Why great leadership starts with listening

- Hello everyone and welcome. I am Chris Hyams, CEO of Indeed, and welcome to the next episode of "Here to Help." This is our look at how Indeed has been navigating the global impact of COVID-19. Today is October 4th. We're on day 580 of global work from home. Since 2015 at Indeed, we have been running an immersive innovation program for our new college grads in technology that we call Indeed University, or IU for short, and IU has three primary objectives. First, to instill our core value of data-driven decision-making, not through listening and reading but through building and launching new products and technology to help people get jobs. Second, as a leadership development program for rising stars in our tech organization who serve as the leads and deans of IU. And, third, to solve real problems and build new innovative technology. Last week, Indeed U 2021, our seventh cohort, wrapped up and this year, for the first time, the focus of Indeed U was on helping Indeed with our own hiring. My guest today is Laurie Williams, a Senior Product Manager at Indeed and Laurie was a lead last year for Indeed U 2020 and this year was one of the two deans responsible for Indeed U 2021. Laurie, thank you so much for joining me today.

- Thanks for having me, Chris.

- Let's start off where we always start these conversations by asking you, how are you doing today right now?

- Chris, I'm amazing. So, IU wrapped up. All our participants have their placements and I go on PTO tomorrow and so it's a really good day for me.

- That is fantastic to hear. Well, let's start. We're going to talk a lot about Indeed University. But, let's talk a little bit about your job at Indeed and how day to day you help people get jobs.

- Yeah, for sure. So, outside of Indeed University, I am normally attached to internal platforms and my journey at Indeed started with a business unit called revenue systems and, revenue systems, they essentially manage the billing for some of our paid services. Rev systems, a lot of business units and IP is going through this really cool transition right now where we have this great system that worked perfectly for what we needed it to at the time and, now that we have grown, we have to sort of rearchitect and kind of break down the monolith so that we are able to scale the business. After that, I spent some time on CRM, which comes up a lot in your Q&A's and they are also going through the same thing, right? So, we had this awesome homegrown platform named Ad Central and it worked perfect for what we needed to at the time. But, now, we've gotten so big that we have to sort of move over to something that is more scalable. And so, one of the sayings that you'll often hear in internal platforms is we help the people that help the people get jobs and so we do that by making our systems scalable so that we can continue to grow so that we can help more people get jobs.

- So, in my intro, I mentioned that you were the Dean of Indeed University this year. Can you explain a little bit more about what Indeed University is and what is the job of the Dean?

- Yeah, sure, so, Indeed University is a 12 week project-based, onboarding program for new college grads. For a lot of them, this is their first job. They already have a skill set, right? So, as an example, for an engineer, they already know how to code. So, we're not teaching them anything like that. What we are teaching them though is some of our values and principles at Indeed. So, how do we make data-driven decisions? How do we think about problems? So, within those 12 weeks, we give them a theme or sort of a problem area which, this year, was internal hiring. They have that time to sort of do their own research, sit with some users, and then each cross functional team, so we had nine of them this year gets to decide what specific problem space they want to focus on. They come up with their hypothesis around this and then they get to spend the rest of the time trying to sort of prove that out or to learn that maybe this wasn't the right direction, but we learned a thing. The biggest goal of IU is to learn. You only fail if you fail to learn. There is no real failing. We actually love it when people fail because that means that you've learned something. As the Dean, so, I work a lot with those teams and I work a lot with the leads this year, which is a little bit different than last year where I focused specifically on the teams that I was assigned to. This year, I had the cool opportunity of also being able to work more directly with some of the new leaders that we have at Indeed.

- So, you were a lead last year, which meant that you were responsible for a couple of teams. You came back as the Dean this year, along with your your partner Rahul, running the entire program. Last year was an incredibly challenging Indeed University. So, we were kicking this off, really, in the early days of the pandemic. We ended up delaying the start and moving it back because we had no idea how we were going to get people work together. We had to figure out how to run this program that had been an immersive cohort, throw everyone into the same room together for 12 weeks, and do it all remotely with people still living in their parents' basements or wherever they were and, after all of that, you decided to come back and do it all over again this year. Can you talk about how the pandemic changed the work of Indeed University and how it was structured?

