Diversity as a superpower with Marcus Sawyerr of EQ Community

Maren Kate
Today my guest is Marcus Sawyerr. He's currently the founder and CEO of EQ Community, which is a private group cultivating connections, community, and careers for multicultural professionals interested in tech. Marcus is also an active startup advisor, drawing on his deep experience in both technology and recruiting from roles at companies such as Adecco, Microsoft, and CareerBuilder. Marcus, really happy to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining.

Marcus Sawyerr
Thanks for having me. Really appreciate you.

Maren Kate
So first of all, what was your very first job?

Marcus Sawyerr
You're taking me back now. My first job, well, one that was not on a, what we call a PAYE in England which is a W2 out here, would have been a paper round probably. That was like the first first first job but then, kind of going into full time, I actually worked in a gym doing sales on gym memberships, a company called LA Fitness.

Maren Kate
They have LA Fitness in the UK?

Marcus Sawyerr
They did at the time. It was competing with another company called Fitness First. So you can see they got innovative names. So yeah, LA Fitness and Fitness First were the two. We used to go head to head with Fitness First.

Maren Kate
I assumed Fitness First won.

Marcus Sawyerr
No, I was on the LA Fitness side. I thought I said that. No, it was healthy competition.

Maren Kate
How did you decide to pick that as your first job?

Marcus Sawyerr
Well, I used to play football, I had a scholarship, soccer people call it in the U.S., and I thought to myself, well, one of the best ways to continue to stay fit after I was done off scholarship was to get a job in a gym as I was trying to find my next professional club. But they didn't have any typical gym jobs. They only had sales jobs and a lot of that was cold calling, getting new people to enter the gym. This was kind of in a wave where going into the gym wasn't super trendy and imagine in London, where you have to stand outside, and you have to try and prize people to come into the gym and that was like, I want to say, 2003, around that time.

Maren Kate
Wow. So you did cold calling.

Marcus Sawyerr
Oh, yeah, yeah, I've done a lot of cold calls.

Maren Kate
Oh my goodness. What was the best thing you learned from your time doing cold calling?

Marcus Sawyerr
Well, you can have conversations with pretty much anyone if you've got a common thread. I think that was one of the things but also learning how to understand how to drive conversation, really, in a sense of getting to know people really quickly because you've only got a short amount of time in order to do that before they either say yes, they want to move ahead, or they want to put the phone down. So it was just a great experience. But I learned a ton about companies because I also had done that CareerBuilder for a long period of time because you have to research the company before you spoke to them and that was super interesting.

Maren Kate
It's funny, I never answered my phone anymore because it's always spam, but I got a call from, I think it was a Bay Area area code, and I thought maybe it was someone I knew so I picked it up and it was a woman doing cold calling and you could tell that she was either early on in it or really hated it because she clearly didn't want to be there and was pretty uncomfortable. And then I felt bad because, I didn't hang up on her, I said I'm not interested, thank you so much, and then I hung up really quick. And I was just thinking like how cold calling pretty much would be like my greatest fear. But I also know so many people that have done any of the like outbound sales from like cold calling to standing on the street trying to get you to donate to a World Wildlife Fund. I have a lot of respect for it because it's constantly putting yourself out there and then I would assume the majority of it is like rejections anywhere from polite to probably really rude. And that's got to just like set you up for success regardless of your career in the future because you've already worked out that muscle, so to speak, of being able to ask for something, like, rolling from one rejection to another and then there's finally the sale. And that's the same in fundraising. It's the same in obviously all sales. It's definitely similar in recruiting.

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah, absolutely. I think building up grit and resilience is something that does and coming from a sports background it was kind of part of that you're gonna get onto the pitch. I mean, my dad was an Olympian and he fought in Seoul in 88 as a fighter and so you're always gonna get knocks and it depends on what you do with those knocks. My goal was doing cold calling so I never have to do another cold call again. Which meant I had to learn from every single conversation to figure out where the direction of the world was actually going, and then you started seeing and going into more emails, and then you saw companies, like HubSpot, developing inbound and so on and it's all marketing and conversations. And it wasn't the ideal role but you learn to kind of figure out what you can achieve from it.

