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Tom Erwin reposted thisTom Erwin reposted thisI've talked extensively about why data contracts need to be placed upstream, the emphasis for shift left approaches in data, and why we need to start addressing data quality at the code level. With the book in its final stages (out for print soon), I can finally go back to writing on Substack, where I can detail the patterns I've observed to be effective for data contract implementations... and the various traps I've seen. In short, implementing data contracts yourself often follows this perilous journey: 1. Feel the pain of unexpected data changes. 2. Implement transformation logic as a stopgap measure. 3. Stopgap measures turn into tech debt that amplifies the original issue. 4. Get buy-in for data contracts and implement them quickly downstream. 5. See a quick win as issues are flagged before reaching business users. 6. Data changes still mount, and now your data contract is a bottleneck. 7. Realize you need to actually prevent the upstream changes. 8. Struggle with upstream teams not adopting your contract because you never accounted for them in your requirements. 9. Realize that for upstream eng teams to adopt data contracts, you need A) leadership buy-in for a top-down directive to adopt, and B) fit data contracts in existing dev workflows to maintain adoption. Steps 1-8 often take data teams over a year to go through, and by step 9, they realize their requirements are completely off for the implementation. I've seen it over and over again. I hope my future writing on these topics will help teams skip to step 9 so they can get value from data contracts as quickly as possible. To help, my co-author, Mark, and I just released this article: https://lnkd.in/g6B2JGNx Good luck!
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Tom Erwin reposted thisTom Erwin reposted thisI genuinely believe that Shift Left in data is an inevitable movement. Between writing our data contract book and the hundreds of meetings with engineers, it's clear that data management in the era of AI needs to happen upstream at the source. [Check out my Shift Left Data Manifesto for a more in-depth explanation] All of the above work has put me at the forefront of this movement, and I have seen it transform from ideas in blogs to numerous organizations implementing Shift Left Data practices themselves. This inflection point is exactly why I'm starting the Shift Left Data Community, a place where technical leaders can come together and formalize best practices to share throughout the industry. Right now, I have a group of ~40 founding members in the community, and I'm looking to expand to 200 leaders for the next round of the community. For now, this will be invite-only for staff+ ICs or technical leaders who are actively implementing shift left practices. If this sounds like you, I would love for you to apply (quick 5-minute questionnaire). You can learn more below-- good luck!
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Tom Erwin reposted thisTom Erwin reposted thisThere's a major evolution coming in data management that I argue will reshape our entire industry-- it's Shift Left Data. Over the past few years, I've watched data contracts move from being a fringe idea in LinkedIn posts to becoming a real driver of organizational change at global enterprises (check out our Shift Left Data Conference recordings). Specifically, I'm noticing that the lines that differentiate the workflows of different teams are being rewritten and bringing stakeholders from various disciplines together in a way we haven't seen before. This is especially true among software and data teams. Yes... AI is a huge catalyst for these shifts (more attention, budget, and scrutiny), but I argue we have been moving towards this direction even before ChatGPT gained global traction. In particular, DevOps and DevSecOps teams have already gone through their "shift left" moment and found success. I firmly believe it's now the data industry's turn. I'm going to be writing more heavily on this on LinkedIn in the coming weeks but here are a few resources from myself and others in the industry that I think are a great start: 1. Shift Left Data Manifesto (https://lnkd.in/gU36qr54) 2. Glassdoor: Data Quality at Petabyte Scale: Building Trust in the Data Lifecycle (https://lnkd.in/gbEApwzD) 3. Shifting Left with Data DevOp (https://lnkd.in/g5G57f9T) 4. Wayfair’s Multi-year Data Mesh Journey (https://lnkd.in/g2YpAdXW) 5. Creating source-aligned data products in Adevinta Spain (https://lnkd.in/gjdE5Dgf) Good luck!
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Tom Erwin shared thisExciting Times at Gable!Tom Erwin shared this🚀 Gable secures $20M Series A to scale our data management platform! Our "Shift Left" approach is transforming data quality from a downstream headache to a built-in advantage. Say goodbye to broken pipelines and hello to seamless collaboration between dev and data teams at the source! #DataQuality #SeriesA #ShiftLeft
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Tom Erwin reposted thisTom Erwin reposted thisShift Left Data Conference - Live Stream Turn your videos into live streams with https://restream.io Live stream of the Shift Left Data Conference. You can join the live Zoom room by signing up at www.shiftleftdata.com.