- Yeah, absolutely. So, I'll answer your first question first, which is why did I come back? And the short answer is that I love Indeed University. I want to tell you my favorite thing about it, and we don't talk about this a lot, but this program builds confidence. It builds confidence for participants. Oftentimes this is their first job, right? And they're, obviously, top performers or they wouldn't be here at Indeed but, if you think back to your first job, you were probably a little bit nervous, a little bit vulnerable, and we create this safe environment for them where they can learn and grow and it's this really cool transformation for the participants where you see them come in and they're a little bit shy and they're a little bit shaky and then, by the end of the program, they're just so smooth and so confident and, this year, I also got a chance to work with the leads where you see the same thing. A lot of the leads, this is the first time they have ever been a people manager or lead people, right? And kind of the same thing, right? So, Rahul and I look for certain signals when hiring, right? We wanted people that were compassionate, empathetic, and that got a lot of joy from seeing others grow and seeing success through others and so it's really cool to kind of see them. Everyone's nervous. The first day jitters, right? But, then, by the end of it, they're just so confident and that's a really cool feeling. As far as your second question, how did the pandemic change the work we were doing and how IU was structured? So, to your point, we used to all sort of fly to an area and then hang out a whole bunch and that was really cool. This year, it's a little bit more of a challenge kind of given that we're on Zoom a lot and so there's an awesome advantage to being able to just sort of be around people and to just learn by overhearing conversations and so that's something that we had to look for ways to sort of compensate for. Probably another big difference and I actually really love this is, so, last year and this year, too, our themes have been very sort of focused and relevant, right? And, in my opinion, it gives people sort of a rally cry, right? And I know we'll talk about last year later on, but we were in the middle of the pandemic and we were doing things that were actually helping some of the people that had maybe lost their job as part of COVID and that was a really cool and uniting feeling for everyone that was in IU.

- You kind of hinted at this when the first, I guess, five iterations of Indeed University, the program was really open to just any idea at all that you have for anything as long as it's helping people get jobs and that led to a lot of creativity. But, I'm a big believer that constraints force more innovation and creativity. When you put some sort of guardrails around something that people have to come up with really interesting ideas around them and so this year's focus specifically was around helping Indeed with our own hiring and there were a number of different ideas that came up around how we're doing scheduling and coordination, but also things like reducing bias in the hiring process and how to improve the candidate experience. Can you talk about how this year's class who had just been through being recruited themselves, how did they make the switch to the other side and approach thinking about these different problems?

- Yeah, absolutely. So, I'll kind of talk about the scheduling and coordination piece first. So, to your point, they were all somewhat familiar with that because they had just been on the other side. But, as you know, and a lot of the folks at Indeed know, right now we have some super aggressive hiring goals, right? We can't hire fast enough and so these IUers were, we just sort of started to shadow and they would just sit with a recruiter or a coordinator and just kind of be a fly on the wall. Like, "Let me just watch what you do and let me ask some questions." And something really interesting sort of emerged in the coordination space. One of the coordinators had shared that she actually leaves interviews on the table every day, meaning I should have scheduled these interviews, but I couldn't because I ran out of time because this process is so cumbersome and it's also so error prone, right? And you would think something like scheduling an interview, it's one of those things you kind of take for granted, and it's like, "Surely that's easy to do?" But, it's actually a lot more complex, especially on the tech side of the org when we need to find calibrated interviewers and we have panels and things like that. So, one of the teams sought to start to solve that problem and they effectively, the product's called Skywalker. It's very cool! They effectively automated a lot of this process and it reduced the time that it takes a coordinator to schedule an interview by 25 to 50% and so that was just a really cool sort of way to sort of approach and solve that problem. As far as the second question you asked about reducing bias, we had a specific team that was super interested in how do we reduce bias, specifically unconscious bias, from our hiring pipeline, right? So, we have a whole pipeline and they chose to focus on the very top of this funnel with resume screening. So, the hypothesis is there's certain information that may have some unconscious bias attached to it. As an example, gender, maybe nationality. You get to deeper into stuff like schools, location, and they started with gender. And so, the hypothesis is, if we blind any information that might tell me someone's gender, would we see more representation in that second pile than we would when we don't blind that information? And this team did a ton of work in this space and the results that, we need a little bit more data before we can conclusively feel that we have an answer to this. But, I think some of the cool things that sort of came from that, and Chris, I know you talked about it, but it really sparked a lot of conversations between you and Lowell and you and Scott Bono, who is our VP of Talent Acquisition, who kindly offered to take this project and move it forward after IU.

