Purpose-Based Recruiting: A Better Way Of Finding Talents With Max Hansen

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Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually help you discover and then live your why. You see, we believe that knowing your why, that driving force behind every decision you make and every action you take, is the essential first step to really knowing yourself. It allows you to move forward faster and have a bigger impact. If you're already a fan of the show, then you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we introduce you to somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. This show will be more powerful for you if you've already discovered your why. If you still need to do that, head over to why institute.com and discover your why today. It'll only take you about five minutes. Now let's meet today's guest.

Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually helping you discover and then live your why. So if you're a regular listener, you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we bring on somebody with that why so we can see how their why has played out in their life. And so this week we're going to be talking about the why of better way. So if your why is better way, then you are the ultimate innovator and you are constantly seeking better ways to do everything. You find yourself wanting to improve virtually anything by finding a way to make it better. You also desire to share your improvement with the world. You constantly ask yourself questions like what if we tried this differently? What if we did this another way? How can we make this better? You contribute to the world with better processes and systems while operating under the motto I'm often pleased but never satisfied. You are excellent at associating, which means that you are adept at taking ideas or systems from one industry or discipline and applying them to another, always with the ultimate goal of improving something. So today I've got a great guest for you. You're going to love this guy. His name is Max Hansen. Max has dedicated the last two decades of his life to providing the best hiring practices in leadership search and consulting. He graduated with a Bachelor's degree from Northern Arizona in Business Administration and was fortunate to start working immediately with the Fortune 50 recruiting firm allegiance Group and Aerotech. This experience provided him with a solid foundation for understanding both best in class business systems and selection processes. In January of 2002, he founded his first recruiting search firm, Jobs Brokers, Inc. That went on to hire more than 30,000 people across a wide swath of industries including engineering, manufacturing, education, healthcare, distribution, mining, finance, technology and apparel. Somewhere along the line in 2010 or 2011, the traditional contingent hiring model wasn't allowing organizations to solve the deeper rooted issues they were facing around their hiring practices. Max's desire to help organizations with the root of their challenges pushed him to create the first ever purpose based leadership search firm called Wyscouts. In 2015, he sold all of his interests in three traditional recruiting companies to more aggressively pursue building Wyscouts and Purpose Based Leadership Search. He enjoys helping them and their organizations continuously improve and succeed as higher performing cultures and teams. The root of his work goes deeper towards individual purpose, building true relationships, relentless learning, love and their ultimate intersection. Max, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, thank you. I appreciate the intro. Sorry to send you such a long bio, but honestly, during the bio, two things were happening while you're reading it, because I felt old thinking about two decades, not in a bad way. And then the other one was holy. I think the better way, like, I can't wait to unpack this a little bit with you. Just as you talked about the background, I could start to think about how much better way has really been impactful in the decisions I've made and why I've done a lot of the things that I've done.

So you and I met at a really strange way, so I'll give my version of it real quick. So Max and I were together at an event called the Genius Network, and we were sitting at different tables and I kept looking over at him. He didn't notice this, I hope, but I kept looking at him and I kept thinking, man, I know that guy. I know him from somewhere. I don't know where, but I know I know him. And so when the event was over, I got up and said, hey, what's your name? And you said, max Hansen. I said, max, man, I know you from somewhere. And you said, yeah, you look familiar to me too. And so we kind of went back in our lives through all the possible connections and didn't really run into anything until the next day when we had lunch together. And you said, okay, now tell me what you do. And I started telling you about the WHY Institute. And you're like, ah, this is why we were supposed to meet. And so that's my version. Is that what you remember?

100%. I can't believe it took us so long to figure out that we existed in the first place. Just based on the things that we're pursuing and the interest. I mean, when I had lunch with you, like I said, I couldn't believe that we were coexisting in this world that didn't know each other. But it's been awesome to meet you, and I didn't notice how creepy you were gazing over at me that night. But, you know, it was awesome to meet you and I'm glad we finally figured it out. So that the end of that is. That's how I remember it. But the end of it is, Gary, we kind of gave up because I live in Arizona. Phoenix, Arizona is where I'm based, Scottsdale. And it's like the biggest small city you'll ever live in. Business wise, you kind of meet everybody. You know, I would say There's. I've got 10 close friends and they know everybody or we know everybody in some shape or form. So I always walk around and I try not to say, hey, where do I know you from? Because then our whole entire conversation consumed with that. So Gary led with that. I let it go. But he did figure out that there was another guy. He's about a foot taller than me, but we look alike, I guess. And I really want to meet this guy one day. I think he lives in Albuquerque with Gary. So he did find the guy. And he did put to rest why he thought he knew me is because I looked exactly like one of his other friends. I was about a foot taller.

Yeah, exactly. So we figured it out.

But.

All right, Max, so let's do this. Let's go back in your life a little bit. Where were you born? What were you like in high school?

