Peter Gray on Why Jobseekers Hate Recruiters, Hidden Hiring Biases, and How to Get Noticed

In Brief: Peter Gray (linkedin.com/in/graypeter/, petergraysearch.com), a social impact executive recruiter and founder of Peter Gray Executive Search, joins host Dan Freehling. Peter shares lessons from placing more than 40 CEOs and over 200 strategic hires, offering practical guidance on leadership succession, building diverse candidate slates, and avoiding the “unicorn” myth in executive hiring. He breaks down what effective recruitment actually looks like today, from standout job postings to the real way LinkedIn is used by recruiters. The conversation also explores hiring biases, including what Peter calls the “round peg bias,” and makes the case for more flexible, opportunistic hiring. Peter also weighs in on trends affecting the social impact job market, including uncertainty around federal funding, and offers candid advice for both jobseekers and employers.

Recommended reading: “Liar’s Poker” and “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis and “When Genius Failed” by Roger Lowenstein.

Dan Freehling (00:01):

Welcome to Forward-Looking Leadership, a podcast for visionary leaders building future ready organizations. I'm your host, Dan Freehling. I'm the founder of the coaching and consulting practice, contemp Leadership, all in for the social impact leaders you want in charge. I'm honored to be joined today by Peter Gray. Peter is a social impact executive recruiter and the founder of Peter Gray Executive Search. A self-described recovering Wall Street recruiter, he's now based in Wisconsin and specializes in helping mission-driven employers hire senior leaders. Peter has successfully placed 40 CEOs and executive directors and over 200 strategic hires and positions across a range of industries and functions. He also trains employers, coaches, individuals, and speaks to groups on diversifying hiring outcomes and overcoming bias and career advancement. Listeners, whether you're exploring your next executive role or planning for a leadership succession, you're in the right place. Peter, thanks so much for joining me on Forward-Looking Leadership.

Peter Gray (00:57):

Oh, great to be here. Thank you Dan.

Dan Freehling (00:59):

So first question for you, more on the executive or leadership kind of a lane than on the career stuff, you've now guided organizations through 40 leadership successions. What are some of the most common mistakes you see in succession planning and how can executives and boards get this right?

Peter Gray (01:16):

I used to not understand what all the fuss was about leadership succession planning. I thought, well, your leadership succession plan is a person, and if you don't have that person, then your leadership succession plan is a search. Eventually I got some more training and education on what leadership succession planning really is, and I learned it's really about business continuity planning. That means looking at every position in your organization and asking if this person leaves our organization tomorrow, what is our plan to cover that gap and keep the business running smoothly?

Dan Freehling (01:50):

It makes so much sense. What kind of factors generally go into who we want next? Say that I'm a board member or executive, we're saying, Peter, we want this kind of a profile next. What kind of factors go into that?

Peter Gray (02:03):

People tend to want everything. They want the perfect unicorn who is everything and has everything. That person often doesn't exist because that person is in their minds, that person is the sort of fantasy amalgamation of everything they want and they kind of want the recruiter to be Dr. Frankenstein and find the best qualities of lots of different kinds of people and put them all together into one human. So I find the only way through that is to generate a slate of candidates. So through the work, through the search itself to generate that slate of candidates and give the employer, which is my client, which is typically nonprofit organizations search committee, generally a board committee that might not or might have one or two staff representatives on that committee. The chance to see people in different lanes to be educated about the fact that generally no one is that unicorn who has everything and is everything, but that if we consider a diverse range of people of different backgrounds and different personalities that we can reach the decision that's the right outcome for us.

Dan Freehling (03:19):

So very tactically, this is probably old hat to you. How do you go about putting together that diverse suite of potential candidates for an executive role?

Peter Gray (03:31):

Well, first I need to understand the organization. So before the announcement of a search, I look for a window of typically at least around two or three weeks for me to really understand the organization, have one-on-one conversations with search committee members and any other key stakeholders. I really need to understand the organization. And then second, that helps me build really attractive job posting materials. I really like to draft an attractive job brochure that has graphics and photos and includes the job description but is a lot more than the job description. It has information about the organization's history and mission and it's about the city or location that it's in. If it's a national search, which most of mine are, and the main purpose of this is really to elevate any job I'm recruiting for above that noise level, talk to anyone who's searching for jobs and it's mostly searching online job postings and people will tell you that they feel like they are drowning in junky job postings.