- One of the great parts about IU, and I always describe it at the start when I meet with the whole cohort, that this is really my favorite time of year at Indeed. It's my favorite thing and I have been involved in every single Indeed U and meet with every single one of the teams on a regular basis and then, at the end, they get to come and pitch to the senior leaders their project if they've discovered something that they feel like we should continue to invest in. Can you talk a little bit about some of the pitches that came out at the end and what stuck with you?

- Yeah, so, first off, all the pitches were awesome. It's really cool to watch. But, some of the ones that stuck with me: We have five teams that are actually going to, their product will live on outside of IU. They'll go to their teams. But, of course, the resume blinding one. We had one, Skywalker, so the coordination tool. There was another team who cleverly named themselves Badger because they remind people like, "Hey, you haven't responded to this interview request" and then also starting to track that information. So, there were some really interesting ones within that space are really innovative ways to think about the problem. But, again, to your point, Chris, one of my favorite moments and I feel really privileged to be there. They all did such a great job and it reminds me, and I felt this way last year too, I coached my son's baseball team. And this is the first year he's play baseball and we would go in between games and practice. I would just throw it to him and just some batting practice and I remember one of the games we were at after we had practiced a good bit, he made contact with the ball and just cracked it out of the park. It was beautiful and I had that same feeling whenever I'm watching the IUers do their pitch. I feel pride is an understatement for the way I feel, it feels like my heart is going to come out of my chest. It was just really incredible.

- That's beautiful. So, the focus, as I said at the start and you reinforced, really that the number one goal is on instilling this idea of how to use data to make decisions. But, as you also pointed out, it's really about learning, learning new things for both the participants and for the leaders. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about the sort of learning environment of Indeed University?

- Yeah, so, Chris, again, I think that one of the value props of Indeed University is it's a very safe environment, right? You have a lot of support. It's totally okay to fail. Failure isn't failure. It's learning, right? And then, for a lot of folks, let's just look at our participants. A lot of these folks, they just got out of college and they've been hand-selected the same way that our leads have, right? Our leads are shooting stars at Indeed and so we know that both of these groups have the potential to do well and then we put them into an environment to where they can take that potential and marry it up with opportunity. I was actually thinking the other day that what I see both leads and participants go through reminds me of, in the Army, they have these confidence courses and one of the exercises you do in the confidence course, it's a 30 foot tower and you have to climb to the top and then go over the top and then go back down and I remember getting there and looking at that thing and saying, "Uh-uh, that's not me." There's no way, but then you do it and then you're like, "Wow, I did that! Who knows what I can do!" And you kind of see that same thing happen. There's a little bit of nerves. I think I can do it. And then they have an opportunity to prove to themselves that they can actually do it and so they have the potential, they have the opportunity, and then they're able to prove it to themselves that they can do it and so then they have the confidence.

- you just sort of slipped a bit of information in there. I'd love to actually talk a little bit more about it. So, to step aside from IU for a second, you have, like my career, a little bit of a nonlinear path getting to where you are today. Can you talk a little bit about how you got to tech and, in particular, you mentioned about your military service?