Yeah, yeah. So I was born in Spokane, Washington, which is an interesting place. I've got lots of family still there. I still summer in Coeur d', Alene, Idaho, which is close to Coeur d'. Alene. What I was like in high school, I was the biggest jock and athlete you ever met. I lettered in four sports. I love to compete. It was my thing. It was how I like. It was my love language. Competing in sports and, you know, really locking arms with a group of guys and a lot of times being the captain of the teams, which I proudly wore that badge and did everything I needed to do and we needed to do to win and enjoy doing and have fun doing it. So that was my pass. I'd say in high school, things that stuck out. I think football was really the sport that really sung to me, that really kind of pulled out everything I had. I'm not the biggest person but back then, the rules were different, and using the crown of your helmet to hit people was not frowned upon. And honestly, that's what I did. And I hit a lot of people a lot of times very hard, and that was what I was known for. But I enjoyed. My high school experience was absolutely amazing. I went to Catholic schools my entire life. I wore a uniform to school. And I was an altar boy when I was younger, up until when I played baseball in college. So I like wearing almost the same thing every day. Still to this day, I'll have, like, job broker shirts and stuff. Sometimes I'll wear them and I have to remind myself, like, I don't have to wear a uniform anymore. So that's what I was like in high school. Very much on the athletic side.

And so then off to college. Northern Arizona. How did you pick Northern Arizona? And I think what, you played sports for them as well?

I was playing baseball at Glendale Community College. And like I said, I think this was one of the pivotal points in my life. I decided to play baseball, and I had only played high school baseball for two years, and my dad pitched at Gonzaga, and he. All of us had really gifted right arms. My son has a really gifted right arm. My brother, he played four years of college football. So I played two years at high school baseball. You know, I think it was just a really good time. I was in the right mindset. I caught and I let off, and I went to a smaller school. I batted.520 when I was a junior and.560 when I was a senior. So I thought my path was go to play baseball just because it was in my family lineage. But I got to Glendale Community College, and I learned a lot. I learned that I didn't love baseball. I mean, these guys that would take 200 cuts a day and really love baseball, it was different the whole time. I just yearned to go, want to put a helmet on and hit somebody, rather than sit there and think about, take a crow hop or take a step or you can take a swing. And so I ended up going to NAU and I was going to play football. And once I got there, I kind of had a change of heart and ended up just going to school there. So that's kind of how I ended up there.

That was the end of your sports career and then off into business. It was.

It was. And it's funny that we're jumping into this, because I think I would say we do lifelines and YPO and stuff like that. We talk about high points and Low points. I would say quitting sports was like this. One of the lowest points of my life. Just because that's like you asked earlier, is how I define myself. I know you're pretty athletic and you play a lot of sports and compete, but for me, when I quit, it was kind of funny. And I remember this now since I want to make sure that I treat my son and my kids. 17 year old played sports and just quit playing basketball, basketball this year, which was a big deal because he was a good athlete and he chose. He didn't want to play anymore. And I totally respected that because when I quit, I had this like thing built up in my head, like I was going to let somebody down or let a bunch of people down because my parents have been watching me play sports my whole entire life. And when I told my parents I wasn't going to play baseball anymore, they were like, that's okay. Like, they were totally encouraging. And there was nothing they harbored. No, it was all in my own head. And so I moved on and went to college. And honestly, those next couple years, I obviously had a great time, had a great college experience. I would say this is no knock on nau. I didn't really learn a lot in college. I went to the College of Business and this was. I graduated in 98. This was NAU, which is in Flagstaff, Arizona for those people. And I'm sure it's a lot better today. But for me, my experience was I got about two or three years in the College of Business and I started asking myself the question of like this guy up here, just kind of generalizing. This guy or professor has been in Flagstaff teaching school business to students for 25 years. What do they know about business? And so I started to kind of ask myself that question. And I think that was true. I mean, they're a bunch of hippies smoking weed up in Flagstaff. I think that they were teaching you out of the textbook, but I don't know how applicable it was. I'm sure the College of Business now is much more focused on real world business and I'm sure it's better. But for me, the best classes were entrepreneurship. And from there I was able to figure out I wanted to move to San Diego and did that for a while. And then I ended up in the staffing business as you talked about. And that's where I've been ever since.

Before we leave this, I wanted to know what was that moment? Take us into that moment when you realized you were done playing sports. What Was the thing that told you that hey, I can no longer do this or I no longer want to do this or what was it?

Yeah, I mean, I think quitting baseball because I never really quit anything in my life. I just wasn't really encouraged in my family. But it also wasn't like, like discouraged. It's just that was what I expected of other people, never to quit. And so I think it was like two different points that I kind of hit me when I quit baseball, I kind of got over this hump where I like realized like there is life after sports. And then I actually, at the end of high school, I was part of this all Arizona team. We went to Brisbane, Australia. We played in the Down under bowl, which was super interesting. We were the first U.S. national team to play another Australian national team in football and gridiron football, which is obviously different than their football we played in Lang mark. It holds 80,000. There's probably, I don't know, 40,000 people there. But it was a rush running out in a Stadium with 40,000 crazy Australians ready to watch the first American football team, which is even more interesting is they were all ages, we were all 18, and these were grown men that we were playing against that we hung out with for the entire week. And they're rugby players and really good athletes. So I came off of that high and came in, I quit baseball and since I already had been through kind of the realization that I was going to have to move on and I wasn't going to play professional sport, which I know this sounds silly, especially being 57 and being as short as I am, I honestly, when I was younger I thought I was going to go play a professional sport. There's no doubt in my mind, like that's what I was going to do. So quitting baseball and then the guys that I played in the down underbowl with, there was a lot of them that went to NAU and played football. So they all recruited me to go up there and I got all the way up there. I signed up for all my classes and then I went and met with the defensive back coach because I was a safety. And he told me after doing all the work to get in my classes that I was going to have to redo my schedule and go start over again. I don't know what it was, I just, I wasn't feeling it. They also, he was talking about possibly red shirting me. I'm going into my sophomore year, going to be redshirted with a bunch of people that I was Already friends with that. I already played a year. So that was when it was an easier decision just to say, hey, you know what? I think I'm ready to hang it up and moved on from there. But I think that wasn't as painful as the first time quitting baseball and kind of walking away from where I was playing baseball at.

