Creative Methods to Recruit and Retain Employees

The Small business show episode 381 for Wednesday, May 25, 2022. Greetings folks and welcome to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co where we are small business ing every week. Sponsors for this episode include shopify.com SBS where you can get your 14 day trial and full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. We will talk about some of those features and more details about Shopify in a moment. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire.

I'm Dave Hamilton and in Lafayette, California, I am Shannon Jean. How's things going out there, Dave?

Things are good. Things are. Yeah, We've got some projects going on in the house and that's crazy. And we're going on this trip, which is also crazy. And you know, it's just like our daughter graduated from high school a couple days ago and we just moved out.

Of college, not high school.

Sorry. Wow. Did I say high school? I did say high school. I'm gonna have to edit that. Yeah, yeah, we've, we, we get to stop paying for her, so that's good. Yeah, well, stop paying for school for her. I don't, I don't know what, what happens next year, but yeah, yeah. Of course it doesn't really change the money outflows because we still have a, our son is in school. And the way the whole financial aid package and all that works, they look at whether or not you have other kids in school and so if once you don't, then they're like, oh, well, you can just spend that money here. It's like, well, cool. Thanks. Yeah, no big deal. That's great. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. But you know, it's all good. Yeah, it's exciting. Yeah. She graduated from college, we moved our son out of school. So it's just like the last 30 days has been mayhem and it, it doesn't end for probably another 15 days. But you know, like, it's, these are all, these are what, what I call first world problems. They're all, it's great stuff. In fact, it's not problems, it's just craziness in the schedule. So.

Yeah, yeah, that's good stuff. My son just came home for the summer.

Yeah.

But this will be like the first summer. I think my daughter probably will not come home because she's living on the east coast now and working and doing stuff. So it's a little change in our routine, but I think, I think it's going to be good and have a good summer. My son is actually going to be Going door to door selling solar panels this summer. So I'm very excited for him to learn the grind of selling and getting opening doors and having doors slammed in your face. Yeah, he's doing, him and his frat buddies from school have this, they're working with this company and they're drop them off at 8 in the morning, pick them up at 5 o' clock and see how they do.

Amazing. Yeah, that's good. Oh yeah, no, that, that for him I did one summer, among other things, I did Cutco knives, which was.

Oh, there we go.

Similar, you know, similar kind of thing. And you learn a lot about dealing with people and managing your time and, and being smart about like identifying whether a prospect is wasting your time or going to be worth your time. Like all those. There's a lot of skills that, that, that your son may, may or may not make money this summer, but he will develop skills. Yeah, that's right.

He's going to make. Yeah, some. He's going to get something out of it.

Yeah.

And I'm, I'm really looking forward to talk, talking to him during and, and after how his, his mindset.

Yeah, well, you're, yeah, your dinner table conversations may be the most valuable part of this for him. Right. As he's debriefing his day and you're there to sort of provide some context and, and some, you know, wisdom and some experience and all that stuff. The question is, will he want to hear it from you? But you know, that, that's another story.

Yeah, it's getting a little. Yeah, it's a story together. But I did explain. I said, hey, you know, it's all about the numbers. And yeah, you know, we used, we used to hand a Salesperson here, here's 100 contacts and make all these. And if you, if you get an appointment and a callback from one, you are killing it. You know, you've had a super successful day.

That's it. Yeah, well, we said that on the show a few times. But to use your numbers, you know, make 100 phone calls, one yes out of 100 phone calls is success. But that means 99 no's are also success. And that's really hard to remember when you're in no number 74.

Yeah, it is hard.

Right. But like you said, it's just a numbers game. You have to just reset in between each call and on you go. It's just how it, how it goes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure I'm reminded similarly, but differently. When my daughter wanted to learn to Play the drums. Heading into like she was in sixth grade, heading into seventh grade, she wanted to join the schools. They called it the jazz band. It really was the studio orchestra. It was like 110 person band. It was wow. Yeah, it was. And it was, it was a competitive scenario. The band was really driven. It's crazy to think that middle schoolers would actually have something that was a quality product, but they really did. This band director, this guy Dave Irvin was. We were so fortunate to have this guy creating this thing and helping the kids and all that. But my daughter came to me and said, I want to learn how to play the drums. And this was after she had failed. She had hated. I won't say she'd failed. She and I took guitar lessons a couple years before that and it was her first instrument and we were taking lessons together. And because it was not my first instrument, I had an initial surge of success that she did not see. If we had stuck together for a year with this, she would have blown me away. But by about the six month mark, she was super frustrated that I was having success and she wasn't. And so it became this, you know, she just, she bailed out and it was, it was fine. But when she, you know, when she said, look, I want to learn how to play the drums, I want to be able to do it for the auditions in August. And this was like April or something. She's like, so you need to teach me. And you know, we came up with ground rules and all that here in the studio, which was great.