- Yeah, absolutely. So, I will walk you through a little bit of my career and then what I want to do is just kind of share some of the lessons that I learned going through my career up until this point. So, I served in the military. I was in the army from 2000 to 2004 and my first duty station was in South Korea about 50 miles south of Seoul and I was stationed there for about a year, excuse me. I was stationed there for about a year and then after returning to The States quickly deployed to Kuwait in response to the 9/11 attacks under Operation Enduring Freedom. So, in the Army, everybody is a soldier first. And so, in that context, I was a soldier that was part of the Chaplain Corps, who was trained to look out for the psychological and spiritual needs of the unit in which I was attached to. So, in Kuwait, one thing to kind of share is that a lot of soldiers are very young, right? A lot of them joined right out of high school. They're the age of maybe the last IU cohort, early twenties. A lot of them have new families. They are newly married and they are faced with feelings of their own mortality, in those environments especially, and oftentimes feelings of loneliness because they're separated from their families for such a long time and communication can be very difficult when you are deployed and so, in that context of my job, the first lesson that I learned, Chris, was that listening is the most important part. In those situations, you can imagine someone having those feelings and they're totally valid and, also, there really isn't very much advice you're going to be able to give someone that's going to make that feel different. Those are real feelings and I found that the best way to serve someone is for them to feel heard and seen and for someone to witness their experience. The second lesson that I learned while being in the military is people are your greatest assets. So, the Army had this really interesting way of looking at soldiers. They saw them as assets, no different than their tanks and their helicopters and, from their perspective, we paid money to recruit you and we paid money to train you and to clothe you and to feed you and to house you and they want their asset to be taken care of and their expectation is that their leaders would take care of that asset the same way that they would take care of a helicopter or a tank. I'm going to fast forward a little bit and talk about my time with Zappos. So, after the military, from 2005 to 2013, I joined Zappos and, at the time, it was a super small startup, right? I don't remember how many people were there. But, I remember that we fit on one floor of a small building and you could stand up and pretty much see everybody and, while I was there, Zappos was kind of getting a lot of attention for being a really happy place to work and it was in the "Fortune" 500s and people would do interviews and they would always ask the question, "What makes this place so happy?" And the answer that was often given was our culture. So, the question is, what is culture? A culture is values plus behaviors, right? And the value that I feel like really kind of made that such an awesome place to work, because I was truly happy when I worked there, was there was 360 psychological safety and what I mean by psychological safety is everybody feels safe to say, "I don't get it. I need help. I made a mistake." And, Zappos was also a very traditional startup in the sense that, one, it's very expensive to run brick and mortars and we could barely make enough money to stay afloat and my opinion is that the reason that Zappos was able to be successful up until the Amazon acquisition was because you would not believe how much work you can get done when you're not thinking about any of the things, right? When you're not worried about, "Wait, I've got to pretend like I didn't just mess something up." Or, "I've got to pretend like I know something when I actually don't." And so, you just get work done, right? And so, that brought me to my second lesson, which was psychological safety makes people go. Moving forward a little bit, after Zappos, I spent a few years at a company called Riot Games. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Riot, they make a game called "League of Legends," "Legends of Runeterra," and "Valorant." And I met some of the most talented people that I've ever met while I worked at Riot Games and Riot is very similar to Indeed or Google in the sense that they hired for top talent, right? So, they would get the best illustrators, the best animators, the best game designers. And I, also, unfortunately, that was the first time I ran into toxic leadership and if anyone is curious about what I mean, just Google "Riot Games culture," and you can kind of get an idea of some of the stuff that I was observing and experiencing. But, kind of going back to the way that the Army looked at its people's assets, Riot Games has all these assets that they have recruited and trained and they've paid top dollar for and I was observing how this toxic leadership was like pouring sugar into a gas tank of a Ferrari. You would have this high performer that all of a sudden was not able to operate anymore and so that kind of left me with a little bit of an obsession for understanding what does good leadership look like and what's important? And then, just kind of this image burned in my head of what happens when you not only have a void of good leadership, you have toxic leadership?

- So, one thing that's super interesting is so much of this job, well your job as a product manager, is, at its core, it's a tactical thing. But, really everything that we do is all about people and so you've had this interesting path and done different things. How does that broad set of experiences that you have you think served you as a Dean of Indeed University?

- Yeah. That's a good question. The thing that I have been thinking about a lot lately is, especially as a Dean, as a leader, and a leader of leaders, I used to have a fixed mindset. And so I believed that any skill you just kind of you're good at or you're bad at, right? You were probably always good at playing the drums, right? And that's not true. Leadership is a skill like any other skill, right? And if you want to grow it, you have to intentionally go out and you have to grow that skill, right? You have to put time into it, like working out. You got to work out that muscle, if you want it to grow. What I've observed is that what often happens is you have high-performing individual contributors and they just sort of rise up and then a reward for getting to a certain level is that you then become a people manager. But, there isn't oftentimes a signal that says like, "Hey, there's actually a new skill that you need to go learn." And so, oftentimes, what you'll find is a spectrum. There's a book I was reading recently called "The Manager's Path" and it describes that oftentimes a large majority of people, they don't necessarily have a bad manager. They have a benign manager. So, they're not hurting you. But, also, they're not doing anything to help either. So, that's a one end of the spectrum and, on the other end of the spectrum, is a manager that actually does a ton of damage. So, one of the things that we did in IU this year, so, in the past, we've had some leadership training around competency, sorry, compliance, sorry. And the compliance training was around, "Hey, this is what FMLA is and don't be weird." And this year we sort of added an additional element to it that was around, "Okay, here's some things that really matter as you're leading people. To be a good leader, you need to create psychological safety. This is what it is. This is why it matters. Here's some tips to do it. Here's some books that you can go read that can help you on your journey. This is what empathy is. This is why it matters. This is how to start to do that and here's some things that you can do to start to build out that skillset."