Yeah.

The reason I'm asking you that, it's funny because my why is better way as well. And so as I'm listening to you talk, I'm hearing myself listening to you, because that's very similar to my story and what I was going through at that same time and kind of how it played out for me as well. Giving up racquetball because I was going to be a professional racquetball player. That's what it was back when I was in college. It was the fastest growing sport and I was in a motorcycle wreck. And I realized that I don't want to put all my eggs in that basket. And I remember having to think, gosh, I thought this is what I was going to do. And now I got to go in a different direction. I got to find something better.

Right.

I got to figure out a better way. And in my mind, that's when I went off to dental school. But back to your story. So, okay, you finished college and then you start right into recruiting. Did you think you were going to go into recruiting? Was that kind of your plan?

No. I mean, honestly, I wish I had a better, more elegant story, but I knew that I needed to get out of Flagstaff, Arizona. And not because Flagstaff is a bad place. Flagstaff is actually an incredible place. But there's one thing that I knew and I had seen. Flagstaff is beautiful. I snowboarded 50 times a year when I was there. We got a lot of snow. They're getting a lot of snow this year. And I saw people that got stuck in Flagstaff because it's such a lovely little city. You can just get stuck there. And then the next thing you know, you're 30 years old and you're starting over still. And so I knew I didn't want to do that, so I intentionally set a date. I packed a car, I drove to San Diego, where my brother lived. My brother graduated from the US Merchant Marine Academy in Long island, which is a. It's called Kings Point. It's. You have to do all the same. The same stuff to get in at Kings Point or the US Merchant Reading Academy that you would. The Naval Academy or the Air Force Academy. In fact, he had senatorial approval to go to the Air Force Academy. So he had a really good job in San Diego. So I drove out there, I slept on his couch and started looking for a job in San Diego, learned how to surf. So I wasn't really in a rush. I was enjoying the moments. He had a big surfboard, he worked all the time. So I decided somebody need to ride that surfboard, so learn how to surf. And I actually interviewed for jobs. I don't know if I've ever talked about this much. I mean, I'm an open book. But I actually interviewed an enterprise rent a car and didn't get the job. I brought my buddy work there and I never understood why I didn't get the job. So I felt like I was looking for other stuff. I interviewed a few places and then I didn't get that job. And then one of my buddies called me from Arizona. He said, hey, we're hiring. And I work for Aerotech, which is a large staffing and search firm. He's like, why don't you come out here and interview? So I came and interviewed, got the job, and then settled down in Arizona. So that's kind of how I ended up in the recruiting business. I didn't necessarily choose it. Maybe it chose me through my friend, I don't know. But that's how I kind of ended up in there ultimately.

Okay, so you were there for how long?

I was there probably only a few months. Oh yeah. So it wasn't an extended time. It probably felt like that for my brother and his wife because it was a one bedroom and I was sleeping on the couch.

But you were with Aerotech for how long?

Oh, I was only with Aerotech for about two years. A little over two years. And so we're getting back to the better way. So I was at Aerotech and I loved Aerotech. I would say it's one of the best things that ever happened to my life. I got exposed to a bunch of sophisticated process and systems and things that they did that made a lot of sense. Stephen Bouchotti, one of the founders of Aerotech, he owns the Baltimore Ravens now. Probably one of the more successful business stories that I know of. Everybody went and got training in Baltimore, where they're based, and I work with some really cool people. I keep in touch with many of the people that I was working with. And interesting enough, I worked in telecom, like our division was telecom. We did a lot of different types of work, but for the most part I was telecom. And what they're Building in telecom, when I tell people this, especially younger folks that work on my team, we were helping building the Internet. So it was the phone carrier was in a race against the cable companies to like put in the Internet infrastructure and building out the pops where they house all the computer systems and stuff to run the Internet. Obviously everybody knows that both the telephone company and the cable company won. They both obviously run the Internet now. But that's what I did there. And I was only there for a little over two years and these people were awesome that I work with. Granted there was in the winter, I remember going in when it was dark and I remember leaving when it was dark. But like I didn't care. It was like a time of my life when I could grind. We had to wear a tie every day. And so there's this passion I had, there's things that I have a love hate relationship. And there was one thing when I was like, when I get to do this, when I get to do it my way, a better way, we're not wearing ties. And so I don't like the formal dress. Like the only people that I see now that are wearing ties are bankers and lawyers. And if you're in one of those rooms, it's either a good situation or it's a not a good situation. So there was a lot of good, great people where I start decided to move on just that where Aerotech was a very structured place where everybody was willing to put in the work. And I could see the natural line to be promoted based on like nobody was going to give up their position like as long as you were there from like when it was dark in the morning and when it was dark at night, you maintained your position in line to be promoted. And yeah, there's some people that perform better and they've kind of moved them up in line. But it was a situation where I just knew I didn't have the time or patience and I wasn't going to be able to find a better way there very quickly. So I left and went to a small company. It was like jumping off an aircraft carrier and then being in a dinghy. It was a small, probably about a 8 person firm in Tempe. We did was called Hunter Technical and we did a lot of technical staffing, we did a lot of like trades, recruiting. I learned a lot. But again thinking about my why of better way I was there and what I had learned at Aerotech, all the things were super applicable. I mean this place was super behind the times compared to Aerotech. Aerotech has probably, I'm just taking a guess, 10,000 employees. And, you know, now I'm at a company that has eight that just barely got computers, it felt like. So I knew I could just apply what I had learned and we could do it better there. The challenge I had there was I didn't like the culture. There were some issues. I really wanted to be in a leadership role. The owners were cool. I direct access to the owner. So I was telling them, like, I think I can make some stuff happen here. You know, let me run the office. So finally they kind of gave me, like, okay, you can, like, run. It wasn't a very official process. We're like, okay, go ahead and take over now. And then 9, 11 hit. And so there were some things that happened that I started to think about. And I knew I didn't know a lot. I was maybe about 26 years old, and I was there for two years. I was able to develop some business. I was able to kind of use my skills that I had learned and kind of sharpen my saw a little bit. But I knew that I didn't like the culture, and I knew I couldn't change what the owners thought and how the owners interacted and how they communicated. And so I decided, as little as I knew, I knew that if I wanted to do it my way, I was going to have to do it on my own and not knowing a lot. So I actually started a conversation. I walked over to one of our competitors that was like two buildings over, and he was also in the recruiting business. And I started the conversation with him. I said, hey, do you ever think about starting your own company? He said, yeah, sometimes. I'm like, well, let's meet, you know, like every month or so. And so we met regularly. And then we decided to start our own company. And it was really based off of to maybe better way drives home. It's really because I felt like if I wanted to do it different and better than where I had it, then I was just going to have to do it from scratch. And so that's what we ended up doing.