(04:43):

So I feel like my first job as a recruiter and anyone recruiting for your own organization can do this, is just make an attractive job posting that elevates itself above the others, and I do that. So that's one way that I do that is by having a PDF job brochure that I link to in every plain text job posting that anywhere I have to post the job that shows there's more of a there and this is a real job with real thought and people behind it. That's one piece of the outreach strategy. There's really a broader outreach approach. Yes, we have to post jobs, but Dan, you know that job postings alone generally don't find employers the candidates who they hope for. And that's why that's there's a job for someone like me to be a recruiter because yes, I place postings, but I also put significant effort into outreach to reach people who would not be looking for or would not see those job postings.

(05:51):

Part of it is I try to take a sort of a PR buzz marketing approach and when a search is announced to have that go on social media, go out on email lists and try to build buzz in the right professional communities and in order to do that before that launch date, I research a contact list of people. I mean, I have my general contact list as a recruiter, I have a pretty good email list of nonprofit leaders, but for every specific search that I'm doing, I research who are the peer organizations in its space and in its ecosystem and maybe there are associations or conferences and I try to connect with and find the contact information of as many of those people as possible so that when a search is announced, I can be individually messaging people to say, Hey, did you see that this organization in your ecosystem is doing a search? By the way, I'm the recruiter. If you have any curiosity or have someone in mind or want to talk, here's how to talk with me. That's another big part of the approach.

Dan Freehling (06:58):

Yes, you can definitely see how being well networked in your space and being active in conferences and associations and known to people who are in these circles can help when an executive search person is doing this kind of active outreach for a role. And I think that makes a ton of sense.

Peter Gray (07:16):

And also I'm sure it's no surprise for you to hear me say that the LinkedIn recruiter platform is extremely helpful.

Dan Freehling (07:22):

Yeah. Can you walk me through how you use that? I've talked to some other recruiters on this too for previous episodes. I'd love to hear from your perspective how you go about using that.

Peter Gray (07:32):

Sure. So your listeners have probably heard this from your prior guests, but the LinkedIn recruiter platform is what enables recruiters to search the entire universe of LinkedIn members. And basically when you create your LinkedIn profile, every field that you enter something into is a searchable field that a recruiter can search for in an advanced search screen. So we recruiters can search by location, by industry, and perhaps most importantly by keyword. So when I am recruiting for, well, here's a fun example. I recently helped an organization called Final Exit Network Recruit an executive director. Final Exit Network is a nonprofit whose mission is to support death with dignity and choice in dying to enable people who are terminally ill to make the decision if they choose to end their lives on their own terms and on their own timing. So I was searching LinkedIn for keywords. Well certainly keyword phrases like choice in dying and death with dignity, but also keywords like hospice, palliative, those were some examples.

Dan Freehling (08:50):

That's amazing. So you put these in and you're going to surface a number of candidates for this. Putting yourself in the either passive or active job seeker side of this, how would you go about making sure that you have the right keywords for your niche in there?

Peter Gray (09:08):

The first thing I'd say is if you're a college educated white collar professional, it's important to be on LinkedIn and to be active on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is pretty much the number one go-to platform for recruiters for professional white collar jobs. So if there's a type of job that you want to be found for and want recruiters to contact you for, probably the most sensible thing to do is pull a few job descriptions of jobs that you hope to be contacted for and align the language in your experience with those job descriptions. I mean, this is more of a challenge for people who are looking to make a change of course, because our whole employment recruiting and hiring infrastructure is organized around creating round holes and then finding round pegs to fill them. So one thing that I encourage someone to do is if there's a class of job titles that you haven't held before but that you want to be approached for, you want to put a bullet. If you have a three bullet summary about yourself at the top of your resume, you want the third bullet to say, interested in and qualified for positions such as, and then list those job titles that you want to be found for. And that is a way to get those job titles into your resume or profile without misrepresenting your experience.

Dan Freehling (10:32):

That's such a tangible tip for people to take away. Just would highly encourage people to do that. And yeah, putting that perspective job title in there, those perspective keywords is a great tip. Peter, so you recently, not recently, you wrote a series of pieces on why job seekers hate recruiters, and I just loved these and I know that my friend Spencer Campbell has surfaced these and invited to speak to his community about these. So let me put it to you to explain to folks why do job seekers hate recruiters and what can both sides do about that?

