From Cricket to Copilot: Bill Khan's Path in Recruitment

Mark Smith: 0:32
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Sydney, Australia. He works as a managing consultant and the director of dynamo recruitment. Unusual for me to have a recruiter online, but I have known this guest for probably close to 10 years, so, uh, I'm interested in having this discussion. He has a vast network, of course, and a keen understanding of the industry, particularly the Australian market. He's a technical recruiter. Talent acquisition is a speciality. You can find links to his bio, socials etc. In the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Bill.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 1:27
Thank you for having me, mark. It's been almost 10 years now we've known each other, so thank you for firstly, taking the time out to have me on the podcast and secondly, for the opportunity to show you what I guess some people don't see, that happens behind the scenes.

Mark Smith: 1:41
Awesome Sounds good. First, I always like to start with food, family and fun. What do they mean to you? Tell us about your family, tell us about the best cuisine to eat in Australia and what do you do for fun?

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 1:54
So I'm born and bred in Penrith, new South Wales. So I'm, you know, true blue, but the background is half Pakistani, half Indian, so we get the best of both worlds when it comes to food. So good cricketer, yeah, any brown man will say they are, but anything to get away on the weekends though. But no, I've been doing this for about 10, 10, 11 years now on the recruitment side of things. So family's definitely been a, you know, a big factor in my life, because being a recruiter it can take up a lot of your time. But family is, you know, a big thing for me. I live in sydney, was here with my parents around the corner, always been very family orientated, and I think that kind of brings me into recruitment as well. In that sense is I'm always trying to think about how people are evolving within their family lives, because careers and family go pretty. You know they tie in together quite well.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 2:44
What do you do for fun, entertainment, cricket, hiking. I'm a massive gamer. I've always been a gamer. That's why I love my PCs. The real way to game is obviously on PCs, but obviously into my sports, my APL. I'm a Liverpool man Shout out Arnie Slott. But it's been good, it's been. You know hobbies-wise. It's just, I've got a two-year-old so you can understand my hobbies. I'll grant him. So what his hobbies are are my hobbies at the moment.

Mark Smith: 3:12
Nice, nice, and you were're gonna say about food yeah, food.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 3:14
I mean look, um, I'm pretty simple, I mean I'm a butter chicken man, but pakistani food obviously has that more afghani barbecue type mix. And then the indian is just, it's just explosion of flavors. But I've never been to india, but it's on my list for next year or the year after, hopefully. Um Shout out to anyone who wants to bring me over, but no, it's honestly so blessed I would say. My probably favorite dish is a dish called nihari, which is like a really thick beef stew or lamb stew, and that's pretty much my go-to which, over in New Zealand, I'm sure you could appreciate with the cold weather.

Mark Smith: 3:51
But yeah, very nice, very nice. Do you know that the only ethnic food that I can get locally and I'm talking about within 10 minutes of my house, because I live 40 minutes away from my local local town is indian food? That's all you need, mate what else do you need?

Mark Smith: 4:07
this is why you're happy man. Yeah, well, here's the thing. When I was growing up, I grew up in a place called bombay in new zealand, right, so you can imagine, with the name Bombay, what it was named after, and so a lot of my neighbors were Indian, and so from a very early age sub 10, I was exposed to Indian food, when the concept of going and eating out was a total foreign thing 40 years ago.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 4:33
So, yeah, I can just imagine you would have been like this is just explosion of flavours. I mean, that's the only way I can explain Indian food.

Mark Smith: 4:40
I was scared. I was scared.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 4:42
As anyone would be.

Mark Smith: 4:44
You know, I'd always been warned of the hot food and of course, I'd been brought up with a very non-spiced palate. But yeah, once I had it it was just like oh it.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 4:56
But yeah, once I had it it was just like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. Oh, as a brown man, I thought we did spice well, until I got into asian cuisine, like proper chinese thai type cuisine. Those, those people know how to do spice. They are next level spice. But yeah, no, I definitely love my near pakistani food, but I'm just pretty easy. Throw me a parma on a saturday and I'm a happy man. So it's it's. I don't like to complicate it too much when it comes to food.

Mark Smith: 5:18
How did you become a specifically Microsoft? I've known you from the Dynamics Days Power Platform and now, as we move into the area of AI co-pilot technology, my observation you pretty much stayed in the Microsoft ecosystem. You've been around probably the longest standing recruiter that I know of in this space. Tell me about why this niche that you got into and, um, and what's the journey been for you?