And what was that one? Cause it was that job.

Job brokers. Yeah. Which is ironic because I would say in all the work that we've been doing, and I'd include you in this because you're kind of in this ethos now of purpose and really figuring out, you know, what drives people is the thing that I've learned after this many years that we. I was in that business for 13 years before selling it Was that nobody wants a job and nobody wants a broker involved. But the name actually worked really well. People liked it. In fact, somebody would like use the name. Like, are they a job broker too? Like they'd coin it. Not quite like Kleenex. I'll tell you, it's not like that. We didn't do that great of a job, but a name stood out and you know, we did well with that brand. We grew fast. It was an incredible ride. I still look back at that and it was a fun time. I remember I finally got this guy to start the business. And we didn't know this back then, but I was more of a BD and kind of outward facing guy and he was more of a operations guy. And he was probably a little bit better or was better at recruiting. I was better set up to do sales. So when we partnered up, I remember I quit my job first and then he came over a week later. And I remember the feeling I was sitting like in a cube. And the way we started is we had two guys that were running another business. It was actually my business partner as one of his clients and he was in there the week before. And his client who ended up being our business partner, he asked him, he's like, how many people work at your office? He's like, I don't know, four? He's like, why don't you just do it on your own? He's like, if you want to start a business, just come talk to me and we'll figure it out. So he puts us together and we drank two beers and the guy asked me, he's like, how much money do you think you need to start this business? And I honestly didn't really know. I was kind of taking a stab in the dark. I'm like, 150,000. You know, that's how much you would need over a period of time before we started making money. And so we started a business and I was the first one there. So we were in his office. They already had an office. It was a ACH processing credit card processing company. And so I started there. And I remember the day I had a computer and a phone book. We hadn't even named the company yet. So I started the process of naming it, Put together a logo with some of my people that I know that do branding and that type of work. And so we were off and running. And it was an incredible journey. It was right after 9, 11. So when I think about this in context, I think this has really kind of helped me with these. Everybody Kind of talking about a recession coming. I think I started a business right after recession. It was tough, yet a scratching clot. A good business, you had to do a lot and everybody was counting you out because it wasn't a good time to start a business. And it turned out that that was the greatest time to start a business because we kind of learned how to be disciplined and really scratch and claw and really earned everything we got and took advantage of it the best we could. And then the years became a lot better. You know, that was January of O2, the ensuing years. I think we did a half a million our first year. And yeah, we were struggling a bit and it was definitely a little bit of a slog. But then we did a million, then we did two and a half, then we did five, then we did 10, then we did 20. And then it just kept ratcheting up until we were doing about 50 million. So it was an incredible ride. Job brokers and I learned a lot.

And so that was a 13 year run.