Maren Kate
Yeah, there's like certain things that if I had it to do over again I would start in either recruiting or sales right out of college versus my choice which was bartending. Though I will say bartending actually my first, like, I was in college and I was bartending and I worked at pretty much a biker bar so that actually did teach me a lot of grit. Because after that I moved to San Francisco and started my first venture-backed company and I had to deal with VCs and tech bros and all this stuff and I remember actually really enjoying that I had that grit from the biker bars where I was like, listen, nothing that you say or do or like your bad attitude, like, this isn't going to intimidate me. I've seen guns, like, it's fine. So I guess it's similar things but I think that's really cool that you started in sales. And now it's completely a sidenote but what was your dad an Olympian in? What did he Olympian?

Marcus Sawyerr
In Taekwondo. So he was in Taekwondo so he was the first competitor for England, he fought in the Olympics, the European champion a few times. So that was one of the sports that I started doing when I was younger because of that.

Maren Kate
I didn't even know taekwondo was in the Olympics.

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah, in Seoul in 88 it was the first time it was in a demonstration and I was, not to date myself but probably will, I was four years old at the time so I remember it a little bit.

Maren Kate
Awesome. That's so cool. Okay, so how did you go from sales at LA Fitness in not LA, to how did you get into technology and, specifically, the talent side of things?

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah, absolutely. So at that time, there was a disruption happening, which was people no longer wanted to advertise in newspapers or magazines for job ads. There was even a disruption just more happening in the online space. So CareerBuilder came along and they were opening up a UK office and there was a cold calling opportunity so I applied for it. I think the recruiter probably wasn't that good because he gave me a chance. I got in and literally just worked my way up and every year for 10 years I got promoted and then I was Director of Europe for CareerBuilder. Which meant that I was interacting with a lot of the companies that we would purchase because we started to transform from online ads to more human capital software. And so I was getting into some of the AI spaces and learning more about the companies that we have brought on in Europe and spending time with those founders. And after that, again, I don't know how I got this but then I got an opportunity to run digital transformation for the largest recruitment company in the world, Adecco, and that really kind of set me up. I was one of the executives of a 30,000-employee company, buying and building, and investing in HR tech companies with teams all around the world and I just got to see a lot and got exposed really quickly. And yeah, that was a little bit about my journey.

Maren Kate
And so when did you start your first business? When did you start your first business yourself?

Marcus Sawyerr
So I started a Vegas concierge business. I want to say it was in 2008. So after making a lot of cold calls you get burnt out. So I thought the best way to revive myself, which I don't know what I was thinking, was to set up a travel business to go to Vegas as much as I could from England.

Maren Kate
Oh, that was a long flight.

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah, that was a long flight and it was, I mean, we were young, kind of having fun, and it was a lot of talk about multiple flights going to Vegas. It was one a week and then it was one a day, then it was two a day. So we would organize trips for my old football friends who actually made it into the Premier League. We’d organize their end-of-season trips. And so I was doing that and it was called Truly Visit and I've done that for a little bit and decided to go back into corporate. So I went back to CareerBuilder actually got promoted again when I came back in and kept that business running for a while. So that was my first I want to say taste of having an LLC or a real company, but there's been a lot of entrepreneurial activities throughout my life.

Maren Kate
So talk about EQ Community. How did you get the idea? What made you decide to take a dive back into founding something? Because I mean, there are different difficulties, obviously, between working for a company and starting a company but starting a company, as you know, it's kind of a 24/7 job. It's like you go to sleep thinking about it, you wake up thinking about it. So what made you take the plunge again?

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah, so I think I was built to do this. I was looking back on my record of achievement when I was in school and I'd written that I was either going to be a football player or running my own business. And going back to some of my family, some of them haven't worked solely for companies, they’ve either been kind of independent contractors or setting up their own deals. So in my mind, it was always like when I would do that again and I wanted to get enough experience in the corporate world to understand how to do things, and also how not to do things, quite frankly. So that was gearing me up and then specifically with EQ, I got to a point where I was at the top of a Fortune 500 company, a great company, learned a lot, saw a lot of things, and just looked around and there was just less and less people that looked like me the further up and higher up I got. I thought to myself, what was my experience in? I understand technology, I have deep recruiting expertise, and I'm passionate about helping people to thrive. And so what would that look like? And I really felt at the time that there was an opportunity to create and cultivate a community that can empower people to get to the next level. And that was really what made me think about EQ, and after many runs, and I was running a lot more than I usually do. So I run a little bit now and I was running every day and doing a lot of thinking, decided to take the plunge at the right time. Because I thought I would set up a company and just go for it.