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 5:48
yeah, so I mean I was. I've been doing recruitment since I was 18. I'm now 29, so 11 years on. The trot Kind of just fell into it, like I think a lot of people do. I was just really unsure. But I think growing up I've never been book smart, I've always been people smart and I knew my job would involve people to some extent. I joined a company in Melbourne, moved down there and the rest is history. I was kind of always interested in the Microsoft stack, being always a PC guy, so I just had to wrap my head around. It started off in business intelligence, sql, started my own desk there and just went for it. After that I wanted CRM and that was when I came to Clark. And Clark is my director and mentor and he's just really helped me unlock that next phase of my career, which has been just don't take it so seriously. And he's kind of just really helped me unlock that next phase of my career, which has been just don't take it so seriously.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 6:38
I think a lot of recruiters take this kind of view that we're the best at what we do and everyone else is crap. Let's just get on with it. We're here to help people, I think and the biggest takeaway I would have from recruitment is we play a pivotal role in people's lives. Sometimes we keep the ecosystem going from, obviously, a recruitment perspective. But, for example, there's a story of a gentleman who I won't name for his own reasons, but he was put in a very tricky situation a few weeks ago by being made redundant, didn't have a visa. He's got a wife who's expecting and you can imagine the type of stress he'd be going through.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 7:13
The day I got him the job, I made sure to video call him, because those are the days. That reminds you what we do and why we do it. It really can make someone's life a lot better as well. So, yeah, I just fell into recruitment. I love every bit of recruitment. It's obviously you've got to be a bit crazy to do it, so I tick those boxes. But yeah, now I've been with Clark for almost 10 years. We recently just opened our office in Sydney as well, and we've been doing biz apps since day one. It makes sense to us, the ecosystem works for us and obviously, after doing it for so long, it's second nature to us now.

Mark Smith: 7:47
So just create a link for me here. I thought you were Dynamo Recruitment, but you've mentioned Clark a few times.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 7:53
Yeah, so he's the owner of Dynamo Recruitment Gotcha gotcha, so Clark's a person.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 7:58
Yes, clark has been working with. I mean, he's owned Dynamo for almost 20 years, been in the industry for longer than me, so he's probably the longest Microsoft recruiter in the country. Gotcha, great guy. You know. If you asked me, mark, 5, 10, 15 years ago if I'd worked for someone for more than three years, I'd say no way. You know and I think this goes back to you know my view on leadership as well the best leaders are the people who are great people, managers, in my opinion. You know, you can teach tech, you can teach all that crap, but if they can't sit down with you and have an honest conversation with you, face to face, not only about work but about life, you know he's made me a better man, a better husband, a better father, you know, and all those things. And that's where I work from, you know, and that's where I'll continue to work from.

Mark Smith: 8:44
I like it. In May this year I put out a post which said the Microsoft partner is dead. Caused a bit of a storm, didn't?

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 8:53
it.

Mark Smith: 8:54
It blew up a bit. It blew up a bit my most successful LinkedIn post ever. All my stats on my LinkedIn account have this massive blip at that point. I think one post got me over 250 new followers. It got 80,000 engagement on it.

Mark Smith: 9:12
It was crazy and my observation was this I was leaving IBM at that point and what I had noticed is that over my career of 20 years being in business applications, a change was happening in the market and that when I started my career, we're selling every customer on Y Dynamics. Nobody heard of the product, right. Nobody was like what Microsoft. I thought they only did service. I thought they just did the Windows operating system, and so we had to sell hard to get that product out in market, and so we built partner practices that implemented these big projects. The change that I was noticing and why I use that tongue-in-cheek post is that more and more customers and I'll give an example.

Mark Smith: 9:57
Let's say a large law enforcement agency, otherwise known as police in Australia. I won't say which state they're in, but they had over 20,000 staff members using the Microsoft Power Platform, full premium licensed across the board. They weren't interested in a Microsoft partner, they were going out and recruiting and hiring their own team of experts. Now the beauty of bringing them in in that scenario is one they will grow deep domain or industry knowledge about law enforcement, were already highly skilled. They were going after people with five plus years experience on dynamic CRM because they knew they had the model-driven experience to work on the power platform, and so that was my first kind of taste of, maybe four years ago, seeing that, and then I progressively saw it increase until we landed the largest Australian-owned company in the financial sector and we saw the same type of thing. We will use partners where we absolutely have to, but we're actually building our own capability in-house, and it's a trend I've seen more and more Partners used to be able to, and I used to say this myself hey, we've got the IP or the mine capital right, we've got all the smartest people in the business.