Peter Gray (11:04):

Well, Dan, I mean it's pretty understandable why job seekers hate recruiters. We ask a lot of them and we usually disappoint them and frustrate them and give them nothing back, right? We're the classic black hole job seekers don't understand that we recruiters, we work for the other side of the trade, we work for employers and really why should they understand that? Because we recruiters do a terrible job explaining that. So this piece that I wrote, why Job Hunters Hate Recruiters? I was writing a column for Business magazine and so it did run in that business magazine, but I was primarily writing it as a manifesto to at the time my employer, the recruiting and HR services firm where I worked to get us to set appropriate expectations to communicate transparently with job seekers about what we are, what we are, not, what we can and can't do for them, and to give them the tools and the transparency to understand how to engage constructively with us.

(12:13):

I think at the time the firm that I was working at was doing what was pretty trendy and what we still see. It was a very warm, fuzzy branding to job seekers saying, Hey, job seekers come to us. We'll fix your life. We're here to get you into a great job. We're here to help you find the job of your dreams. To me, that is absolute marketing malpractice and it's very standard. So that's the first thing that job seekers can do is learn how recruiters work. Although again, we don't make it easy for you, but read my paper. And then for recruiters, recruiting firms and employers don't over promise set appropriate expectations, but we can offer transparency as to what jobs we're recruiting for and we can offer the tools like opt-in email alerts to give job seekers the way to follow us and to be informed about what we're working on because I feel like what's a fair expectation to set is if you follow me, somebody else is not going to have the inside track on a job.

(13:23):

You're going to learn about the jobs that I'm recruiting for as soon as they go live, because that's part of the problem too is jobs get posted for a long time and then as a job seeker, you come across a job, you apply, you hear nothing back. Well, it turns out if that job's already been posted for four or five weeks, that employer is probably moving, is probably already moving forward with a slate of candidates. So it's important to hear about jobs when posted and to apply for them promptly. If there's one more thing that we recruiters and employers can do, it's post salary ranges on our jobs. I do that and yet going back, I've only been doing that for five years, five plus years ago, that was generally not done and I'm so glad we've entered the era where that is more standard. So recruiters and employers, if you're not posting salaries and salary ranges for your jobs yet, time to start.

Dan Freehling (14:16):

I love it and it can just really fair and transparent and candid and I think it's so needed. What are the current trends you're seeing from your seat in the social impact job market?

Peter Gray (14:30):

Well, Dan, I don't think this is going to surprise you at all. I feel like the biggest trends I'm seeing are the DEI backlash and uncertainty about federal funding and what what the current federal funding landscape means for the social impact sector.

Dan Freehling (14:48):

Yeah, let's take those one at a time. So the DEI backlash, what do you see that showing up as in the job market?

Peter Gray (14:55):

It's so interesting. I feel like there was a tremendous boomlet in DEI as a profession and a new opportunity for people to become directors of diversity and chief diversity officers that is largely significantly going away or getting a lot harder, getting a lot smaller. And there was also a boomlet in DEI consulting firms, same thing. And there was also, I feel like for recruiters like me, there was more demand from employers and more interest from employers in intentionally diversifying hiring outcomes. That's something that I'm passionate about and I work with employers a lot on intentionally diversifying hiring outcomes and some remain committed to that and others don't.

Dan Freehling (15:42):

And then the federal funding, so it's showing up in a number of different spaces. I'd love to hear from your perspective where you're seeing that

Peter Gray (15:49):

It is, and Dan, I know you and Spencer work a lot with professionals in the international development space, which suffered a sudden collapse of federal funding. I do a lot of work with affordable housing nonprofit organizations, which in some cases are seeing cuts to federal funding. Well, housing authorities are seeing cuts to federal funding and nonprofit organizations in affordable housing are just experiencing a lot of uncertainty. They don't know what's going to happen to things like CDFI funding Section eight and other types of affordable housing, community development block grants, all sorts of federal funding for affordable housing. There's just a lot of uncertainty out there, and every nonprofit that is exposed to federal funding is finding itself needing to sort of do a review and a risk assessment and pretty much down the line if it's a line item or if it's a grant or a program that has not lost funding, it's just a big question mark like, is a shoe going to drop? We just don't know, but we might wake up one morning and find an email in our inbox that is a shoe dropping and some funding ending.

Dan Freehling (17:00):

So with all of this, what are you noticing is still hiring? Where are a lot of your searches focused these days?