Maren Kate
That's awesome. And then when I'm looking at it, like, tell us about where you started and where you are now. Obviously, it looks like you have to request to join. What's the profile of your community members? And then what have you seen is the biggest benefit that people are getting from being part of this?

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah, yeah. I appreciate the question. So how it started, it was with my small network, friends, and family, like really, really small and that was to see what it would look like to be part of a community that would be online. On the business side, one of the things after allocating a lot of capital to companies, I spent six hundred 30 million in two years, I'd noticed that there was a trend of companies not really figuring out how they make money and I kind of despised that. So I was like, well, let me figure out a business model first and then I'll kind of back into what the approach would be and I was working with smart people, right, and as you probably have throughout the years and you meet with people, you discuss things, and there's something to be said for being resourceful really early when you don't actually need to be. And after consulting with some venture capital firms and private equity firms I was helping them with their DE&I pledges and what I found is everybody said they wanted to do something about DEI but did not know how. So it was a combination of okay, what would that business model look like and I believe that hiring in at the mid to senior level is one of the biggest changes that you can have with DEI if you're serious about it. So we cultivated a beta community of mid to senior executives. It started with really small, like really, really small, like less than 60 people, and then got to a point where it just kept growing and growing and growing and we got more and more referrals. We built out the database and built out the infrastructure around the talent piece. When the individuals come to the platform we make it feel like a family like you're part of someone. Our members describe it as a safe place. They describe it as a place where they can have interactions and meet like-minded people that will help them progress to the next level. So the recruiting piece is kind of secondary to that and we cultivate this membership that allows a sense of belonging to help you to get to the next level.

Maren Kate
I love that you started with the business model. So I'm on my third business at this point and I realized, three businesses in, that starting with the business model first and then letting everything else flow from that is the best way to start. And it's definitely not the Silicon Valley model or it's at least not the one that's like the press version but at the same time it's a smarter way to start something and it takes a little more discipline too so I love that you approach it from that. And then the other point where you said that all these companies are making pledges around diversity and inclusion but, at the same time, people don't really know how to act on that. I mean, I actually think we have a lot of clients that will tell us when we're onboarding to help them hire because we work with startups that are hiring, that it's really important that they build a diverse team from the ground up but usually people don't necessarily exactly know what that means or don't have that defined. It's just usually more of the idea, which is great to have the idea, but being able to actually back into what does that actually means. What does that actually look like and how are we going to measure success, like, whether we've succeeded or failed in our diversity goals? It seems a lot fuzzier. So in terms of that, especially coming from what you're building at EQ Community, how do you define diversity? And how do you think of diversity inclusion? Like how do you feel when a company is actually doing it well versus when it's kind of an empty promise?

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah, absolutely. So there's two things that spring to mind and one is the work that I was doing with digital transformation and then you've got diversity. So I've got the two Ds, digital and diversity, and I think if you don't do any of those as a company you're gonna die. It's that simple and it's around transformation. And so how do you see diversity? What lens do you see it through? Do you see it as a box-ticking exercise and it's a nice thing to do and we want to help each other? Or do you actually see diversity as a superpower? And so we talk a lot about the fact that D is a superpower. If you look at the world's best-performing companies, they're diverse in nature and whether that is from working in multiple countries and multiple languages or just understanding nuances. They have to be diverse because of the customers that they serve. So I think if you've got a significant and serious ambition, being diverse is a secret weapon that people don't talk about. And I always liken it back to sports teams, again which is, on a team you need people to play in different positions and you need different perspectives. And if we're all sitting around a boardroom and you're sitting on one end and I'm sitting on the other end and you've got two people in the middle on either side parallel, we want to identify an object in the middle of the table, we need each other in order to do that. So diversity is a company's biggest target. And I think the narrative so far has been its good, in theory, it's nice to do it, it's a box-ticking exercise, but people don't know why they're really doing that. So we spend a lot of time on that with the companies helping them understand that. The ones that get it get it and they're off to the races.