That's good.

Yep. It was like, once we enter the studio, we're no longer parent child, we are teacher student. We can yell at each other, it's fine. You know, we got to be able to get through this. And she did it. But then once she. And she got in and she wound up being the, you know, at the time anyway, the, you know, the first chair drummer for the jazz band for the two years that she was in it, which was awesome. And I did sound for the jazz band. So I was there at all the gigs, you know, helping, but also fly on the wall and, you know, all of that stuff. And it was the dinner table conversations that really helped her excel because there would be the gigs and all of that stuff and she would learn at rehearsals and learn at the gigs, then debriefing afterwards, like, oh, there was this. I'm like, yeah, you gotta drive that a little harder. You gotta listen for this. And just those little 30 second interactions gave her far more than Any of the other kids were getting because it just. They didn't have that environment. And your son's gonna be in that similar scenario this summer where he's got you to pick your brain or just share those little wisdom nuggets occasionally that hopefully we'll help him course correct and, you know, figure it out.

Yeah, I think so. It's good after he hears it, you know, a few times.

Right, right. Yeah. Well, that's. It is. He needs to hear it a few times. But there's nothing wrong with that. That's. That's totally fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All of us are that way.

So we're all that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yep. So let me ask you a question in your area, you know, your side of the country. Yeah. Are there lots of help wanted signs and notices about please be patient staff shortage, you know, that kind of thing?

Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's. It's an. Employ it right now. You can basically write your own ticket. That's right.

I would agree.

Yeah.

There's definitely this worker shortage and I'd love to talk about that today. I have a lot of questions and I have some tips I think that would be good for people on creative ways to attract employees. And I have some comments about whether this is going to continue or whether next year might be different.

Yeah, it's a good conversation to have. And I want to talk a little bit too about why some of the reasons that we are where we are with this because it's a new scenario to be in where there's just not enough people for most of the jobs that are open out there. So, yeah, we can talk about all that stuff. That sounds good to me. Cool. The first next thing that I want to do is to talk a little bit more about our sponsor. If that works for you. Yeah.

I love these guys.

All right. You know what that sound is? I love that sound because that is the sound of another sale on Shopify. The all in one commerce platform to start, run and grow your business. And also our sponsor for today. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere. Giving entrepreneurs like all of us here, the resources once reserved for big businesses. They're customized for our needs with a great looking online store that can bring our ideas to life and tools to manage our day to day and drive sales. Making your idea real opens up endless possibilities. And then that's when the journey starts. Look, Shannon and I, we've both used Shopify in the past. They make life so easy because they're experts at this, you're experts at other things. That's amazing. Let Shopify be the experts here so that you can be the experts there. And it's a match made in heaven. Shopify powers millions of entrepreneurs, not just us, from first sale to full scale. And every 28 seconds, a small business owner makes their first sale on Shopify too. Go to shopify.comsbs all lowercase for a free 14 day trial. And get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Start selling on Shopify today. Go to shopify.com SBS right now. Shopify.com SBS and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. All right, so let's dig into this thing and, and I want to, I do want to start by talking about, you know, a little bit about where we are and, or why we are here. But, but then like, like let's make sure we get into what we can do with our companies to help stand out. Right. You know, how do you compete? How do we compete? Yeah. You know, and it's not just money, I don't think. I think there's, there's going to be some, some better answers there and perhaps some creative answers there. But you know, it's interesting like looking at your son right where he's got, he could basically work any job he wants this summer. Right? I mean, you know, there are some jobs for which he is not trained. Like he can't be a surgeon this summer. Right. But you know, like entry level stuff, you know, certainly entry level and maybe even notches above that. You know, people are desperate right now and yet he is choosing not to do any of that so that he can run his own life, manage his own schedule. And, and, and I realize there's some, probably some constraints on that too. But, but you know, he's choosing this what, what I'll call an atypical path. Although for me it sounds very typical. But you know, he's not going and wage job somewhere. He wants to be in control of his own destiny more than that would allow him. And so here he is doing this. I think that's, this is part of what's going on is people are like your son deciding hey, I want to be in control of my life, I can go and do something. And maybe, and again, this is a summer job so this is a little bit different. But, but there's people that are choosing their.