That was a 13 year run. Yeah. It ended officially in 2015 is when I officially sold it. But that said, and this is like when I was reading through, you know, kind of my why just recently and then right before this call, it really like, want to make sure that comes out. As we talk about, like how I ended up in wy Scouts, I was really figuring out that I wanted to do it a better way. So when I started job brokers, really what I wanted to do is I wanted to work for myself. That was my dream. Nobody in my family was an entrepreneur. I mean, my grandpa did some stuff, but he was a police officer. Then later in life, he owned some restaurants and some properties. But so I don't know what it was with me. I just really felt like I wanted the freedom of working for myself. And then the next thing I know, over some long years of hard work, I was with the business partner. We were both making seven figures. And I started to ask myself the question, like, what am I doing this for? What am I going to be known for? What are we doing? Like my business hat was also saying, like, is this the model that I trust to feed my. At the time I had one son, he was about five. And I was starting to think about this, like, is this the business model that I want to continue to feed my family with? And the answer that I got to was no. I think there was three things in the old business. And this is no knock on staffing companies or contingent because they have their place in this World. It just, I did that and after a while of doing it, what it felt like to me was I felt like we were preying on the ineptness of companies ability to hire. Meaning like, and I'll give some examples and this is no knock on these companies like the University of Phoenix. They needed to fill a contact center full of people and they weren't as good as recruiting as we were. So we went in and we hired, you know, thousands of people for them over several years. Same with like Goodrich Aerospace. And that was okay at the beginning of my career, but as I got older I started to think about the problems of. Because when you think about the contingent model is if you have a company that has just enough turnover where you're just continuing to fill the same role because it's 90 days contract to hire. So if the person makes past 90 days they can take them on full time. But if they don't, you get to fill that seed again, you get to make money on it all over again. That was kind of. I started to think about it and again I just started to think about the problems upstream beyond the people I was working with and what it would mean for me and that company if we could really figure out the challenges and the problems as to why they're having all this turnover in the first place. That was giving us all the business interesting enough. I and this is, you know, kind of always tying back to a better way. There was a straw that broke the camel's back. I was at home working. It was probably 2009 and I remember my son was probably 5 years old at this point. I'm a single entrepreneur. I'm having the time of my life. Like I'm coaching all his teams. I'm like, feel like a great dad. I'm spending my son half the time and everything's great. And he walks up to me and he's with my nephew. And to put it in context, my nephew's dad or my brother in law is a police officer. And so they walked up to me and they said, what do you do? And so back to like the why? And I was like, I find people jobs. I help companies hire people when they need them so they can continue to do whatever business or product or service they're in. And they're like giggling and they're like no, what do you actually do? I'm like, what do you mean like no, what do you actually do? And I'm like, well, I talk to people on the phone and meet with them in person. And they looked at me, they go, that's all you do. And I remember I had been going back and forth with, like, why am I doing this? Like, it's just not something that I want to be known for. It's not going to leave a legacy. And so that was kind of the last straw. I was already, like, kind of ready. And I went and talked to my partner and I said, hey, we need to start unwinding this business a bit. What we able to do is during that time, I did start Wise Scouts, which I think is important to understand. While we were running this other business and while it was kicking off a bunch of cash and when you're able to start a business when you don't absolutely have to drive money to the bottom line and that was the case, it's like, we got to tinker with, like, would this work? What would people think if, you know, we did purpose discovery on them and we really started to ask them about, you know, why they want to work and, like, what means if they could exchange, they could get paid the same what they're doing now and do anything, what would they do? Like, those types of questions, that was really what helped in us really test, like, these different things that we do now and really play them out. In fact, back in the day when we started Wise Scouts, the other company, job brokers, and there was a company called True Path that came out of that, and then there was a company called Sky Staffing that we also ran, and then we also had this JBI Energy company as well. So there's a few brands wrapped up in there. They were just rolling along and like, they were almost like, making fun of why Scouts. Like, I had, we were in the same building. We had a group of people that were founding this company, and they were just kind of like, making fun of it. Like, you just don't even make any money. Like, you don't even produce any revenue or income. We kind of had to overcome this, like, black cloud of, you know, people kind of ridiculing us for starting something so different. But obviously it ended up getting some legs over some time.

For those of you that don't know, it's Y as in the letter Y. Why did you go with just the letter?

Yes, this is an interesting question. And again, it brings me back. I brought on a guy, he's a close friend of mine. He came into the business and I think we hired him as like a VP of growth for job workers. But our intent, like, him and I agreed, we're like let's figure out a way to do this different. He was from the job board business. He worked at jobbing. Great guy. Still around today he's running another business. But so we decided we're going to just do this different. And so what we decided was we wanted to figure out a way to align people and understand their purpose and reason for work, like deeper meaning and really align people based on that. And since he was in the job board world and I was in the staffing world, we started to understand, like the technology of job boards. It somewhat broke the hiring process and still is today in our opinion. Meaning what we were seeing a lot of is a lot of people were posting jobs and then people were applying. They're rewriting the resumes according to the job posting and sending it in and putting all the keywords on their resume. So they gamified it so they go to the top and then they would get hired and then they'd ultimately end up not working out. And we saw this play out over and over and over, even in our own work that we were doing. So we decided it was going to matter. We wanted to make sure that we align people the right types of people that wanted more meaning in their work. And so we started thinking about it and obviously it was this concept of purpose, like we want to figure out. And so we knew we were doing purpose based recruiting. So we were in the conference room and I remember googling purpose based recruiting. And the first thing that came up was the Boy Scouts Institute. Like nobody had even used that term in hr, consulting, recruiting, staffing. And that was the first moment we were like, well, I think that we're onto something. So we started, you know, think about. Our first tagline was what's your why? And so why Scouts? How we came up with the name is Y. The letter Y stands for the word Y. Just like your company, the Y Institute, it also stands for a fork in the road. Like when you're going up a Y and you have that fork, you got to make a decision. And for us, we were standing for something different. Like we wanted to align people that wanted more meaningful work. There's going to be some people that were going to still exchange time for pay, and that's okay. That's their path. Our path was the people that decided they're going to quit doing that. They're going to do something more meaningful and something that, you know, really aligned to them. We're going to stand for that. So that was the fork in the road. And then there's A theory. And I don't know if I shared this with you, but you probably know this. There's X theory and Y theory, and X theory, just like kind of shorthand, stems back to some studies that the US government did. But X theory, I think McGregor is the guy's name that did it. X theory is based on the premise that people will only do stuff for money. And Y theory is the premise that, like, people can be led and motivated to do things for more than just money. And so that was another indicator. And then the word scouts, we took the 10 companies that we thought were our competitors back then. It's changed over the years. And we did a word cloud, and the word scouts wasn't in there once. And it also tied back to my sports background. I started to think about a scout sees talent before anybody else does. And that was something that we pride ourselves in as being a leadership search firm and hiring great leaders and being a beacon for great leadership.