Maren Kate
How do you think about, like, so it's funny, we recorded a podcast right before this with a woman who has a company called Localized Learning, which is awesome, and they help companies hire, and this is not more senior talent this would be more junior talent, hire people right out of university but right out of the universities all over the world, especially in up and coming emerging markets. So, Syria, Sierra Leone, Turkey, and we were talking about how, in theory, people want the best talent but then they look at the lens of the best talent in North America versus expanding it out. So how do you think diversity ties into the ability to hire people globally? And what is the difference between? I'm just curious, like, do you see that actually helping spur diversity on or is it better to focus on, or is it better to focus on….I don't know where I'm going with this but I'm curious what your thoughts are on that?

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah. So if we look at just geography as a whole, one thing I've learned, well many things I’ve learned about living in the US from the UK. Like the US is vast, huge. What's the population? Like 325 million, something around that, and in the UK I think is 69 million, and so what that means is that each state ultimately even the way you see it governed is generally its own island sometimes and so just take in that before we go globally for a second. So now if you're a bit more open-minded to where the talent has to be based, let's say you're not remote-first but your working hybrid, so instead of you recruiting just from your local, local, local market, let's say in Boston or just picking an area randomly, you can now maybe go a little bit further like Atlanta. You're gonna get a different talent pool so there's an advantage to doing that. Now, globally, I think, yeah, there's absolutely opportunities to do that but you need some kind of conduit between the organization and those individuals to translate not language but also cultures as well. And so I think that's somewhat of a challenge in terms of how business is done. And some companies do that really well, make every effort to do that. And I think companies also do that will get the best talent and a lot of times it's at the lowest cost as well. And there's a benefit to that but there's also a problem with that, as well, because it has to be relative to that market. So if you're getting talent and lowest cost in one area but they're living really well because relatively to live it doesn't cost as much. I think that's a net positive.

Maren Kate
Yeah, where can it be a win-win?

Marcus Sawyerr
Right. Exactly. And I think you're starting to see that with a lot of the policies that companies have brought on. Airbnb just started a work anywhere policy which you probably saw, right, and that gives a ton of flexibility for people. As you know, in your space, in a recruiting space as we are, if we can give people access to more talent globally, we can actually hire people quickly and more effectively. But the question is, internally, do you have the ability to manage that?

Maren Kate
Yeah. Do you have the systems, do you have the setup? For sure. So how do you approach hiring internally for EQ Community? I mean, you've obviously been at Adecco, you've been at CareerBuilder, and you have had deep experience both on the big company side and now on the startup side. I'm curious what the best practices you've brought to bear at your own company, what that looks like.

Marcus Sawyerr
So I really look at competencies and traits. Obviously, there's a fit in terms of the function that you need, so the skills that are required, but outside of that it's your ability to be agile and learn. I think the adaptability pieces and then that kind of grit piece. If you can pick things up really quickly, especially in a startup, it will allow you to grow with that organization. So that's just kind of a cool piece. How we approach it, in fact, we've been I don’t want to say fortunate but a lot of the folks we have hired have been in our community. I’ll give you an example. There was one person who was a high school algebra math teacher at like 20 years old and he wanted to get into data science and so he put it out on the community. We saw that, we had him do a few events, we have conversations. We were like, “You know, we'll give you a shot”. And we knew that he knew maths, we knew he could figure it out and we just gave him access to a lot and he's an absolute wizard. And so it's like understanding that and then giving that time but we're in a different position to maybe some of the larger companies that need people now now now. So the pressure is quite different.