Mark Smith: 11:17
And the drawback of working for a partner that you will find from most consultants that have been in the game for a little wee while is back in the day you used to get a lot of on-the-job training. Now you see partners with utilization targets of northward of 90%. I've been working for businesses that have had 98% to 100% utilization targets. So you tell me, how do you learn on the job, how do you develop your skills? Outside of being a trial by fire, you just throw it in the deep end, which means that the only way to from a sink or swim scenario is you've want to upskill on your own time, right, so you got to go. Okay, is that worth the investment of my career?

Mark Smith: 12:00
And so what I'm noticing is that if you go work for a end customer, you don't have that challenge because you don't have a time sheet right, which is how partner organizations are run.

Mark Smith: 12:11
They've got this little metric, which is really the dominating metric of whether you live or survive in a partner organization, called utilization, and so what I've noticed in more recent years is that you can be highly skilled practitioner who has built a reputation and market, and you can either work for microsoft you can work for a microsoft partner or you can work for the end customer, and what I'm noticing is that a lot of people that thought that the partner was the land of opportunity that are expert consultants I'm not talking about juniors, I'm talking about expert practitioners are now moving more and more to working direct to customer rather than via partner, because partners have just become a utilization machine, and I suppose you're hard pressedpressed to find a partner now that is outcome-driven anymore, and what I mean by that is that you're interested in delivering amazing projects for customers rather than you're interested in putting in as many bums on seats inside this account as possible and selling time of those consultants, and so that's the observation I've made Absolutely.

Mark Smith: 13:22
Now I turn over to you and tell me, what are you noticing?

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 13:25
I think the biggest. It's just one word, the biggest word that's killed partners over the last five years and obviously we work with a mix of partners and end users and I don't think it's actually a partner-wide thing. I think it's more of a mentality thing and that's complacency. Partners got complacent, partners thought that it was a you know, and obviously I've got a lot of respect for partners my biggest clients are partners in Australia but the shift that we saw was that the costing went up but the value didn't really. It was just more sort of a big push of how many bums, as you said, can we get on a seat in this client. The best partners that I work with are, again, the people who treat their clients as if they're their own team. It's not about utilization. Obviously, we're all in the business to make coin here, and this is what I would say. One of your biggest strengths is, mark, you're a technologist. You're not someone who sits on a bum in a seat and goes I'm doing this for someone you know, just because it's my job. You do it because you genuinely love it and that's what you have passion for. So I think that's where a lot of partners did really lose that edge.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 14:26
If you look at the partner landscape five years ago and now it's very different. I would say medium to small partners are killing it now. Why? Because they're not complacent. They spend that time one-on-one with their clients. You look at the biggest power platform user in Australia. Their partner is not a big player, it's a medium to small-sized partner. But, yes, there are probably about 40, 50 people now just starting to get there. But what did they fall in love with? They fell in love with the owner and what he brings to the table, that intimate relationship. And this is why, going into AI and all these things as well, the intimacy between client and consultant will always be there.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 14:59
But building that in-house team unfortunately a lot of practitioners don't operate how many you do with having that genuine care of the end result, having your client, having your project as your baby. But when you're working in-house, you've got a vested interest. That's just the reality. You've got a vested interest. That's just the reality. You've got a vested interest in companies, unique challenges, the culture and pretty much what you do you'll get to see on a day-by-day basis. We could flip the script as well on agencies versus internal recruitment teams. Both have value, but some people may feel that some agents might not have that vested interest in an organization, whereas for someone like me it's always a long game. You know I've been doing this for 10 years and it's always about how can I benefit a client in the long run.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 15:43
But I would say that building in-house teams is just making sense for more people. From a cost perspective, partners still absolutely have their value, but I still stand by this. They have to shift how they're working. You can't just be treating clients like a timesheet and going well, if we build this, we'll build that. The most successful practices I've worked with are people who don't talk about utilization, don't talk about billing. Yes, we're in. The nature of business is to have work and put people on site, and that's what it is. But it's not just to get a project done, it's to have a transformation and actually have a genuine experience with someone, and I think that's what people like you bring to the table. It's not just work for you, it's what you're passionate about, but unfortunately, as me and you both know, it's kind of becoming less and less common to see in the industry nowadays.

Mark Smith: 16:27
I'd say so it's interesting what you said there about agency as in-house, because back in the day six, seven, eight, agency as in in-house because back in the day six, seven, eight years ago I don't know how long ago when I worked at sms management technology, who went on them to be acquired by asg in australia, and then, more recently, while their parent company what their parent company name?