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Tom Erwin reposted thisTom Erwin reposted thisWell, it's done. My longest article ever, and the summation of two years worth of work: The Shift Left Data Manifesto (link is in the comments) The article is nearly 15 pages and draws from my experience working with startups, Fortune 500s, and other large enterprises who are actively trying - sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding - in solving the biggest problems in data management. The core takeaway is that thanks to the rapid spread of federation, it is no longer enough to think solely in terms of "data" - rows, tables, columns, records, and dashboards. There is an entirely unexplored world beyond data - the world of code. And in the world of code the rules, systems, patterns and methodologies are totally different from how data teams operate today. We focus less on the OUTPUT, and more on the INPUT - what are the constraints within the system that produces data, and how can we better define the quality of those constraints at the source. I would love for you to give it a read and leave me any feedback (I read it all). Thank you for all the support over the last several years, and good luck. I will see you all tomorrow for Shift Left Data 2025!
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Tom Erwin reposted thisTom Erwin reposted thisI'll be the MCee at the upcoming Shift Left Data Conference next Thursday. You can expect some bad rhythm guitar playing and out-of-tune singing. But if you can manage to overcome the cringe, you might enjoy the wisdom from all the folks talks! The lineup is absolutely spectacular!
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Tom Erwin reposted thisTom Erwin reposted this🤯 Less than 2 weeks away from the Shift Left Data Conference and we have many of the leading voices in tech to share their insights! 👇🏽 Don't believe me? Here are our speakers! ▪️ Carly Taylor, M.Sc. - Founder - Rebel Data Science ▪️ Vin Vashishta - CEO - V Squared AI ▪️ Joe Reis - Founder - Nerd Herd Education ▪️ Andrew Madson MSc, MBA - Founder - Insights x Design ▪️ Tristan Handy - CEO and Founder - dbt Labs ▪️ Barr Moses - CEO and Co-founder - Monte Carlo ▪️ Nachiket Mehta - Head of Data and Analytics Engineering - Wayfair ▪️ Piyush Tiwari - Senior Manager of Engineering - Wayfair ▪️ Matt Turck - Managing Partner - FirstMark ▪️ Apoorva Pandhi - Managing Partner - Zetta Venture Partners ▪️ Sarah McKenna - CEO - Sequentum ▪️ Anna Swigart - Director, Data Engineering - Helix ▪️ Sergio Couto Catoira - Sr Data Engineer - Adevinta Spain ▪️ Zakariah S. - Engineering Manager, Data Platform - Glassdoor ▪️ Demetrios Brinkmann - Founder - MLOps Community ▪️ Chad Sanderson - CEO and Co-founder - Gable 🫡 And we are still confirming more speakers! 📌 You can checkout their talks and schedule in the slide below, as well as signup for free here: https://lnkd.in/gxXZ-v8b #data #ai
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Tom Erwin liked thisTom Erwin liked thisEarlier this week I shared that Kairos officially spun out of UP.Labs. What I didn't share is what we've been building underneath the product. As we begin to further build out more of the team after a year of working on the product, we wrote down how we wanted to operate. Not mission statements. Not values for a wall. Three commitments we hire on and hold each other to every day. The first is intellectual curiosity. Now that we worked with a customer. What are all of the top theories for manufacturing production. What are the top methods for scheduling? Drum-Buffer-Rope methodology. Pull Systems and Kanban. We had technical team members studying these models and how we could ingest these methods and apply them as a Skill in Kairos. Study and read the research papers to be the most knowledgeable in the manufacturing industry. That discipline has shaped the product as well as set in motion the high standard we hold ourselves to in our culture. The second is engineering excellence. Do it right the first time. We are building an enterprise system. Manufacturers will fully trust and unlock significant financial impact and depend on what we deliver in our orchestration platform. The third is customer obsession. A planner rebuilding a schedule that reality already invalidated. A buyer expediting parts that should have been there. That is who we build for. We've sat next to them. We've watched them do it. And we carry that into every product decision we make. These are not aspirational. They are operational. When someone joins Kairos, the first thing they learn is that curiosity, precision and closeness to the customer are not nice-to-haves. They are the standard and we hold each other accountable. We set out to change how manufacturers operate. That starts with how we operate ourselves. What are the values your team actually hires on and holds each other to, not the ones on the website, the ones that show up in how you work every day?