Peter Gray (17:06):

I'm not always the best at sussing out macro trends because I am a solo consultant, which means that my plate gets filled pretty fast. My basic model is it's just me, Peter Gray executive search. My goal is to be carrying three C-level executive searches at once. My typical search is an executive director leadership succession for a small to mid-size nonprofit organization, that's a search process that takes around three months and three to four months. So that means that my typical workload in a given year might be something like nine to 12 leadership successions at nonprofits. So I'm not, again, my plate gets filled pretty quickly, and so I'm not always the best at assessing out macro trends. So I'm not quite sure where to go with your question. Who's still hiring? Who do you see? I mean, you're working with, I know you're working with in some cases some job seekers who are really in a tough spot in the case of USAID and other international development folks who just are fantastic people who've been doing fantastic work and they've had the rug pulled out from under them. Who do you see who still hiring?

Dan Freehling (18:22):

Yeah, it's a great question. Back to me to, and so obviously anyone who can bring in funding is getting hired. So I'm seeing a lot of people with development offices, not international development, but nonprofit development is still booming. Corporate partnerships especially obviously some of the traditional grants or government funding is not there, but I've noticed that the high net worth individuals, anyone who can do kind of the nonprofit development, I've also noticed, so I've had several clients get hired through this still it's a tough slog, but there's still a lot of these sectors. So had a client get hired running community outreach programs for a big hospital network, it, it's tricky with the federal funding, those are still hiring. I had another client this past week who was hired for kind of a place that people wouldn't have heard of, but it's on a very particular kind of scientific health related issue, and they're very concerned with this particular issue and they're looking for someone to translate that into how do we engage with policymakers on this?

(19:26):

How do we do our advocacy and communications on this? And she was able to get hired into that. So yeah, it's a tricky time for sure, but it's something where they're definitely still hiring and they have to be looking at what are the problems that these different organizations are now trying to solve and for people in international development, it's going to be different than we're trying to stay compliant with and perform well on existing international development programming because obviously that's almost completely gone now and it's instead to what are social impact organizations now doing and where do they need the kind of support that you can bring to them?

Peter Gray (20:03):

Dan, those are great examples and you raise a great point too, and maybe that's the smart answer that I should have given to your question of who's still hiring or what are people still hiring for? I do feel like nonprofit development, meaning fundraising, donor cultivation, grant writing, I feel like that's the door that's always open at nonprofit organizations. I sometimes get people coming to me and maybe you get people coming to you who might be folks who've had a successful career in the private sector and have said, I really want to give back. I really want to shift into nonprofit at this stage in my career, and that's what I say to them. I say fundraising development. That's the way in to nonprofit organizations where that's most open to you. How can you translate your network of relationships and connections into something that can you unlock their generosity on behalf of an organization that you would then be representing in a development function?

Dan Freehling (21:05):

I know you're not a prognosticator your own self definition here. What do you imagine sort of longer term for the social sector? Where do you see

Peter Gray (21:13):

This going? We're in a very interesting moment right now in 2025. I feel like we are all contending with a lot of change coming from the current administration in Washington DC and is this the new forever normal? Will the pendulum swing back? Will it swing back all the way or will it swing back in a different direction? Who knows? I don't know. What do you think?

Dan Freehling (21:38):

There's no way to know exactly what this will be. I imagine the future of this is going to be some sort of a pendulum swing back, but it's going to look very different. It's not going to be the same exact things, and I think that's actually an opportunity in all of this of a lot of people, a lot of tremendous damage done and a lot of reckless damage done to institutions. At the same time, I think there were a lot of obvious known flaws with a lot of these institutions and new ways to build these for the current day is something that I think is some sort of a positive out of all of this destruction. And I think people being able to be on the side of that where you're, okay, how do we build this in a way that makes sense for now for the current issues, for the future issues, more on social enterprises, more on these newer institutions, less of the legacy kind of stuff, less on the big donor reliance on the global north reliance. I think all of this kind of stuff is some of the more hopeful angles of this that can come out of what's so destructive for so many people.

Peter Gray (22:44):

I hope So, Dan,

Dan Freehling (22:45):

On the topic of bias, I know you do a lot of thinking and work on trying to make sure that people are educated on bias and how that shows up in the hiring process. Beyond what everyone might be assuming about how bias might show up in the hiring process, what are some ways that you've noticed this does show up and how can people on the hiring side be more cognizant of that and make sure that they're not exacerbating these?