Okay, so that makes a lot of sense. I didn't know that's why you picked. Why. I don't think that's ever come up in our conversations. Was it the job boards that really was the reason that you wanted to go towards purpose? Because people were just getting hired to get hired and then wasting everybody's time turning out bad, that kind of thing, or.

Yeah, I think. Yes, that angle of, like, when you think about it, the job boards were set up where you could go apply to, like, a hundred jobs in, like, five minutes, you know, so it was. It became less meaningful for people to apply. Like, it's. Everybody was just applying to everything. So that was one of the drivers for us, was to try to fix that. I mean, the interesting part is still to this day, we don't ever post jobs. And the reason why we don't post jobs. And what we tested back then was when we reach out to leaders now and that we do all work in the cease, we take everybody through purpose discovery before we actually tell them what the role is, the company and the details of the actual role. Now, if you're a cfo, you probably know that you're getting called about a CFO role. But the way we address it is we've been retaining it. We're exclusive by a company that cares so much around purpose, values, and your ability to do the job that we want to take you through a discovery process before we get into the details of the role. Are you cool with that? People actually love that. So we tested that, and when we start testing it early on, we Thought people are going to be able to tell us to go pound sand. And now we're realizing like the response rate that we have through our outreach is much higher. I mean, we have got a lot of brand equity that we've built up as well. So when people look it up, they're like, well, this is interesting. But yeah. So we started doing discovery work. The other problem. So we were addressing problems we still do. We feel like we address it through our process. The other problem that we were addressing that I went through and Brian being at the job board was is how job descriptions are written. So like anybody will, you know, anybody that's listening that has to write a job description. They know how job descriptions are written. They Google it and figure it out. Now you could probably use AI, it might be a lot better. But back in, you know, over time people would just Google and find a job description, copy, paste it and then pass it around. So you already have like this is, you know, kind of what this person's going to do. And then everybody would add a bunch of stuff to the job and it would make it so complex that would be almost impossible to interview somebody too. So one of the our three uniques is our role visioning and success outcome design process. So we really help clients define what success looks like in the role through the stakeholders that are the most important in the company. So that was another thing that we were addressing and then great leadership. So then we do the discovery process that I talked about on the candidate side to make sure that they're aligned to those success outcomes, key responsibilities. And then we have a leadership model for hiring and we believe the best leaders on earth according to our leadership model, which we claim and tell everybody it's open source, you're welcome to use. This is we look for proof points and how much somebody's been a relentless learner, how much they've developed other people and how have they driven results. So when you really break it down and you actually take the time, recruiting is actually there are some things that really don't make sense, especially for somebody, like kind of a quick start mentality when you're hiring a senior level role. I always encourage people to interview the high potential candidates, even if they don't have an open role. But when you know you're going to have an open role, you got to break yourself down and to go fast, you have to go slow and really be intentional about figuring out what you need. So we really built a system to address like all the challenges we were seeing and we are really, we're still hell bent on being non traditional. Like, I think that, you know, recruiting has been around forever, and there are some staunchy, like traditional search firms out there, and we stand for kind of the opposite of that.

And our other companies are looking at you as the innovator.

Right.

And they're wanting to have you come in and like, help them revamp, even what they're doing.

Yeah, absolutely. When we go take a company through our process, just helping them define the role, we give them everything that we do. So, I mean, one thing that's interesting and I think a little bit counterintuitive for most people that think about recruiters is they think that most recruiters, they're just trying to take all their work and spit out these people out of a black box. You know, we're a little bit different. I did do that for many years, and they'd give me all their recruiting needs. And we in some cases hired thousands of people for companies. But a big win for us would be helping somebody even with one role, taking them through a process and then taking a couple things from our process and implementing it in their own process. So every hire moving forward is better for them. And if they never needed us again after one hire, that would be a huge win and they would never quit referring us to other people.

I love that. All right, so Max, tell us what was the toughest job you've ever had to fill?

Man, this is one of the toughest jobs that ended up being a really good opportunity for us, and I would never do it again. So back in the early 2000s, there was a Motorola facility in Arizona, and they needed to decommission it. Like they needed to knock it down and rebuild it if, you know, from semiconductor manufacturing. There was like pipes that had, like, pretty hazardous chemicals, like running, you know, miles of pipes, this whole place. So this company hired us. I don't even know how they talked me into this, but they hire us and they're like, we need you. I think it was like a risk thing. They wanted the risk to be on somebody else's payroll. We need you to hire these people. They need to be hazmat certified and respirator certified. So they had to wear these respirators and cut out these pieces of pipe in foot pieces. And it was going to take, you know, it took probably 40, 50 people, you know, almost a year to do. And so I would take back, then we would take the checks to go pay these people. So it was tough because when we started, we had to first figure out like we have to find somebody that's willing to wear a respirator all day. Not to mention there's probably the heat in Arizona. So I mean, I went there and paid them a couple times and there was guys like on the roof inside tanks, like sawing tanks off. I'm like, this does not look safe. But I'd say that was one of the more tougher roles to fill. And then another one was back in the day there was a company called Orbital Sciences and they would launch things into space, satellites into space. And they brought me in like a clearance and I think it's okay to talk about now, but they told me we needed to hire a person that was going to help build a system to shoot down a missile out of the sky that the government was going to build. So it was like this stealth mission. So that was an interesting one to fill as well. Wow.