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Tom Erwin liked thisTom Erwin liked thisEvery quarter at Prevail, our top performers qualify for a High Performance Event. For Q2, that meant a full day in Catalina celebrating two people who absolutely earned it. Rachel Berry finished #1 in the company and put together the best quarter of her recruiting career and she’s been recruiting since 2012. Evan Cornutt finished #2 and had his best quarter in the last four years. Those are the kinds of accomplishments worth celebrating. So we traded the office for Catalina for the day, brought Evan’s wife Kayla along, and spent the day recognizing what Rachel and Evan accomplished in Q2. Although apparently you can take the recruiter out of the office, but you can’t take the recruiter out of the recruiter… At one point we literally had to pull the golf cart over so Evan could jump on the phone and close another deal. When we started Prevail, one of the things we wanted to build into the culture was simple: Exceptional performance should be recognized and rewarded. Not just once a year. When you perform at a high level, we want to celebrate it. Proud of both of you. Hell of a quarter. Now the race is on for the Q3 High Performance Event… although I have a feeling someone in this photo is already having another record quarter.
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Tom Erwin liked this1 Year...we're just getting started, yes we do things different here! https://lnkd.in/grahtwBxTom Erwin liked thisOne year ago today, we launched Prevail Recruiting. There was no guarantee it would work. Just a belief that there had to be a better way to build a recruiting company - one where great recruiters could have more autonomy, better economics and real support. Where compensation is simple and transparent, expectations don’t constantly move, leadership communicates openly, people are trusted to run their desks, teammates collaborate instead of compete internally, and experienced recruiters have the tools and freedom to do what they do best. A place where you’re treated like you’re helping build the company, not just another number inside of it. A year later, the model is proven. In our first 12 months, Prevail became a profitable, seven-figure business, and we’ve nearly doubled revenue quarter after quarter. Even more rewarding has been watching experienced recruiters come to Prevail and produce some of the best results of their careers - fastest deals, personal-record months and quarters, and several are on pace for record years. That tells me we’re building something that works. We’ve assembled an incredible team, partnered with companies across the country, helped organizations hire critical talent, and helped a lot of people make meaningful moves in their careers. But what I’m most proud of isn’t a number. It’s the team. Every person who decided to take a chance on Prevail helped shape what this company is becoming. We’re a remote team, so I still somehow don’t have one photo with everyone together. Pictured are a few of us, but this milestone belongs just as much to Rachel, Mark and Sean, and everyone who has helped us build Prevail during Year One. That also includes the partners and advisors behind the scenes who helped us navigate Year One and build Prevail the right way - Max and the Y Scouts team, Megan LaPlante, Jessa Rappleye, and many others who supported us along the way. Building a company from scratch isn’t always pretty. There are wins, mistakes, hard conversations, long days, late nights and plenty of lessons along the way. That’s part of building something real. Year One was about proving the model. Year Two is about taking it to the next level. The focus now is growth - continuing to build the team, expanding what we can offer our clients, and turning a seven-figure business into an eight-figure business without losing what made Prevail work in the first place. Thank you to our team, our clients, our candidates, Y Scouts, and everyone who trusted us during our first year. Year One in the books. Now we scale. Happy 1st Birthday, Prevail Recruiting.
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Tom Erwin liked this65 years of freight expertise, and J.B. Hunt is still asking "what's next?" Their CEO Shelley Simpson shares how the company is investing in AI and automation across the freight lifecycle. She describes the collaboration with UP.Labs to launch Overroute and building what's next in the Logistics Venture Lab. Definitely worth the read.Tom Erwin liked thisDecades in the freight & logistics industry taught Shelley Simpson one thing: technology only earns its place when it's proven in the field and adds value to customers. In her Fortune op-ed marking J.B. Hunt's 65th anniversary, the President & CEO puts our partnership in exactly those terms. She writes that the two companies are "co-designing and launching technology startups," bringing J.B. Hunt's scale and freight expertise to problems that matter across the industry.” Overroute™, the first startup out of the partnership, is live. It uses AI to catch problems early, keep teams coordinated, and help crews adjust as conditions change, built around how freight actually moves, not how it looks on a whiteboard. A second startup is close behind, with two more already in the pipeline. Read Shelley Simpson's full op-ed here: https://lnkd.in/eTGYyHcuJB Hunt CEO: What 65 years of freight tells us about building for the future | FortuneJB Hunt CEO: What 65 years of freight tells us about building for the future | Fortune