It's indicative of it though. He's indicative of Starbucks or Correct doing whatever. He's going to go do this job which is arguably much more difficult than one of those jobs with the potential to make a lot more money. But it's all on his shoulders. He, you know, if he doesn't show, if he doesn't go, they're like, hey, you work whatever days you want, you know, but this is how it goes.

Make a commission. That's it. Yeah.

Yes, that's it. And so it is. Like when I was doing a little research here, you know, one of the things that came up is there's this, this discussion. Oh, it's. There's this great resignation. People that stop after. During COVID That's the wrong word. Yeah, yeah. And the way I then heard it talked about was it's kind of the great reshuffle of people deciding, oh, you know what, I want to do something different or, you know, some, maybe something on my own. I mean, I've always said, and I tell my kids, it's never been easier to go out on your own and start a business, start a side hustle that could turn into a business or, you know, or just be self employed and be very happy with the money you're making and the flexibility. So I think all of it comes into play here.

Yeah, I agree. It's not that people don't want to earn a living. I mean, I'm sure there's some people out there that don't want to earn a living.

Majority of them do.

Yeah, but. Right. The majority of people want to earn a living, but they don't necessarily want to do it on someone else's schedule, plan life. There's plenty of people out there that have figured out, well, look, I can go and stream playing games on YouTube and I can make 50k a year doing that. Now, is that 200k a year? No, but they're doing what they want. They can pay their rent, presumably wherever they happen to live, and they do what they want all day and they make enough to survive. And that checks the box. That's it. And I, and I think.

Go ahead.

No, I was going to say, I think, you know, there is, and I believe it's correct attribution to the pandemic for creating this great reshuffle. I like that word much better than resignation because I don't know that people are resigning. People.

Yeah, they're not.

I mean, they may resign from a company, but. But it's the byproduct of. Okay, wait a minute. You know, we, we had this whatever, somewhere between 12 and 24 months to reexamine our lives and a lot of people said, you know what, I don't want to hate my job anymore. Life's too short. And so they find other paths. And that's, I think that's great.

I do too.

But it sucks when you need, when you have a business that's built on the old way of bringing, you know, of just hiring people, assuming there will be countless people that want to fill the role for you. And I kind of like this, that it forces us to rethink and actually make an attractive scenario for people. I think it's good. Yeah.

Yeah. Because people want something better, right. And for those of you listening, which is everybody, I'm using the quotes, air quotes there. What is that better thing? And that's what we need to figure out as small business owners. Is it just money? I don't think so. You know, is it, is it flexibility? Yes. Is it this? So I think that's the first step is figuring out for your, you know, particular situation, what do people really want?

Right.

Can you, can you do these things, like the whole work from home thing, a remote work, you know, people seem to really like that as far as, like a work life balance. But can you do it? Can your business? You know, Dave, you've done this forever, right? This distributed model of people literally all over the world that are working for you. But what if you can't do it? You know, what if you can't do that thing? And how, what other ways can you address that?

Right. Well, it's an interesting thing, right? And there are a lot of companies that previously would have said, we can't do that. It's impossible. The way our company works, it's, you know, we're not able to. Everybody has to be in the office. It's the only way. And then most of those companies were forced to figure out how to do it without people in the office. And in most of those cases, it worked out great. In fact, in many cases, it worked out even better. Apple is a, and it's a company I've been following for a long time and I know a lot of people that work there. And many of you. These Apple employees have been quite public lately as Apple has started mandating a return to the office, saying, okay, well, I'm just gonna quit, I'm gonna go somewhere else.

I don't wanna go back.

Yeah, I don't wanna, like, we've proven that it works. Now I will say, though, I don't know that we've proven anything or we certainly haven't proven everything pretty early, right? Well, what we've proven is that people who were working together in the office were, were able to go home and continue being productive as a team together. That's what we've proven. What we haven't proven is can those companies bring new people in and make that team just as productive and cohesive as it was? When these people, when you're in the office, you bring someone new in, they're by definition integrated into this environment. When you bring someone new in and you literally don't get to ever meet them face to face, you have to be very intentional about creating opportunities to just get to know each other because there is no water cooler when you are alone in your space. Right. So you have to create the water cooler. You have to create opportunities for people to feel like they're part of a team but still have the flexibility to, you know, wake up and start working without having to drive somewhere. So it's, it's, it, it will be interesting to see where things are in five years. I think that that's where, that's where we'll find out. Okay. We've now had a turnover in, you know, 50% of the staff in each of these departments. How, how productive are things now? And I think that's where the answers come in.