- I've had the pleasure of getting to work with Indeed U over all of these years. But, you have experience, at least in the last two years, and every class is definitely different and unique, and they they bring their own sort of set of perspectives and experiences. What struck you about this year of IU compared to what you've seen in the past?

- Yeah, good question. So, the similarities are, they're really awesome, just like the class was last year. I look at these participants and I think, "I don't think I looked like that when I was your age. I did not have it together like what you do." But, a thing that I've been thinking of a lot recently, and a lot of that I believe comes from, I have kids that are a part of Gen-Z and a lot of these participants are part of Gen-Z. I'm a millennial myself and then, Chris, you're probably, what, Gen-X?

- I'm solidly Gen-X.

- Awesome! So, I think it's very interesting that, so these are all blanket statements, right? They're generalizations. But, it was very interesting that your experience, which is informed by culture, at a certain age, where you are able to sort of take in new information, will influence your perspective on the world. And one of the things that I've noticed is that there's a slightly different perspective on things and I love that. I love the challenge of it and I want to just kind of call out a few things that I've noticed. And, again, these are generalizations. But, I've noticed that with a lot of Gen-Zers, they have a lot less tolerance for a lack of representation. They have a lot less tolerance for any kind of a bias and they're very aware of microaggressions. And so you can have a blind spot, right? But, the thing I want to talk about are more like blurry spots. So, I want to give you an example. There's been several times in my career and I've noticed this as of late. As an example, you're in a meeting. Someone says something and you just kind of have a feeling like something about that felt weird to me. Something felt off, but I don't have words for what that was so I'm certainly not going to say anything about it. And the thing is, they do though. They have words for it. They have a name for it. They'll call it out and they're not afraid to say it and I love this because it, one, gives me a language for whatever reason, that's a blind or blurry spot for me, it gives me a language. And then, also, it gives me courage because they're so courageous that I think I can be like them. I can speak up and say something.

- That's fantastic. So, last year around this time on "Here to Help," I had Heather Wood as a guest who was the dean of IU last year, one of the deans of IU last year and talking really about 'cause that was sort of the big pivot from how do we take something that we used to do in person and make it fully remote. We've talked about the fact that some of these, because you were fully remote this year, some of these issues carried over into this year. What were some of the impacts on this year's class of having to figure out how to work together remotely?

- Yeah, so, first off, hats off to Heather and Neek and Trace. They worked so hard. Last year, there was so much uncertainty and, from my perspective, at a minimum, they carved a path and it's like, "If you just follow this path, you're going to be okay and then if you want to do some improv along the way, that's fine, but here's a path for success." And so, I'm super grateful that they did that. They also took a lot of time to capture learnings and make sure that this class and myself that we were all aware of it. But, some of the things that I think persist, and this is, of course, a barrier with technology is communication is hard, right? So much of our communication comes from just overhearing a conversation or running into someone in the hallway. It's more informal and those are hard to do. On Zoom, you're setting up a direct call. You have to have your questions ready. You can't just run into someone in the break room on Zoom. And, the other thing, and this was really, this came up a lot in the views, but people really had this deep desire to be able to connect to the other people that were part of the program, to connect in, I guess, more of a traditional way of just being around another human being and this experience of IU it's so jam packed and it's so intense that you end up having this bond with people that you really just kind of want to appreciate in a different way, right? And so, I know for me, mostly everyone that I met through IU, I've only ever known them on Zoom. So, you have this desire of, "I really just want to see 'em." And I've seen two people that I went to IU with and it's such an awesome feeling. I don't really even know how to compare it to anything else, but I know that for a lot of the participants and definitely for myself, I can't wait until we are able to share a meal or a coffee or just run into each other in the hallway.

- On a personal level, so you're a mother of four kids, can you talk a little bit about how the pandemic has affected you and your family personally?