So like, what's going to be the future now of recruiting and staffing with all the AI that's coming out? Is AI playing a bigger and bigger part in it? Yeah, I think so.

I mean, I think that's one of the things that fascinates me the most is like I think AI will aid certain things like we were just talking about. I think aid people in actually writing job descriptions possibly that are more on point because they can use more keywords that have to do specifically with what they need versus copy and pasting from somebody else. And this machine can base it off of more keywords. But I don't, you know, I think it'll aid. I don't think it will ever, that I can see in the near future it will ever take over, especially at the leadership search. I think that's one thing that fascinates me most in this day and age is with all the technological changes and advances, the need for great leadership is still at an all time high. And I think the only way you uncover great leadership is through face to face conversations. There might be again some tools to help aid somebody, but at the end of the day, we have to find great leaders and we have to trust great leaders. And on the lower levels and on maybe technical jobs and stuff, it may help, you know, from a sourcing standpoint and help in some different ways to automate some processes. Especially the way people apply and kind of how they pre screen them. Like there are some tools and some bots that are already making that a much more efficient game.

Is this right? You only work in hiring or placing leaders. That's kind of your Thing is just leaders.

Just leaders, yeah. In fact, that's the cutoff. I mean, every once in a while, one of our clients will ask us. Most of the time, the answer is no. But that's the first question. Is this a leadership role? We're a leadership search firm. We stand for great leadership. In fact, when we started we executive search, the name bothered us and bothered me. Like, now I've learned to get over it. But when we started, I'm like, you know, the reason why executive search doesn't make sense is like, not every executive is a leader. And so we tried to use leadership search, not executive search. And I know there's, you know, everybody's like, what's the difference? But for us, we took a lot of pride in it because we're. We're a leadership search firm and we stood for great leadership. So you're absolutely right. The process we built is meant to really figure out whether or not somebody is a great leader. And the reason why we did it in the first place, you know, kind of back to a better way, is impact. We wanted to create a business where we would positively impact as many people as we could. In fact, Brian Moore, one of the co founders of Wise Scouts, his purpose and why is to positively impact everybody he meets. Now, I don't know what it would be on your system, but. And so we chose leadership because we started to think through these companies and we really targeted purpose and values driven companies that cared about purpose and cared about the why. So we wanted to work with leaders and we wanted to align leaders that could have an impact companies and have it cascade down and really impact as many people as possible. And we're talking about what I started to see and what we started to really care about was not only the people that work in the company, but when you have a great leader, the people that you lead, they go home and they treat their family different, they treat their kids different. Great leader can impact people directly in the company, but it's everybody outside the company, everybody around them, everybody they mentor, and everybody they come in contact with. So that was one of the things that was important to us, is really to have the biggest positive impact and focus on leadership search. And that's one area that we're really continuing to figure out is how do we take our leadership model that we feel has covers a lot of ground of being a relentless learner, developing others, and driving results. When you look at those three things and somebody's past, if you look in every single role, the people that are able to do that are the best leaders out there. And I know it's a simple model, but those are also our internal core values. That's how much we believe in that leadership model.

So relentless learner, is that right?

Yep.

Building others and driving results. So have you found leadership to be something people can learn, or is it.

Something they just have 100% they can learn it. So that model using that is, if you only had to pick one, you would pick a relentless learner. But. And I don't have all the answers to this, but it resonates with a lot of people, and I'm sure it will with a lot of your listeners. And, you know, is everybody kind of knows people in their lives or people that they work with that are relentless learners. Like, they want to learn, they'll learn, they'll read, they'll develop. And then they like to work with other people, like to develop other people. So they got those in space. But for some reason, they just don't drive results. I don't know why that is. I'd love to figure that piece out. Because if you have somebody that's a relentless learner and cares about other people, to your point, they should be able to learn how to drive results. But not everybody does. So again, I'm not sure why that is, but in that model, that's where I wouldn't say it breaks down. That's where people break down when you put them up against that model.

How do you teach somebody to be a. Someone who drives results? Do you know?

Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, it's a big question. I think people that drive results, I think it starts in their personal life. I think it starts with habits, and then it spills over into their professional life. And you stack a bunch of good habits together and you start measuring progress and you make it happen. So just some people are able to get it done and some people aren't. Again, I don't know why. I think it has a desire, it's wants, it's their ability to set goals and measure progress. And then I always think, when I was thinking about Better Way is your system talks about is the problem with Better Way, and I run into this all the time, is it's never good enough. Nothing's ever good enough for me. And I've had people tell me that you just always don't even stop to say, hey, this is great. You're just like, you just keep moving. And that can be, you know, obviously a bad thing because you don't ever give people compliment people to the, to the extent that they need it. So that's. There can be some pitfalls in that. But I always like to use the term, you got to figure out how to do the right things and doing things right. So it's that combo. You know, I try to strike the balance in that, and I think it all breaks down to the advice I have and I often give myself is you just got to move to action. Nothing happens unless you start moving forward and you start doing action. I mean, if you've done all the research that you need to do and then you're ready to take action, you probably waited way too long, figured out on the way.