So, yeah, and these huge companies are, especially in California if you're in Silicon Valley and trying to get, get there on the roads is just murder. Trying to actually afford a home near where you work to avoid that commute is, is also just ridiculous. And so I think they are in a unique situation. A lot of people from a quality of life standpoint are just like, well, look, I'm not going to sit in my car for, you know, three to four hours a day to get down there to sit in the office. And but I do think there will have to be some specialized methods of how you onboard and how you build that team cohesiveness. And it could be that you just say, okay, well let's plan these events and we're going to get everybody, you know, physically together and build these teams. Then we'll split back up and you know, go, go back and work from home. So there's going to have to be some way to address that.

Yeah. And companies are trying like I know again using Apple as the example right now, now they are on a, a two day a week mandated work from office schedule. It's Tuesdays and Thursdays. They recently just backed off of that because cases were increasing or something. And so they're saying it's still two Days a week. But if you're not comfortable coming into the office, let your supervisor know and we'll make an accommodation for you. Whereas previously that was. There was no if and. Or but.

I see.

But they were about. I think this week was supposed to start. It was supposed to add Mondays to that. So it was going to be Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays in the office, mandated. And that did not happen. They sort of kicked that can down the road. Apple's in a, In a weird position because mid pandemic, they opened their, their huge new campus that they spent billions on and no one goes there. So it's a. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a new plan. One thing I will add to that, and we have other parts of this to talk about, but I think, and I realize definitions of words change, like language evolves. I'm okay with it. It's fine. But using the word virtual to describe a meeting where people are not in the same room is dangerous to me. There is nothing virtual about this meeting. It's a real meeting. There are real humans there. You know, the whole idea of virtual assistant, no, that's a human. Like, that's not a robot. Like, we didn't create it in a computer. It's an actual living being. They're actually having meetings. Call them remote meetings, remote workers. I just think this whole virtual thing makes it seem less real. And if you want to be successful, you have to embrace the fact that this is real and it's okay. We never called, you know, we've been doing this 23 and a half years. We never called the Mac Observer a virtual company. The IRS certainly didn't let me pay virtual taxes. You know, like, so it, it's one of those things. I, and again, I realize we may, you know, five, ten years from now, the word virtual might mean something different. It's certainly pushing that way. But for now, thinking about it is a real thing, calling it remote as opposed to virtual. For me, that helps kind of frame it the right way. So I share.

I think that's good.

That's good.

And I think if you, if you're, if you're small business or your company is just not such that you can offer remote work to everybody. You know, I think you should look at possibility of how you could make those days more flexible. You know, can they come in and work four hour, or, I'm sorry, four days and have three days off? Or is there other way to shift things around to allow that flex time and especially, you know, from, like, where we, where I am in the Bay Area where, you know, people just don't want to be on the roads during the commute time. Can you be flexible about those hours or, you know, really kind of dig down to think about the quality of life of these people? Because that I think is the, is the frame and the way to start thinking about being creative to get these folks to come back to work and, or to keep attracting quality people that, you know, want to work for you.

I have an idea. Your culture. Yeah, I have an idea to share. It just came to. Came to mind. So you've got people, you know, you're working full time, so, you know, say eight hours a day, you know, five days a week. You want, you know, whether you're right or not, it doesn't matter. You know that for your company, you need to have people together frequently in order to keep things on track. Right. So you want to be able to have people in the office, let's say, you know, two days a week normally, if they're working from home, you know, they, they work whatever 9 to 5. Let's say if they work in the.

Office, we'll give them benefit of the doubt.

Yeah, we'll give. Right, right. Well, that's there, that's the hours. Right. And again, I'm generalizing a lot of things here, but if you're 9 to 5 when you're working from home, what if you make it so that on the days that everybody's in the office, you need to be in the office from 11 to 3, okay. And we're paying you for the time it's going to take you to commute to the office. So you leave your house at 9, you leave the office at 3, and now you still have the same amount of time to yourself at home because we're in the office for four hours together or whatever. Depending on where everybody lives, you might be able to stretch that and say, okay, you gotta be in from 10 to 3 or something. You could do something. But just embracing the world that we're in and thinking about it this way and turning it on its head and saying, okay, I want you here. So you're on my clock when you're driving yourself to the office and when you're driving yourself home and owning that might be one way for your company to be able to attract people that might otherwise say, no, I don't want to. I don't, I don't want to spend the extra time commuting. Well, now it's, now it's my time. I'm paying for it.

