more companies scale in the right way and make new friends and cultivate existing relationships like ours for yours to come. And paying the bills off of working in these industries is so cool.

[00:50:18] Merril Gilbert: Love it.

[00:50:19] Merril Gilbert: Thank you. Thank you for being our first guest. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your continued friendship and connectivity. I, I've really enjoyed our time over these last several years and look forward to what comes next. And Rhon, I'm going back to you to close us out and, and just really appreciative of today's conversation.

[00:50:40] Rhiannon Woo: All right. Thank you everyone for tuning in to TraceTrust Live, and thank you to everyone who watched it as a recording. If you would like to be a part of Trace Trust Live, you can reach out to us at [email protected]. We are always open to talking about leadership and resiliency in whatever form you are making it happen in your world.

[00:51:01] Rhiannon Woo: So thank you very much for your time. Our next Trace Trusts live is going to be on January 20th, so keep an eye on your feeds for more information about that. And with that, I will say goodbye. So thank you everyone.