Maren Kate
I like that though. What do you call that talent? I actually think that's one of the levers or superpowers that startups can leverage that big companies maybe don't have the ability to as much. It's not like you call it like what is it, emerging economies. It's not emerging talent. It's making a shift from one bucket to another. We have a PM at Avra, he was a graduate of Oxford. He had graduated just during the pandemic so he was super unfortunate where he didn't get to spend the last six months in university, yada, yada, but obviously a really smart guy and graduated with a degree in entrepreneurship, which always makes me giggle, and business but he really wanted to be in product. And so we took the chance on him where I was like, listen, I'm gonna dump all this stuff on you around product and product management, and you work with us for, you know, a year or two and that will be you're bouncing off board to go get into product management at a larger company with more of a true product team than like an entrepreneur at a smaller company. And he has been absolutely excellent. And recently he actually got a job offer that he couldn't refuse at an awesome tech company. And I'm like if I could continue to hire people like that, that are that emerging talent like, that's, I don't know. What do you even define that type of talent is? That seems like an interesting business model in and of itself.

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah. So the word that springs to mind is cultivation because you're ultimately cultivating that talent. Maybe we can come up with a phrase, right, and coin it.

Maren Kate
Yes, seriously. But what are the traits? Like they're probably traits, regardless, if it's someone coming out of university regardless if it's someone who's in their 40s or 50s and they're making like a complete career shift. There's definitely specific traits that no matter what you have to have those traits for it to work regardless if you're going from sales to customer support or if you're going from bartending to entrepreneurship. I know you touched on them. You said the ability to learn. What are some other traits that you think are really important?

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah, I almost think it's grit, capacity, and humility. The grit is you've been able to kind of get up and go. The capacity is for you to take things on and understand them. And then the humility is that you're just willing to learn at all costs. And I think when you have those traits the world is your oyster because you don't know what you don't know and I think people that are aware of that their learning just accelerates a lot faster than others that may have been in one position or one role for a long period of time that think they know it all.

Maren Kate
I'm gonna break those down even a little bit more because this is so interesting. So how do you define grit? And how do you test for this when you're bringing someone on your team? Or helping a company do it?

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah. So I think I think people's adversity throughout their life gives you some idea of what they've had to overcome. And so you can really understand. It doesn't mean it has to be the kind of traditional hard life, couldn't afford this and blah, blah, but there are things that everybody goes through. Doesn't matter how much you have economically or not and it's like, how do you deal with those situations, right? If you're a single father or a single mother and you've got two kids and they're running around and you managed to provide for them for a period of time and you still went to school, you still want to work, now that's kind of alleviated and you don't have that. That person can overcome something. So I think understanding that, in a background, that journey is somewhat of a barometer for that. But then, you also don't need people that have had to have gone through this hardship. It's all sort of problem-solving. How do you approach things? What's your mindset? Do you feel that this is super hard and I can't do it? Or do you think there's always gonna be a way. I don't know what the way is right now but I'm gonna figure it out. I think grit is a lot about problem-solving.

Maren Kate
That’s grit, yep. I think that's very true. And you're right, everyone has gone through something whether it's health-related, economic-related, whatever, and being able… Probably an interview question, there's definitely questions that can be crafted around that and getting a sense of do they just deflate and do they let life happen to them, or do they have the grit and the problem-solving mindset to be able to find a workaround? Okay, so then what about capacity? Is that kind of role-specific or is it more general?

Marcus Sawyerr
Well, I feel like it's understanding concepts, especially in the service business, because a lot of the things we talk about you can't see and that's why we have to name them. And we name them something and then understanding them and then being able to go back into the toolkit when you're ready. I was talking to my little sister today. So I got three sisters. One's a Director of HR. She got bought out by a big kind of global conglomerate and she knows what she's doing and she's been around. And one of them's an actress and she's a straight-A student. And my other sister, I was talking to her today this morning, and she is an 18-year-old Python Developer and she's going to Oxford University to study philosophy. And she call me this morning to talk about trading crypto. But she was asking me like, “What do you do”? Because before she was selling like Yeezys on eBay.

Maren Kate
Just a hustler. Good for her.

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah, she's an absolute hustler. Now the other thing, I have a brother and my brother was 15 at the time when he had a brain aneurysm and those two are really, really close. So he's 21 years old now and she's had to help him through that because they were the closest age. So she's seen all of that and he's still not in a situation where he's fully functioning, can't see. He was playing football and had a brain aneurysm. And so I look at my little sister, and I say that's capacity. She's able to take on like five or six different things, take on some kind of trauma with our little brother, and still get stuff done. And so it's not that you have to be super. There are people like that that exist. So yeah, that's a biased perspective from my standpoint with a bit of recency bias because I had the conversation earlier today.