So I like it. And it's part of a solution and creative things to try.

Just try it.

See what kind of results that you get. Because I think now you really do have to think about it. If you're struggling to get people to come in, I think that's real important.

And polls are always a dangerous thing, but somehow taking the temperature of your workers and maybe deciding as a group, not a poll, but deciding as a group, which two days everybody's going to be in the office because you say, okay, look, I don't care if it's Monday, I don't want it to be two days in a row. Although there could be an argument that that actually works really well. But whatever it is, you know what, two days works for us as a group. And truly let the group decide. And knowing that the group has to come up with a consensus and if they don't, you will. Right. You know, but, but give the group the option to choose which days we're going to be in the office and then they've got buy into it. Right? Yeah.

And it's a two week experiment so you can adjust to use your.

I've heard of this.

Yeah. And that way you, you're not getting locked into something because if it turns out, wow, this is, maybe it's great for everybody else, but not so good for the company. You need to reserve the right to make those adjustments. And so talking about it as an experiment up front is one way to do that.

Yep, yep.

I think that's important.

Yeah. I got burned on the whole two week experiment thing or at least the cats out of the bag. Because when we went into lockdown, the announcement came on March, whatever, 13th, that we were going to go lock down for two weeks.

Two weeks. Yeah.

Yeah. As soon as they said that, I remember sitting at dinner and like somebody want to fix us around a cocktails before we have this conversation?

Yeah.

There's no way I know about this two week thing. I've used this tactic.

Yeah, that's great.

Yeah. Two years, you know.

Yeah, Two year experiment. The, the, a lot of this is, it's selling your culture, like I said, and why you're a great, why you, your company's just a great place to work, you know, and it's even better if you let your current employees share that concept or share their, their own stories either with applicants that are, you know, applying for jobs and coming in for interviews or maybe even on your website where you have a career section which I'll mention again in A little bit, but, you know, allow them to tell their stories. Maybe it's video, you know, putting video up there about why, why I love working at this company and what they've done for me and sharing that stuff. You know, we've had plenty of people on the show that have talked about sharing things on LinkedIn about their employees. And I just saw, I can't. The name escapes me. But one, one small business that I used to deal with in the electronics field, and they had, you know, those big giant wrestling belts or boxing, big belts that goes around, just a huge thing, covers almost your stomach. Well, there's a company that makes those like just for awards. Yes, of course. And they customize them. Well, here, you know, this was a post on LinkedIn. A guy who, you know, won whatever, some award, some kind of recognition, and they had given him this big belt that he was holding over his shoulder. And, you know, people see that, potential employees see that. They're like, this is kind of different, you know, how they, how they recognize their employees and then sharing that in public, whether you're posting it on Your own website, LinkedIn, other social media, using medium to do blog posts, whatever you want to do.

I have a question for you about sharing how much to share, especially how you're recognizing your employees. Because some of it's going to be monetary in a sense. Well, in a real way, it's going to be monetary. But do you share that you do quarterly reviews or annual this. How far do you go with that stuff?

Yeah, yeah, I think it's a, that's a really good question. And I think that the key is just to know that, that there is some system in place to get recognized. Right. If you look employees looking for jobs, like, well, am I going to get a review each quarter? Oh, look, they post this stuff on LinkedIn that could even help me get a job down the road if I was recognized by some, you know, as employee of whatever. You can talk about profit sharing, whether you do bonuses. I mean, but it's even better if you have your existing employees talk about it. Now. You may have to parse some of that data, right, of course, clean it up to keep it not detailed. But, you know, asking people that, hopefully you have people that love to work there already. If you don't, that's another show. But you want to let the people know that this is a great place. There's a career path. I started as the receptionist or as a warehouse person, and now I'm doing X. And I learned all this and I got some training. You know, we just did a couple of episodes on career paths and we'll, we'll put the link in the show notes. Having a career path is a huge benefit versus a company that doesn't even talk about that and doesn't promote it. And I highly recommend you have a place on your website where you spotlight your employees, talk about what they're doing and sharing this whole concept because it's part of your culture and people are looking at your website when they're thinking about coming to work for you. That's for sure.

Yeah. No. Okay. Yeah, I like. Yeah, this makes sense, right? Yeah. And even that sharing becomes part of the culture if we're, you know, if we zoom out and get a little bit meta here, that whole idea, if you can make that part of your culture, but then it happens automatically and you've got your employees sort of doing that part of the promotion for you, if you will. Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah.