Peter Gray (23:13):

Dan, this is a big one, so thank you for asking about this topic. I feel like there are many dimensions of bias in recruiting and hiring that go largely unseen and unnamed. I try to be a student of this whole topic and I try to name biases that I just come up with names for them because I haven't seen them named elsewhere, and I feel like the biggest bias that I see is what I call round peg bias, which is simply the idea that it's very normal for employers and for those of us interviewing and considering people for hire to have a picture in our mind and a clear idea of who we're looking for. And then we very quickly even in the first seconds evaluate and judge candidates based on how close or how far they are from that ideal profile and that ideal candidate we have in our mind that's round peg bias and that's part of why job search is so unfriendly and hiring is so unfriendly to people who want to make a change in our careers.

(24:21):

You don't want to just do the same thing you did before. Most of the time when we're looking for jobs, we want to grow, change and do something different. We're forward looking. Employers are just backward looking, right? They only value us and only know how to assess our worth based on being backward looking and seeing what are we doing now? What have we done before? I call it round peg bias, but another term that I use for it is replacement parts mentality. It's kind of dehumanizing, but I think I see it all the time. Employers look at their organization as a machine and when a part went missing, they have a replacement parts mentality. They go out looking for the replacement part that appears to have as close as possible, the same specifications as the part that went missing.

Dan Freehling (25:11):

Yeah, I guess for the job seeker first, the implication here is knowing it's this kind of like a tough love message in some ways too, of knowing that that's often what orgs are looking for, that they're kind of lazily looking in some ways for this replacement part. And the more you can position yourself as that, the better. I guess for the employers side, what's a different way they can think about that?

Peter Gray (25:35):

Well, it's difficult for employers to get out of replacement parts mentality if they are focused on the whole construct of job postings and job descriptions. It's a replacement parts model. I think the only off ramp from round peg bias and replacement parts mentality is taking a more of an opportunistic hiring approach. I'm old enough to have been around in the.com era, and I feel like I saw this sometimes in the.com era where an employer would say, there'd be a conversation between an employer and a candidate, and the employer would say, yeah, you know what? You get us. You're excited about who we are and what we do. You really want to work here. Let's hire you and then figure out what you're good at and what you could do. For us, I feel like opportunistic hiring, I feel like that kind of opportunistic hiring is the opposite of round peg bias or replacement parts mentality. And I feel like we can only get there if employers are willing to just like it says, to hire opportunistically outside of job descriptions because the whole job openings and job postings and job descriptions are basically asks for replacement parts.

Dan Freehling (26:49):

Yeah. Have you had any luck convincing places of this or is it something like they have to already be thinking of and it's the only time I've seen it go through?

Peter Gray (26:58):

I have on occasion had employers be surprised by the person they picked. Yes. And I can think of two examples. One was a professional association in a specific industry, and their board was made up of elected the leaders of who were elected from among their members. And it had always been one or another of those board members who had sat in the executive director seat. So they kind of assumed that it would be an industry insider who knew their industry, who would be their next executive director. And to their own surprise, the person they ended up hiring was an association executive from an association in an unrelated industry. And that person really convinced them that running your association, it's different from, and someone needs to know how to do some things that are different from what someone learns how to do from being a leader in your industry, right?

(27:55):

Running an association, it's about member relations, it's about generating revenue from training education and conferences, and that's a whole discipline and a whole skillset that's different. And having someone who has come up that professional lane actually makes sense. So they surprised themselves. They were in the insurance industry and they hired their first non-insurance insider, executive director of their professional association, and he was someone who had been the executive director of a state association for the restaurant industry. So that's one example. It was a learning lesson for me that part of my job as a recruiter is to present candidates across a breadth of lanes, right? No one is that perfect unicorn, who is everything and has everything, but like I said before, I take it as my job to present candidates in different lanes so that employers have the opportunity to challenge themselves and say, oh, is this assumption that we needed a subject matter expert, industry insider?

(29:00):

Is that really the case? Because here's someone who brings something very different who could do something great for us. I also had a recent success story with an affordable housing nonprofit who hired someone who was taking voluntary resignation from hud, and I thought that was a great success. In most cases, the affordable housing nonprofit organizations that I work with, they're either direct services or they own affordable housing portfolios of affordable property. And so they're either kind of property developer, property managers who might have wraparound social services as part of their organizations, or they are already on the social services side. And a lot of those organizations, they were getting some great, very experienced people are leaving HUD and considering leaving HUD right now. And yet I feel like a lot of nonprofits see that HUD experience as kind of one step removed because someone at HUD might've been overseeing one particular compliance program or doing something else that was a little more arm's length from the kind of direct services or property management that an affordable housing 5 0 1 C3 nonprofit does. But one of those organizations that I work with did recently hire someone who's leaving HUD, who just really did a great job conveying their interest, doing their homework, learning about the organization, and bringing forward ideas about how they would lead

Dan Freehling (30:34):

Some great lessons in there of how to go about doing that, how to go about showing that you, what you're doing in your functional area in these cases and can translate that over. Let's say you were trying to get into a new space, what would you do to get up to speed, get educated, get connected, all of that kind of stuff?