Mark Smith: 16:47
um, I think they've become nri, they went yeah so sms had a massive recruitment division, right, we had a whole thing as part of SMS. We had a very lucrative recruiting, more executive-based recruitment division within the company and we had our in-house recruiters. And what I noticed is that in-house recruiters if you're in a large organization, they generally do not have their finger on the pulse of the market. As in I'm talking about, I need a consultant with X amount of experience in a particular product. Go. What are they going to do? They're going to go to seek. They're going to put up an ad. They're going to get a couple of like they don't have a little black book that they can pick up and go. I know exactly who we're talking about. I know them, I have got a history with them, that type of thing.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 17:37
Yeah, look, and I think people downplay the internal recruiter life. I think a lot of agents especially when I was younger, we were told that it's where you go for easier. I don't think it's easier. I think with internal recruiters you're pulled in so many directions. For example, with me, microsoft Biz Apps is what we do and that's what we specialize in. I've got a board literally in front of me all the time for every single role that could come up and the candidates that could be relevant for that role. It's my vested interest.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 18:06
Now you can say internal recruiters might not have that vested motivation. For example, for me, I would say if you meet any agency recruiter and they tell you they're not driven financially, they're lying. It's a part of our job and that's what one of the bigger motivations is. The other is obviously helping people and being able to influence things. But internal recruiters get pulled left, right and center to. One day they're working on an Azure DevOps role. One day they're working on a BA for a HRI system. How can you really be able to, on the drop of a hat, go, hey, we need a BI developer for a six-month contract. And go, yeah, I know who you're talking about, the reason why people work with us at Dynamo is that we're doing this every single day. So it's not us doing more work, and that's why our fees are definitely more fair than what you'll see out there is because the work's already done. We're already doing this stuff on a daily basis. We're talking to the people.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 19:00
Candidates are the king. I've just recently hired a lady here in the Sydney office and I said without candidates, we're nothing. They fuel the whole ecosystem. So it's about maintaining those relationships with people and if I'm not having my finger on the pulse, I don't think I can really call myself a specialist. There are people out there who will call themselves specialists and they can do what they want, but I've been doing this for 11 years straight. Anything. Microsoft is what we're about. I've got relationships with people in Microsoft.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 19:30
I've got a vested interest in the success of both myself and the organization I work for. Unfortunately, I think and this is not all internal recruiters I work with some brilliant ones as well, but for some people it's just a bum on a seat job. There's no motivation. What motivation If I said to you, mark, if you deliver this co-pilot app for me, I'll give you $1,000. Or if I said you'll just get the salary that you work for. I think we both know which answer you'd go for. It's human element to want motivation and to want extra motivation as well. But I just think it carps down back to what people do. If people do what they love, then you'll always see a difference. I mean, I worked with the SMS team back in the day people like Julian back in the day and they had that vested interest. They were passionately passionate and interested in it.

Mark Smith: 20:15
You've got a good memory yeah.

Mark Smith: 20:20
So back in the day, and you know they had that vested interest. They were genuinely passionate and interested in a good memory. Yeah, so it's um. It's my job to have a good memory, isn't it? So tell me, what are you seeing in ai now that as in particularly around? What roles are you starting to see roles? Because you know a colleague of mine in the uk, chris huntingford, says that if you're a um, a power platform consultant implementer and I use the word consultant very broadly to mean any sub role that fits in it, but anybody that's working in the space, that is your career. You need to quickly develop your AI chops because, you know, just last week we celebrated the one-year-old birthday of Copilot. For me it already feels like it's been around forever, but it's only one year old from Microsoft's perspective. We were talking about M365 Copilot specifically and Are you starting to see candidates that are starting to really develop their skills in that area? And then, conversely, are you seeing the market starting to request or are we still too early?