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Tom Erwin liked this"Talent density" gets thrown around a lot, but very few people can actually break down how you build it. Adam Ward can. I met Adam a few years back at a GBD talent leadership dinner in Nashville and walked away struck by how much he knew. He's now running talent at Cursor, and this episode of Lenny's Podcast is a masterclass on building elite, high-density teams. If you're in talent, this one's worth your time. https://lnkd.in/gKmE9zBNTom Erwin liked thisMy biggest takeaways from Adam Ward (Head of Talent at Cursor): 1. The forward deployed engineer is the hottest role in tech right now. 2. The traditional recruiting funnel, what Adam calls the “funnel of doom,” is designed to build mediocre teams. 3. The alternative is treating every hire like an executive search. 4. The new danger zone is after the offer is signed. 4. Work trials are the highest predictor of success. 6. Asking your network “Who’s the best engineer you know?” is a trap. 7. Scoping the role is the most under-invested step in most hiring processes. 8. When a top candidate says “bad timing,” shrink the ask: “I’m not asking you to interview—I’m asking for our next conversation.” 9. Closing is a team sport, and it starts at the first conversation. 10. Caring is free, and it’s the biggest unfair advantage in recruiting. Listen to our full conversation: https://lnkd.in/g25SY-Ey
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Tom Erwin liked thisTom Erwin liked thisDecades in the freight & logistics industry taught Shelley Simpson one thing: technology only earns its place when it's proven in the field and adds value to customers. In her Fortune op-ed marking J.B. Hunt's 65th anniversary, the President & CEO puts our partnership in exactly those terms. She writes that the two companies are "co-designing and launching technology startups," bringing J.B. Hunt's scale and freight expertise to problems that matter across the industry.” Overroute™, the first startup out of the partnership, is live. It uses AI to catch problems early, keep teams coordinated, and help crews adjust as conditions change, built around how freight actually moves, not how it looks on a whiteboard. A second startup is close behind, with two more already in the pipeline. Read Shelley Simpson's full op-ed here: https://lnkd.in/eTGYyHcuJB Hunt CEO: What 65 years of freight tells us about building for the future | FortuneJB Hunt CEO: What 65 years of freight tells us about building for the future | Fortune
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Tom Erwin liked thisTom Erwin liked thisHappy Birthday to this Kid! Nathan Madigan, just turned 27, he wakes up early, he's a full time lifeguard for the City of Laguna Beach, just passed his 100 ton Captain's test, EMT, Certified Search and Rescue and guitarist/bass player for SpliffRiff. Photo inspired by Mike Rankin's kid who also battled the Wedge this past week.
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Tom Erwin liked thisTom Erwin liked thisStill getting settled back home after the most memorable work trip. It's not often that you get to enjoy a tropical cruise with 1,400+ colleagues! It was wonderful to build and strengthen working relationships through new experiences and time together. Thanks HighLevel for doing this!
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David Folwell
Referrals generate more gross profit than job boards. Not by a little. By 34% to 25%. Christopher Ryan at Avionté Staffing Software just published an analysis of tens of thousands of placements across 400+ agencies. The data confirms what I keep hearing on customer calls: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻'𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘀 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘄𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝘀𝘁. 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗰𝗸 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗺𝗲: "Blast texts and emails don't work for talent sourcing. Mass messaging is impersonal. Lists get stale. People ignore it." This is the opposite of what most agencies do. They buy a bigger list, blast harder, wonder why response rates keep dropping. The data says something different: referrals + walk-ins + local outreach = over 50% of gross profit. All relationship-driven. All from people who already know you. Your database isn't a backup plan. It's your primary source. Worth reading the full breakdown → https://lnkd.in/gfcgWGWb Curious what others are seeing: Is this ratio (referrals > job boards) holding in your shop, or is it vertical-specific?
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Lily Brezler
Hiring isn’t getting easier in 2026—it’s just getting more layered. Across conversations the past few weeks, one theme keeps showing up in staffing and recruiting: Speed is still important, but clarity is now the real differentiator. Roles are sitting open not because talent doesn’t exist, but because alignment doesn’t. • Job descriptions that evolve mid-search • Interview panels that don’t agree on “must-haves” • Compensation that hasn’t caught up to market reality • And decision timelines that stretch while top candidates move on The market isn’t short on candidates—it’s short on decisive, aligned hiring processes. In staffing, this is where partnerships matter more than transactions. The agencies and recruiters who are adding value right now aren’t just submitting resumes—they’re pressure-testing alignment early, challenging assumptions, and keeping both sides honest about what’s actually required to make a hire successful. Because the cost of a “maybe” hire is still higher than the cost of a longer search done right. So I’m curious—what’s the biggest bottleneck you’re seeing right now in your hiring process: speed, alignment, or expectations? I would love to hear what hiring leaders are experiencing on the ground.
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JusRecruit
Most recruiting stacks look modern on the surface, but fall apart under real-world volume. Too many tools, too many workflows, and too much manual judgment where structure is needed. AI doesn’t replace recruiters; it removes friction. The right tools make sourcing faster, interviews consistent, and decisions more objective. We’ve broken down the 9 AI tools that matter in 2025. Read it here: https://lnkd.in/daXkVuWv Swipe through for the top 5 picks. 👇
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