Robin Vovk has been in sales since the nineties. She's worked through more than one collapse — 2008, 2009, and the swings that come with healthcare staffing, where travel nursing runs hot and cold and locums moves on its own cycle.

We talked about what actually works in cold outreach, why she thinks most people chase volume when they should be chasing fewer, better relationships, and her rule of making one new friend a day. We got into agencies and VMSs, how she keeps a pipeline organized, and what AI has done to outreach emails — not much good, in her view.

Her advice on surviving the down years is simple enough that it's easy to dismiss: everything is cyclical, so keep pressing forward.

Then she answered the question every guest on this show gets: name one thing your whole industry does that's flat wrong.

This is episode two of Common Practice — conversations with people who actually run things, about hiring, sales, and the habits entire industries never question.

Want to be a guest? jvasquez@vasquezconsultants.com

Jana Vanaman spent about a decade at Gartner and ended up running global recruiting there, a team hiring hundreds of people a year across every function and region. Then she left to start her own firm. Then she went back in-house. She has strong opinions about all three.

We get into what was actually broken in the hiring process before she fixed it, what happened when she pulled hiring managers out of first-round interviews, and what she'd tell an owner with thirty employees who can't figure out why their hiring keeps missing.

Then she answers the question every guest on this show gets: name one thing your whole industry does that's flat wrong.

This is the first episode of Common Practice — conversations with people who actually run things, about hiring, sales, and the habits entire industries never question.

Want to be a guest? jvasquez@vasquezconsultants.com

Go pull up your hiring process. The actual one, the steps a candidate walks through from application to offer.

Now ask who built it. Not what it does. Who decided it should work that way, and when.

Most people can't answer that. It was somebody who left in 2019. It made sense at the time for reasons nobody wrote down. And it's still running, still filtering people out, still costing you weeks on every hire, because changing it was never anybody's job.

Your sales process has the same problem. So does your onboarding. So does the way you run your pipeline reviews.

That's what this show is about.

I'm Justin Vasquez, and Common Practice is a long conversation with people who actually run things. Recruiters, sales leaders, founders, operators. The ones who own a number and have to hit it with whatever they've been handed. We get into what they built, what broke, and what they're still trying to sort out.

No talking points. No conference answers. If we disagree, we do it on the record.

And every guest gets the same question before we're done: name one thing your whole industry does that's flat wrong.

Some of them sit with that one for a while. Those answers are usually worth the whole episode.

First one's coming soon.

Follow the show so you don't miss it. If there's somebody I should be talking to, tell me: jvasquez@vasquezconsultants.com