It's always better when someone else tells the story because it's validation.

Yeah, yeah, Yes.

I mean, some people are going to believe you as the owner, but other people, you know, are just gonna go, well, of course he's gonna say there. Of course they're gonna say that.

Yeah.

But when you have, you know, other, other stuff, like, it's like a customer independent review, it has more power.

A lot more power.

Yeah, a lot more power. So the another thing I really like, and we used to do this and, and I just talked to a woman who's a mortgage broker.

Okay.

And her big best place for her to recruit other employees, entry level employees, is Starbucks. Based on her interactions buying a cup of coffee and looking at people. Oh, how did they respond? You know, are they eye contact, are they engaging if they're funny or this kind of thing. And she keeps what she calls recruitment cards with her. It's not a business card. It's a card that she's designed for her business and she gives them out to all their employees to hand out as well. And this concept of always be recruiting. Right. If you have a great experience with someone from another company, you know, hey, you should come work for us and here's why. And you give him this card and try. You're just recruiting, but it's in a casual manner and I think it's a great opportunity to woo people over to come work for your business.

What a brilliant idea. Yeah. Especially in today's world. Recruitment cards. Yeah, yeah.

And you talk about, it's not just, you know, you're talking about your company on that card. Why did you come work for us? We're a great place to work. We have, we have training. We do this, we do that. Keep it short, and then send them to that spot on your website where your own employees that have gone through this before can share their stories. That's really powerful. And because it's not just always about the money, I always say this on the flip side. Thinking about pricing your products or your services, you need to be competitive. But if you're just competing on price, or you have customers that come to you and they're only focused on price, that's just a losing strategy. And just like those kind of customers, if you have potential employees that are just focused on salary, those people should be avoided if you can. Because you know, again, you gotta be competitive. But if someone's like, I'll come to you if you match me this or do this and I want this, I would argue that that's never gonna end with that person.

It never will. I learned that lesson when we starting down the path of sending our kids to college and shopping for colleges and someone said, hey, we got this advice. And it was one of those earth shattering and yet obvious moments where they said, hey, look, if you want to, it's down to school A and school B. And school B is $10,000 less than school A. But you really want to go to school A, don't call up school A and say, hey, if you match what school B gives me, I will come say, I want to come to your school, but I'm about 10k short. Can you work with me on this? You're asking for the same net result, Right? But you're not different. But you're framing it as I want to be there as opposed to I want to be wherever the lowest price is. Right? And that may be true. In the end, you might have to choose school B because you can't afford the extra 10k. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's just how life works. But having the conversation that way will encourage the school, if they have flexibility, to figure out how to meet you there. Because, you know, you have expressed. But what is. My son, my son's a tour guide at the school he goes to and they don't do it there. But, but he's heard about it from other schools where they are asking the tour guides and all the people for which students have demonstrated interest. And you know, they are looking for that because they want students who want to be there. And, and so it's just an interesting way of thinking about it. And the same is true with, you know, employees and. And employers, you know, some, like you said, if somebody comes and says, if you'll match the money, I can come and work for you unless you absolutely need them. Run screaming. Yep. Yeah, yeah.

And we're doing it the way you suggest is you're showing the value. I appreciate the value. I'm just trying to figure out a way to make this work. Right.

That's it.

That's a better way to do it.

Yep. And saying that to an employee who comes to you and says, I need an extra 10k, say, look, I appreciate your value. You know, my budget is such that I'm capped here for. For now. But, you know, is there if you come and you work and maybe set some metrics where if they hit them, then, you know, things can open up. And of course, if they're commissioned, if there's a way to put them on some sort of a commission, that makes life even easier. But I would still worry about the person that says, you know, the only thing left on the table is more money. Like, be careful of that person.

And I fall back to, hey, you know, we. We're different. We've created this really great culture here. Yeah, we're all about this. Look at this. And so if. If that. All the things that Dave and I are talking about, recognition, career path, you know, all these things, if those don't mean anything to that employee, that's not the person you want. Just like finding your primary customer, which we've discussed here ad nauseam because it's so important. Finding the primary employee type that you want is also very important.

Yeah, yeah, right. Do you want employees who are just there to soak you for as much as you can get or as much as they can get? Yeah. Rob's not.

I want people that are going to be actively involved that you want. I want to hear laughter and joking around as I'm walking through my building. I don't want just, you know, sour puss faces that are just, I got to grind this out, make my money and go home, you know, so. So that mentality is. Is important to try to protect when you bring in new people in there.

Yeah, for sure, for sure.