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 21:21
I think it's happening now. I think 2025 is going to be the year of AI. It is a massive buzzword which a lot of people don't fully understand yet because it's such a big, vague term. What does AI actually mean? Obviously relevant to Dynamics.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 21:35
Me and you both know that each Dynamics suite has its own individual co-pilot and things like that as well. But I think I saw the first ad, probably this week, and that was from probably the biggest partner in Australia at the moment, and they advertise for co-pilot skills. But how are we interviewing and assessing and hiring on the basis of that? I think, meen, you had a conversation about this a few weeks ago. It's the core skills and the adaptability. The people who don't want to adapt, people who want to stay set in their ways, will fall behind, and I'm sorry if anyone takes offense to that. That's the reality of things.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 22:09
AI is not something, that's just a, it's not just a development tool. It's. It's going to change absolutely how we work. We use ai a lot in recruitment. Um, you know me and you caught up the other day on the recruitment company in india who was, you know, implementing co-pilot and how they really took that by storm. I don't think the australian way will ever be, you know, co-pilot for interviews and stuff like that but it will just make our life Yet, yet. I always think that human element will always be a requirement in that sense, but I think it'll transform the way that we go from candidate sourcing to. But again, I was having a conversation with a Microsoft partner about this yesterday it's awfully heavily reliant on data and the accuracy of data. For example, if I've put out a job ad and it's got 100 applicants and AI pulls out the first five, if there is someone in there who hasn't updated their CV and sent me a wrong CV, I may lose out on that. So how we get to those challenges will be interesting to see.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 23:07
How we evolve AI, yeah, but my opinion, if you're not using it, if it's not at the forefront of your mind, you'll fall behind. For example, a big part of my role within Dynamo is doing this sales training, sales training on AI, how we can make our life easier, how we can use it to make our candidate experience much better as well, which then reflects better on our client's experience. So it's just about being open-minded, I think. If you're closed-minded and go well, this is how it's just about being open-minded. I think if you're closed-minded and go well, this is how it's worked and how it always will work Great for you. I think you'll still be successful to some extent. But eventually people will wipe the floor with you because I can do what job took me, you know, an hour 10 years ago, in about five to six minutes now. Yeah, and that's not from not adapting, it's from adapting, you know now interesting.

Mark Smith: 23:54
Interesting we're definitely, you know. So for me it's not a buzzword because it literally permeates everything I do in my life, you know. So I still find it interesting when people refer to it as such, because I'm like, wow, you don't know how deep I am into it. And when you know when microsoft start to rebrand themselves and start calling themselves an AI-first company or an AI company, not a software company the largest company on the planet doesn't do a pivot like that lightly, right.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 24:25
Yeah, and I think that's the thing is. When I say AI is a buzzword, I think it's on everyone's mind's lips at the moment, no one really has taken the time to understand it, and I think that's going back to what your goal will be for 2025, with a lot of the AI conferences you'll be holding here in Australia. I think it's about exposing it in the right way, because you look at Power Platform when it came out, it genuinely was a buzzword. People just said, yeah, we'll hire skills in this area. They didn't fully understand what it was.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 24:55
A lot of SharePoint people moved across. A lot of CE people moved across. But now we have a better grasp. Ai is now such a big beast and it's going to change the way we do everything. But it's on Microsoft, it's on the partners, and I tell every salesperson I work with get your head around this stuff, because this is what's going to be the future and if you want to stand up with your competitors, this is what you need to do. You know, yeah, but easier said than done when, as you said, utilization is on the forefront of pretty much every partner's mind at the moment. So when do you get time to do the skills and training, you know. So that's the catch-22 at the moment.

Mark Smith: 26:21
What I've noticed in the recruitment I did over the last three years in the Australian market is that there are a lot of people I've never heard of and when I look at their CVs I can see why I've never heard of them. They are underwhelming. Should we say there's nothing that would make me go. I want to hire this person. I can build a team with this person. I know the customer is going to be enamored with this person. And what I've noticed is that you could give me 100 CVs and I would be hard pressed, if you remove the names, for me to match them to their names.

Mark Smith: 26:51
And as someone who's worked across the globe in multiple countries, I've always stood out because I have um. I've profiled myself in both social media, particularly linkedin and blogs and every other content you know type that's out there. And what I notice is that people you know have been told for years we play in a global marketplace. How do you stand out in a global marketplace? But they're just like oh well, I'll just do two years at this company and then I'll buzz off to the next company. I'll get a 10 000 bump on my pay. But I've noticed lately the markets just started to contract a little bit with the global financial bits and pieces that have gone on and the tightening inflation and stuff like this and what I keep going back to. Why don't you have a portfolio site? And just this week I interviewed a guy from Microsoft who's in the FastTrack team in Microsoft recently moved in. There was an MVP prior to that and when I first because I was having him on the podcast and I went to his website his website dates back to 1981. 1981.

Mark Smith: 28:00
I was minus 14 back then, so there you go, right, and what I see is that he has this site. That is what I would call a portfolio site. He starts back from you, back from what he did at university. His first line of code was written in 1981, right up to 2024. And you can see the timeline of his life. You can see what he does, what he specializes in. You can see hundreds, if not thousands, of posts on this guy's website. You can see his certifications. You can see he has a sideline in photography. It's on his website, right, so he shows himself as a holistic person.