Maren Kate
Yeah, I liked the word, like, what you said about ability. The ability to just get stuff done. And then the last one, humility, because you're definitely right that you can have grit, you can have the capacity, and often what I've seen is that sometimes, especially if you have a few wins early on or maybe you've been in one role at one place for a long time, people can probably, not even realizing it, develop that, like, my way or the highway, that kind of intellectual inflexibility. And so you could have those two things that have maybe brought you some success but if you don't have that humility, it will be very hard to, I mean, if there's inflexibility at some points things always break.

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah, I think that what got you here won't get you there. There's a book I think, it's been a while…So, the skills that you need….It's like hiring, right, the skills that you need to bring people in versus keeping them are different. Like, there has to be a good environment. So the skills that get you in that position, did you interview well, do people like you, do they think that you can be a leader? And then what's gonna keep you is, how do you bring others along the journey with you, whatever journey you're going on or whatever journey you're trying to help people on? So that humility is, I can learn from everyone. And once you get your head around that, every time you ask a question you don't ask a question to give people a response, you ask a question because you want to listen and understand. And there's a difference and I think people appreciate that. Take myself personally, when you go into management, because I was a cold caller, hardcore cold caller, and you go into management because you're the top performer. You don’t really learn those skills until you speak to people. And I think teams support a lot of that as well so whether it's sports clubs or things that you're part of, your own community and being members of that and helping each other out. I think that drives a lot of humility and that's an underlooked skill. And I’ve kind of put that all together under the banner of EQ, right, which is emotional intelligence. I think if you have those things it's a really powerful…

Maren Kate
Combination.

Marcus Sawyerr
Exactly. Exactly.

Maren Kate
And then I would assume that whether you're hiring an executive or if you're taking a chance, like you mentioned, on the data scientists that was the algebra teacher, those need to be there regardless. Because if you hire an executive that doesn't have that humility they won't be able to mesh into your culture and probably will cause more damage than aid and if you don't have that grit or that ability then it also won't work. So it seems like these traits, regardless, are really important to have and to filter for, and then you're just figuring out what the right seat for them is.

Marcus Sawyerr
I think the thing about culture is, you can look at it a few ways. Is somebody going to destroy your culture? As you mentioned, are they going to mesh to it or they can add to it? Because a lot of companies define culture really early on and they need to evolve that culture. So thinking about people that can bring that and take it to the next level is really important. So to your point, at that executive level, it's even more important that they have that level of humility because they say you can't teach an old dog new tricks so they may be a little bit further gone. At least if you've got somebody at entry-level and they're trying to figure it out over time they'll get there. And also they have a senior level, they have an outweighed impact on the organization because they have teams, peers, decisions that they're making. Are you making them in the right way to impact the rest of that organization? So I think executive level, it's even more important.

Maren Kate
Yeah, I like will they harm or hurt your culture? I actually just made a note to add that to our internal recruiting because I don't think there are people that are just net neutral when it comes to culture. I think they're either actively adding to it or they're actively detracting from it. What are your thoughts on that?

Marcus Sawyerr
No, I agree. I agree. I think that about anything in life because it's never going to level set it, right? To your point, it's going to either add to or deduct it and whether it's 0.001 or one point it's not possible for it to be zero. So you've got to determine what side are those people on, right? So a little bit of a math equation.

Maren Kate
I love that. I love when we're doing an interview and I'm like taking notes. I have three pages of notes just from us talking. That's so cool. Okay, so I have some random final questions. I just always love asking these. First of all, what is the tech stack that you rely on at EQ Community and in working with some of the companies that you work with? What is the tech stack you rely on for hiring?

Marcus Sawyerr
For hiring, so one of the companies that I rave about, so we don't have an internal ATS or a CRM that is off the shelf, we actually built that and we built that through using AirTable.

Maren Kate
Really?

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah. So we’re end to end usually in AirTable. So I love AirTable. They actually offer me like a, yesterday they sent me a survey and I gave them a 10 out of 10 because I just love how flexible it is.

Maren Kate
They love you.

Marcus Sawyerr
Well, yeah, hopefully. I mean, we don't pay them that much as well. That's the other thing, right? I definitely think you can do a lot with AirTable.