And then a few other things. One thing I really like, what we always used to do is I think you have to write awesome job descriptions and recruiting posts to show that you're different. If you want to attract those employees that are a little different and value the things like we're Just talking about, you know, using humor, taking a lot of pride in what we've created, maybe a little exclusivity. You know, hey, we really hire unique people here, or we hire the best of the best or, you know, that kind of thing. And. And, you know, and talking about, like, the career path and all that kind of stuff, those things really pay off, and people connect with it on another level, and I think it's just really important. Don't. Don't forget that. That's another way you're communicating. And, like, I'm a guy, I really don't care for resumes very much. I don't think they tell you very much. I think they're prepped. They're way too polished. And, yeah, you can kind of get a thing, and I can go look at, you know, whatever, dozens of them, be like, okay, but tell me about your accomplishments and tell me, you know, what you've done and different things. And so I would talk about that. I don't. I don't really like resumes, but here. Here's 10 questions I want you to answer. Send those questions to me. And, you know, it's amazing how many people just ignore those instructions. And I would go, well, I don't want to hire that person. They're not even. They can't figure this out.

Right.

And those questions that I would answer, and it wasn't even the importance of each individual questions. It was just like, okay, is this person different? If you throw the resume out, you can entice people that kind of maybe out of the mold, if you will.

Yeah.

And those people can be really valuable.

And.

And I think, again, those people value what you have to offer, probably more so than somebody that's just focused on the salary.

So are you saying to, like, lead with that on your, you know, recruitment page, on your website, whatever that is, you know, slash hiring?

Just one other way to do it.

Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah.

If you post something in a. On LinkedIn or you post it, you know, Elon Musk, I just saw a thing he posted on Twitter the other day about hiring some attorneys. And his thing was, hey, I'm putting together a group. You know, I need a group of attorneys that'll help us. Send me a direct message with the top three cases you've been involved in. That was it.

Yeah.

And show me your. Show me the solutions that, you know, you've helped come up with. So, you know, he didn't care where you went to school, what's your resume, whatever it is, what have you done?

What can you do? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What can you do? And so you're setting that. It's just a different discussion when you have that. When you can attract that kind of person, that's, you know, if they're so focused on the resume, which is fine. And, you know, I'd say nine times out of ten, that's what you get.

Yeah.

But I like the questionnaire. I think that's really good because you can add some interest, ask some interesting questions before you even meet the person that can help you decide if you. If you want to meet them. Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's interesting. Like, I'm thinking about how I would do things differently. And one thing, one question I really enjoyed asking the last time we went through a big hiring push, which was a year ago when we hired Sadie here was. And it was a question we asked in person was, tell me about something that we're nerds here. What are you a nerd about? And everybody had their own thing. I mean, Sadie's was music, and she likes seeing live music, which was obviously a great thing because it meant we got to have a conversation. You know, there was the number two, and it was a close first and second. I don't think we've ever talked about this publicly here, but the number two was a woman who was an absolute Star wars nerd. And we had a great conversation there, too. The number three person was a guy who had played music with members of REM and things like that. So that was another interesting thing. It was like, wow, these are interesting people. And. Yes. And. But, like, leading on the website with we're nerds about lots of different things and maybe listing all the things that we're nerds about so that they don't think, oh, I've got to be a nerd about technology. No, no, no, no. Like, everybody's a nerd about something, you know, and just leading with that so that people like. Because that could be an attractive thing to the right person. Like, wait a minute. These people say they're nerds. I might like hanging out with them. Well, you know, that's. That's a good place to start. So. Yeah.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, it's really good.

Yeah.

And also kind of, you know, I always ask a question. One of my last questions I always ask someone is I said, look, I'm going to be interviewing a bunch of people. Tell me something I'm going to remember about you specifically. And that's kind of along the same lines. You know, what are You a nerd about tell me something you're super interested or something unique about you. So when I'm looking through all this stuff, I can go, oh, I remember that guy. He was interested in this. Or like that that woman was super Star wars person.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I like when I say super Star wars person. Then I remember the other things about her. But like that's the thing that comes to mind was like, oh, yeah, that was, you know, it's good. Yeah.

Okay. I'm going to share what I would say is the, the best thing I've ever done for hiring that completely changed the entire dynamic of my businesses and helped me be successful. I'm going to share it here. Right there.

Okay.

And it's.

I'm ready.

You ready?

Yep.