Peter Gray (30:50):

Yeah, great question. I mean, I feel like the first thing that I really would want to do is visualize. First it's about opportunity visualization and deciding what do I want to be doing? Who do I want to be? Again, this goes back to the replacement part mentality. What's the part I want to be? What's the spot in an organization that I want to hold? And then I would want to do a market mapping exercise to understand what's the universe of employers for me? Okay, once I know what job I'm making a play for and then who my universe of employers is, then I can map, okay, how do I craft my presentation so that universe of folks will respond to it? And two, who's my network? Well, you map the market of prospective employers and then you cross-reference that with your network. Who do I know in those spaces and how do I get better connected in those spaces?

(31:48):

And maybe my experience from what I've done before, maybe I don't have that credibility, and that's okay because through reading, through following the right subject matter experts on LinkedIn and elsewhere through attending conferences, I can get into those rooms. I can educate myself and I can get into those rooms and get into those conversations. And my first bites of opportunity in a new space, especially if it's a space that I don't have prior professional cred in that might be self-employment or gig work or a consulting assignment, and that's okay. I feel like if I do that work of learning the players, following them, getting into dialogue with them, and then getting to the point where people will think of me as someone who is interested in and knowledgeable about this space, eventually I will get one of those folks is going to ask me and say, Hey, I've got a project that could use a hand, or, what's your capacity? Are you available? It does take time, which is not helpful to hear if we are out of a job right now

(32:58):

And hurting for income. But what I have always said, especially to those of us who are mid-career, is if you've got a steady Eddie job that you've had for a long time and you lose that job, especially in your fifties plus, it is really difficult and it can really take time to land a new job, especially to replace that job at that current level of income and responsibility. And Dan, I had to take my own advice by the way, because at age 52, I was a pandemic layoff in March of 2020 from the firm where I had worked talk about Steady Eddie. I had worked at this firm for 15 years, had grown a recruiting team, and my team and I were all laid off along with a bunch of others in March of 2020, and I realized that this advice I'd been giving to others, I needed to take myself, and I became what I am now, Peter Gray executive search. And that felt pretty weird and scary at the time, but it also, it was fun and exciting too, and I can look back and see what a gift that was because I shouldn't have needed that push. It's gone great. I should not have needed that push. I should have done this sooner.

Dan Freehling (34:20):

So a question I ask every guest, it doesn't necessarily have to be books, it doesn't necessarily have to be business books or career books, but what books or any other resources and any medium would you most recommend for people who are on the job hunt for people looking to level up their career for leaders, any of that kind of stuff? Dan, I love this

Peter Gray (34:40):

Question. I knew this question was coming at first. I was a little bit caught short because I don't really have a great book to recommend about job search and recruiting and hiring. Maybe that sounds strange to you, but there it is

Dan Freehling (34:56):

Not at all.

Peter Gray (34:56):

The category of business books that I feel like I've gained the most from and that have stuck with me are books that are either memoirs or books written by journalists that recount some big business train wreck and just unpack for us like what the heck happened, what was going on that led to this? Those stick with me. And the biggest classics that I go back to for that are Liar's Poker, which was Michael Lewis's breakout book. It was his memoir about his early career stint as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers on Wall Street in the 1980s, which was the dawn of the junk bond era, Salomon Brothers. That was like the boiler room of junk bonds. And that was a really, really interesting read. And then if you read that, the next book to read right after that is When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein.

(35:55):

So these are different books by different authors, but When Genius Failed reads like a sequel to Liar's Poker because it's about the same cast of characters who moved from Salomon Brothers to Long-Term Capital Management. Remember Long-Term Capital Management, that was the global bond hedge fund that collapsed and practically took down the whole global bond market with it in 1998. Another Michael Lewis book that I recommend that I learned a lot from is The Big Short, The Big Short takes on and really explains the financial crisis of 2007, 2008, for those of us who don't know what mortgage-backed securities are or don't know what collateralized debt obligations are and what the heck happened in oh 7, 0 8, the Big Short does a good job explaining that.