Maren Kate
Why did you build your own versus using something off the shelf?

Marcus Sawyerr
We had some pilots with some things off the shelf, actually. When we first started because of, I suppose, my background were going a little bit more than the job board route. So we were advertising a lot more jobs and so we tried a few different platforms that were good for that. But as we felt we were more on the exec search side it was all about the data flows. So how do you manage the data through your marketing, through the resumes, the pausing, as well as the community. So we needed something that was flexible and we've integrated with AWS as well. So AirTable and AWS are key.

Maren Kate
Okay, and then in terms of, so you run your own ATS which is awesome, what product or tool do you personally rely on the most to do your best work sans your phone or your computer?

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah, it's gonna be pretty boring.

Maren Kate
Is it going to be AirTable again?

Marcus Sawyerr
No, no, no, no, it won't be that boring. I love new tools, like, I'll try anything and I've got this spreadsheet in AirTable of all the things we've tried. So if somebody comes back and said, hey you should try this. We've tried this and this was the rating and so we have to rate every tool we’ve used.

Maren Kate
Oh, that’s smart.

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah, so I love doing it so I've got a full list. Anybody on our team can decide to choose anything, especially with a free trial, and then we see if it works. And we put it into an experimentation bucket. We don't integrate it immediately. So I'll try anything and then move it over. So I think the things that we like right now are quite boring because they save a lot of time. It's a lot of the calendar stuff, right? For some things we use Calendly but for some things, we use Calendar Hero. And they used to be a one called Amy AI that I loved.

Maren Kate
I remember that.

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah, it got discontinued, which I was a bit sad about because it used to save a lot of time.

Maren Kate
So, Calendly and Calendar Hero?

Marcus Sawyerr
Calendar Hero, yeah.

Maren Kate
I gotta check that out. We use Calendly a lot but I've never heard of Calendar Hero.

Marcus Sawyerr
We use Calendly for a lot of the internal kind of candidate stuff and some of the recruiters use that but Calendar Hero for the client stuff because you can almost put an AI EA into the conversation and they can continue to drive things forward.

Maren Kate
Cool. That's awesome. We'll have to check that out. And then what is your favorite podcast or book from the last year? It doesn't have to be work-related.

Marcus Sawyerr
Yeah. So podcasts, I listened to a ton of different podcasts.

Maren Kate
Me too. What is the player you use?

Marcus Sawyerr
I use Apple. So yeah, I use Apple Podcasts. And so it's anything from there's one that I really like called Trapital.

Maren Kate
What is it?

Marcus Sawyerr
Trap-i-tal. It's by a guy called Dan Runcie and he breaks down the business dynamics of hip hop. So all of the deals that people are doing, why they structured deals, stuff they're doing in Web3, stuff they're doing in NFT. He breaks all that down. I think he does a really good job. And then there are some that I just listened to all the time. Like, I’ll listen to Founder’s Journal, This Week in Startups.

Maren Kate
Yeah. Calacanis.

Marcus Sawyer
Yeah, exactly.

Maren Kate
How I built This is so good.

Marcus Sawyer
Yeah. How I Built This is really cool. I thought I had run out of episodes but I think I’m missing the latest one.

Maren Kate
I think they're actually reusing old ones because I've started to hear some old ones again. Okay, and then lastly, also very importantly, how can people find out more about EQ Community and yourself?

Marcus Sawyerr
So if you're an individual and you want to find out more about EQ Community and you feel like you fall within the bracket of being a mid to senior-level executive you can apply to be part of the community on EQ dot community. So it's really simple. And if you're a company and you want to learn more it's just my name on LinkedIn, Marcus Sawyerr with two Rs. I'm pretty... I try to be…

Maren Kate
Good about LinkedIn.

Marcus Sawyerr
I try to have a balance with a lot of the platforms and that was like kind of one of the main reasons we built ours but I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn. Sometimes I'm on Twitter, sometimes I'm not.

Maren Kate
That’s kind of how I approach it too. Awesome, Marcus, this is so enjoyable. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Marcus Sawyerr
Well, thanks for having me. I really, really appreciate it and, yeah, it was a lot of fun.