Intern. Interns. If you don't have an internship program at your company, stop and start researching how to get one, how to create one, who you would work with to create it. A local technical school, a community college. And, and if you don't think you're, you know, business is right for interns, I'm telling you, you're wrong. Because everything you do, from greeting customers at the door to taking phone calls, to shipping orders, if you're doing that to showing up at people's houses, interacting with the public, there's a ton of young people that don't know how to do that and can really help add to your organization. And you know, either or often you don't have to pay them because they're getting credits from some other program they're involved in or you're paying them something, you know, that's very reasonable. But you're creating this cycle of success. The system, if you will. We used to call our interns, worked for us about 100 hours, 110 hours. And I called it our 110 hour interview. Because when those interns. So the flip side of it is that when they're done with your internship, often they're looking for jobs. So you get to look at that person and say, man, that she was great and she figured this out and she was really flexible and her attitude was great because a lot of it, success was built on how you respond to these problems that come up in your job and attitude and how you carry yourself interacting with other people. So a hundred hours to watch how that unfolds is priceless. And every. I just can't think of a company where you couldn't figure. I don't care if you're a plumber, you could take somebody to teach how to do estimates and how to do this kind of work, whatever it is, if you're in the trades, getting with the local union and figuring out, hey, is there a way we could, you know, work through interns or, you know, whatever. Whatever. They apprentices, something like that. And you're giving back.

Right.

Because those people want that experience. They need your help. And it's. It's just. It's like having a minor league farm team in baseball. You're constantly working with these people and developing their skills. Skills that eventually, with a couple of my businesses, my entire staff came from the intern program because they started, you know, and how difficult.

And I know we've done episodes on this, and I know we've answered this question, but in a nutshell, how difficult did you find it getting yourself set up so that, you know, an accredited school could send people to you as interns? How difficult was that?

It took a while, but.

Okay.

The key thing, I mean, I. I would say it took us six months.

Okay.

I had to guess. And reaching out to a couple different schools.

Sure.

Explaining and. And really focusing on. And just be transparent. Hey, we need people and we want to help. You know, we know your people are learning about what we're doing. In our case, it was the primarily technical side of things.

Sure.

But it. What I found was, because we've done it with a few different institutions, a lot of it was, hey, we just need these young people to learn about showing up on time, dressing appropriately, how to talk with people and communicate, and how to be accountable. Those kind of skills we may take for granted as business owners, but especially young people, they need to model and learn that stuff. And that's a great thing about an intern. It's not necessarily, you know. Well, maybe it is. It could be a college kid. That's. At a certain point, it all depends on your. On what you're doing. If you're in the financial planning business, well, getting some finance, you know, kids that are learning all about that stuff in your office, and they. They'll do a lot of menial work. I mean, we used to kind of grind them up a bit in the first 10 to 12 hours to see if they would actually do what we asked them to do. It was like, we called it the keyboard test because we were refurbishing tons of product. And at the that time, and one of the jobs, you just had to clean keyboards and test and get them in the test with these testing machines, go through and test all the keyboards, but you had to clean them. And if the intern's attitude wasn't such that they could see it wasn't an end in itself, but that cleaning and doing grunt work for the first 10 hours was going to make their internship much better. They would leave and they'd never come back. But then we'd get the people that did. Like, sure, tell me what to do and I'll do it, you know, so.

That'S a good litmus test right there. That's the key. Yeah.

Think about how you could, you could create an internship program.

You're.

Like I said, you're giving back and you're also creating a farm of people that are going to continually come into your business. Right. It's priceless and so often ignored.

So, yeah, well, I think, yes, you're right. All those things are correct. I can come up with my own reasons for ignoring it, but they're. They're irrelevant.

Your.

Your point stands? Yeah.

If you don't need it, it's fine. But I found it incredibly rewarding as well, because, yeah, I don't know, I can see the experience that these, these young kids were having. And I did feel like we were giving back and helping them learn some basic life skills, you know, in addition to the technical stuff, it was, hey, this is how you interact with their supervisor, somebody who's not a teacher or not your parent and stuff. So look that up and think about that. And if you have questions about how we set up our program, I'd be glad to help. Feedbackusinessshow co and then, you know, let us know tips and things you're doing to recruit people and to stand out right now because I think we're all struggling to find people that want to come help us out and got to help each other.

We got it. Yeah, absolutely. Feedbackus show co. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Folks, thanks for all your feedback. In fact, next week you've got some great feedback about mailing list to share. Feedbackus show co. Thanks for checking out our sponsor, of course. That's shopify.comsbs and keep living that charmed life, would you? We'll see you next week.