That's funny, because the next question and the last question I was going to ask you is, what's the best piece of advice you've ever given or you've ever received?

Yeah, I think it'd have to be around that in that spirit of you just got to take action. I think once you take action, once you have a little momentum, you can figure stuff out and you can iterate. But overthinking and not taking action, I think is what kills people and freezes them and, you know, physically, mentally, and professionally. So I think taking action, not overthinking stuff is probably the best advice that I've ever gotten.

That's hard for a better way person to do, typically, because we're always looking for what's best. Right. Well, if I pick this one, if I move on this. Well, what about that over there? That might be better. So I'm curious how you've been able to overcome the paralysis by analysis.

Yeah. I think one of the ways that I have has been, you know, kind of tying back to where this conversation started. I think playing sports and working out and staying active, like when I was stuck professionally, like the first year I talked about, I just breezed over it. But, you know, it's kind of hard. I mean, I had business partners that were kind of like, are you gonna make, like, is this working or not? Like, we're, we're gonna cut you off soon. This is almost done. When I was young, I thought I maybe should just be in the office, like cold calling, trying to build a business. But instead I just went to the gym. And so, like, that was physical action that I was taking. And so that's. That's kind of maybe one of the things that helped me overcome not getting stuck. And I still, to this day, I'd say all the success that I've been fortunate enough to have through the teams that We've built. It kind of mimics how physically fit I am. I know it sounds pretty cheesy, but like, the times in my life when I feel really good and I'm staying very disciplined and eating good and doing all the things that I like to do because I like to find a better way to stay in shape, it seems to mimic, you know, how things are going professionally for me.

So the physical mimics the mental?

Yeah. For me, it has almost my entire career. In fact, I can't think of times in my life when I was in the best shape of my life. I never was in the best shape of my life, which is getting harder and harder because I push it pretty hard. But when I'm in the best shape of my life, things on the professional side are just going. They're going crazy. They're going great. And I can't think of a time when I was in the best shape of my life where things were miserable. And I'm sure maybe it's coincidence. I'm just sharing with you that that's been my personal experience.

Have you had a time in your life where you weren't in great shape?

Oh, yeah. When I quit playing sports when I was in college for a couple years, I worked out a little bit, played intramural sports, but I drank, I smoked cigarettes. Like, you know, I did all the things that you do. And even when I got a little older, you know, there was a few years that I, when I was working, I was more focused just on work and got away from it a little bit, but not for very long. I, you know, kind of came back to it. And that was kind of my. To your point, that's kind of how I kept, I think moving forward was staying physically in action.

So what is next for umax and what's next for WY Scouts?

Man, I feel like we're just starting to make hay. Like, I mean, we've been at this for 10 years. Which, granted, for the first three years I was still running companies, but we had great teams working on this problem. For us, it's continuing to pursue our purpose of transforming how people and companies connect to work that matters. So continuing to change the game and feeling different and performing different and executing search different in order to align leaders on purpose and values and professional competencies and continuing to do that. One of the way we talk about kind of our BHAG or a 10 year is to have done purposeful hiring in over 10,000 companies. And so we're probably 10% there. I haven't done the math. But so for us, we want to continue to push this. We feel like we stand for something different. We feel like we want to start we're competing more and more with big four or five, however you want to look at it. The hydrogen struggles, the Spencer Stewarts, the Russell Reynolds. We want to start just continuing to build our business and take over the US we started to do some international stuff, so we'll continue to build this. We recently just built our research function. We've got a lot of tools and access to stuff that helps us source more effectively and just find people and solve problems and, you know, really find people that you just can't do unless you have these tools and the team and the process that we have.

I love it. Max, thanks so much for being here. If there's people that are listening that want to get ahold of you, want to follow your company, want to hire you guys, what's the best way for them to connect with you?

Yeah, wyscouts.com it's y s c o u t s dot com and then I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I post quite a bit. So if you follow me on LinkedIn, it'll be a good way to interact with me as well.

Awesome. Thanks so much for being here, Max.

You got it. Thanks.

So it's time for our newer segment called guess there why. And this is with famous people that all of you know. And so I want you to think about Elvis Presley. What do you think Elvis Presley's why was? You know, how he danced, you know the songs that he came up with. You know, his history. If you saw his movie that just came out six months ago or so, you got to learn more about how he grew up and the way he learned to sing and his inspiration and then how he passed away. And so I'd love to know what you think his why is. And for me, I'm going to guess that his why was better way only because he was always finding better ways to do things. Better way to dance, better way to sing, better way to move. Could also be challenge. Could also be challenged to think differently and challenge the status quo. Think outside the box. But the more I watch the movie, the more better way came to me. So I'd love to know what you think in whatever platform you're using.

If there's a way for you to.

Write it in there, let me know. And thank you so much for listening. If you've not yet discovered your why or your yos, you can do so@yinstitute.com you can use the code PODCAST50 and take it at half price. If you love the beyond, you'd why Podcast? Please don't forget to subscribe below and leave us a review and rating on whatever platform you're using to listen to our podcast. So I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening.

I really hope you enjoyed today's episode and that through today's guest, you heard how important it is to know your why and how impactful it can be in your life and the lives of those around you. Be sure to head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. Remember, the more you know about yourself, the more you'll know about others. I'm Dr. Gary Sanchez and I'll see you on the next episode.