Mark Smith: 28:42
It's not just technology Got a great about section but a lot of the data shows that any recruiter and or employer are going to look you up online outside of your cv, right, and we make calls and judgments on things like that. And I find people in our world today, in our area of technology, that don't have an online presence, that don't have, and it's not that they're introverts, extroverts or any. You know that type of label, but there no, nothing that shows a level of excellence or quality or you know nothing being endorsed on them or awards won or anything like that, and I know that. You know you can have your worker bees and stuff that just want to get down and get the job done. But at the end of the day, when you're looking at a hundred CVs for a role and everything just looks vanilla yeah, and I want chocolate. Um, I ain't seeing that in there. And it's so easy to differentiate yourself with. Just having your own website doesn't cost much.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 29:44
I think the greatest example is our friend Nathan Rose. You know you look at his career after. You know initiating the 90-day mentorship program and using you as a mentor as well. I mean it speaks for itself For where he's come from in his career to where he is now. That is all on professional development, and I'm huge on professional development, personal branding, making sure that you stand out right, because at the end of the day, we're all similar at the crux of things.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 30:10
But what really separates you? For example, even with my new staff, the sales training that I'm doing with them what's going to make you stand out? What's your sell? For example, with me I knew what it was initially. I'm half Indian, half Pakistani. Probably 70% of the dynamics industry is within that space. I can talk to people and really cut that layer of uncomfortability and lack of trust and just get straight down to it. I can also speak to most people while they sit in front of their boss and they won't understand a thing they're saying right, but that is what I knew my niche would be.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 30:43
So people have kind of lost that passion to find their niche because they just go. It's not something you should be passionate about. Works, work, which is a mentality to have. But if you're going to do something, at least do it well, and I think that's what my biggest sell has been over the last 10 years is, bill, what's your value offering is A I'm not a kiss-ass mind my language. Two I just make sure I'm exceptionally good at my job and exceptionally honest with the people I work with, and I think personal branding is something that we're heavily investing in 2025 as a group here at Dynamo getting people to know who we are as people.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 31:19
We're all people at the end of the day, but how we operate is very different. But building those personal branding is something that I'm very passionate about. You've awakened that in me a little bit as well, because I look back at even your career, back at SMS days from there to now, like even your career back at SMS days from there to now. The difference is insane. I don't think there's a person who wouldn't know your name in the dynamics industry in Australia, new Zealand, let alone Europe as well, us as well. But to do that, you have to put a lot of time aside, a lot of time for your own professional development. Look at yourself in the mirror and go how do. I take that next step and I think that's why the 90-Day program which you run is so effective, because you've been there, you physically were there and you took that next step, and I think it's it speaks to experience speaks for itself. You know, you can do as many certifications as you want. Experience teaches you like nothing else will, in my opinion.

Mark Smith: 32:11
Yeah, yeah, and for me it's always been that people can get a job in the space and get into technology and create decent lifestyles and incomes for themselves, and that's why I think that there is an opportunity for anybody that wants to apply themselves, that wants to give up on their excuses of why not? And really look at why, why me, why now, why is this possible?

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 32:38
But it takes a very big mindset switch, sorry. I suffer from anxiety, heavy, heavy anxiety, and it kind of just took me one day where I went Bill, instead of worrying about what I'm missing out on what I'm going to potentially could happen, let's just do life and roll with it. I've got a saying now which I'll just try and go with roll with the punches and hope you don't get caught, because I think I've got a glass chin, so I just try and evade as much as you can. But that's life and I think that's what recruitment has taught me as well is that everyone's got their own stuff going on and you've really just got to be empathetic.

Bilal (Bill) Khan: 33:14
And this is what, you know, annoys me about a lot of the culture we see in work today is it's not about fresh development, it's just that human element as well. Where's the human element gone? Where's the people reaching out just to have a chat for the sake of having a chat, because it's really, unless you're getting something out of it, that doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in people talking anymore. For example, my partner, her family, lives out in the outback and I love going to visit them because everybody there is up for a chat, and I want everyone here is just lost in their own you know ego and you know life where it's like, guys, we're humans at the end of the day. Let's just have a chat so you can see why recruitment suits me, because I do love a yap and a yarn, but it's something that is very important to me. Is that human empathy, and that's a part of professional development as well. How can I constantly be better?

Mark Smith: 34:02
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP, mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. Guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.