Dan Freehling (36:46):

Thanks for all those recommendations, and I am very much not surprised to hear that the traditional business books are not the ones that really stick with you. What is it about these kind of train wreck books, particularly these financial train wreck books that you think are so, why are these coming up for you, do you think?

Peter Gray (37:04):

Well, I mean, on the flip side, I feel like there's so much puffery in guru books or sort of self-congratulatory memoirs. The self-aggrandizing memoirs just sound really fake and really self-serving. And the idea books, it's like, yes, you're okay. I get it. You're smart. This is an interesting concept, a fun way to think, is this really me? Does this really fit with me? Am I really able to make use of this? I feel like the train wreck books, they help explain our world in a way that just helps me better understand where we are and how we got here. Just reading history. I will say, you know what? I'll go on another tangent about reading. I realized not that long ago that I don't do nearly enough reading for fun, and sometimes I probably don't read much as many books as I might because I've always thought of reading that it needs to be like, it's a little like eating my vegetables.

(38:02):

I should read things that are good for me and make me smarter and better and all that. And I recently with some help from my wife, because I could see the way she was churning through novels and I didn't read much fiction, so I started taking some recommendations for her. And I am a new, I've newly discovered the romance genre and I'm really enjoying it. I read a couple Ali Hazelwoods and I think Emily Henry is next, and I also feel like maybe if I had read more fiction and more romance earlier in life, it been good for my emotional intelligence.

Dan Freehling (38:36):

I feel like this combo of real talk and idealism is very on-brand for you, Peter, and I think this is instructive of what you bring to the table.

Peter Gray (38:46):

Thank you.

Dan Freehling (38:46):

So Peter, thank you so much again for sharing your insights with people. There's so much here for whether people are on the job hunt, whether they're leading organizations for your fellow executive search folks and recruiters for coaches to keep in mind. So I really appreciate you taking the time to share it all with us. Well, Dan, I appreciate

Peter Gray (39:04):

You. I love what you're doing in terms of your coaching work. As I listen to your podcast, I really appreciate, I don't feel like anybody is out there demystifying recruiting and recruiters for job seekers the way you are. So I really appreciate what you're doing and I'm grateful for the opportunity to spend this time with you.

Dan Freehling (39:24):

Thanks so much again, Peter. The feeling is definitely mutual. If people want to follow along with your work, what's the best way to do that?

Peter Gray (39:31):

Absolutely connect with me on LinkedIn, Peter Gray, GRAY. My website is PeterGraySearch.com. And on my website, you can upload your resume to join my confidential talent bench, which I always check when I'm starting a search. You can schedule an office hours meet and greet to have an introductory call with me and you can subscribe to get my emails. I generally just send emails to announce a new search or to announce a hire as a solo consultant that's only maybe like 10 or 12 fills per year. So we're talking about multiply that by two for a job search announcement and a job filled announcement. We're talking about a couple emails a month.

Dan Freehling (40:15):

Beautiful. Well, we'll put all of those links in the show notes, contempusleadership.com, and thank you so much again, Peter. I really appreciate it.

Peter Gray (40:22):

Thank you, Dan.

Dan Freehling (40:24):

Hey everyone, I hope you got a lot out of that episode, and if you did, if you could please share it with someone who might find it valuable and take a second to leave a quick review on whatever podcast app you're using. Even just the stars is great. It goes a long way in helping others to discover the show. And if you liked this episode, check out our previous episode with Rokhaya Mané on what recruiters really look for in the leadership skill that futureproofs careers. Here's a clip from it.

Rokhaya Mané (40:48):

So for recruiters and for leaders, this matters a lot because people are watching more closely what you do under pressure than what you say in calm moments. And these are the type of questions that you can have during interviews for especially in the impact and purpose-driven organization because trust is built all broken in these value testing situations. So for organizations, it's not about to just state values. They need to build systems that we reward, integrity, courage, consistency, et cetera. And values should not just look good on paper, they should shape decisions when the stakes are high. And when you are an organization who, again, those values that you have and that are important to you, that means you want to keep the promise, you have to showcase it in the daily for your employees. And when you are a candidate or future employee, you are expecting to see those values and you yourself, you want to make sure that you are showing those values consistently. But also when things can be hard.