- Yeah, I'd be happy to. First, though, I wanted to say that I loved the campaign that we did, I guess it was two years ago now, where it was our 15th anniversary and you got to upload a picture of yourself when you were 15. The picture that I uploaded was actually a picture of me and my wife when I was 15 and we didn't get married till way, way later. We were never in a relationship and then five years ago that happened and, three years ago, we got married and so I love the framing of the best is yet to come, right? I'm living that best right now. But, as far as having kids, so lots of people get into parenting gradually. You've got time to warm up and get ready for it. But, Stephanie and I got married and I became a mom right away to four kids and, naturally, your perspective starts to shift. You're usually thinking about yourself and maybe yourself and one other person. But, now, you're thinking about four other people that you're responsible for. So, there's a lot of feelings that I have that I feel like I probably wouldn't have felt as strongly before the pandemic. As an example, I feel grateful that I have job stability. I feel grateful that I have the kind of job where I can work from home and we have an option to have our kids homeschool if we're concerned about their health and safety at the school, right? Stephanie often reminds me that, so, before we were married, she was a single mom and this wouldn't have been an option for her, right? And then I also feel scared for their safety and wellbeing, right? So, it's a thing that you end up thinking about a lot.

- Thank you for sharing that. Well, I could keep talking for another hour easily. There's so much to cover. But, just to wrap up the way that I always like to bring these conversations to a close and sort of looking ahead, with all of the challenges and all of the extreme difficulties that people around the world have faced throughout this pandemic, what, from your perspective, has happened, or what have you experienced that gives you some optimism for the future?

- Yeah, so, the past 18 months, there's been a lot of things that are not awesome and it's super easy to kind of get focused on those things and forget about some of the good things. There's a quote and the quote is "The light shines in the darkness. The darkness does not overcome it." And I think about that a lot when I've seen people just doing some of the kindest things. I'll give you an example. My wife works in foster care and adoption and a couple of weeks ago I got to witness an adoption for this girl that was turning 18 in a week and, for context, when you turn 18, you've aged out of the adoption age, right? You can do an adult adoption, but it's very different, right? And, they did not care. They loved this girl. She was part of their family and they wanted to make it official. So, it's good to remember things like that. The second thing is one of my favorite shows that has gotten me through the pandemic is "Ted Lasso." I would highly recommend Season One. I wouldn't necessarily recommend Season Two. But, please watch it. It is super just sort of wholesome. And there's a lot of like great lines from it. But one of the lines he says is "Back home we have a saying, do you believe in miracles?" And the story I'm about to tell you makes sense if you do believe in miracles. So, about six months ago, when we were interviewing leads, our oldest kid, who's 14 and has some neurodiversity, had a moment of frustration and they left our house in the middle of the night and they told us that their goal was to just be gone for a couple hours and come home. But, they walked so far for so long that they got lost and they were missing for four days and, as a parent, it is just an unnerving feeling to wake up and realize that one of your children is gone, they're missing. And so, for four days, my wife and I are, we're doing our math and trying to figure out, how fast could they be walking? And we've created a perimeter and you're just driving up and down the roads, trying to find your kid, right? And we're showing pictures and talking to all their friends and we were really fortunate to have so many people that wanted to help us, right? They're sending food. "Let me help you find your kid." And one of the people that was so helpful is actually a Indeedian named Mindy Krupp. One thing you should know about Mindy is she's an absolute force of nature. If you want something done, give it to Mindy and just get it done. So, Mindy had been very helpful throughout this whole thing, but I want to talk about the last day. So, Mindy had offered to create flyers for us. And so, we're going to meet. We're going to start passing them out and she goes to print it and her home printer doesn't work. So, then she goes to Walgreens and Walgreens' printer doesn't work. So, now, she's got to go to Office Depot. She doesn't know where it's at. So, she's got her GPS pulled up and she's driving around trying to find it and it gets her into a parking lot and she was like, "This is all weird." And then it points down an alley and she looks down the alley and there's our kid and when we were reunited, we asked our kid, "We know that you left with $5, how have you been eating this whole time? Have you been starving? What's been going on?" And they told us that strangers have been giving them money, people in restaurants have been bringing them food. And so, the thing that makes me optimistic, Chris, is I do believe in the goodness of people and I do believe in miracles.

- Wow. That's an extraordinary story. Thank you for sharing that, Laurie and thank you for joining me today. What an amazing conversation. I really look forward to talking more and hearing more of these stories. But, thank you, also, just for everything that you do every day to help people get jobs.

- Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.