Cracking the Talent Code: The Entrepreneur's AI-Powered Hiring Hack

As an entrepreneur, I've always found the recruitment part of the business one of the most challenging because I know that I need to spend more time on it. I know that it's mission critical, but it's also not necessarily directly revenue related, and it's not a skill set that I've been trained in. There is a solution, and we're going to talk to a gentleman today who's actually got an amazing business out of Surfside, California, and it's called Discovered. Fletcher Wimbush has got the platform that people like you and I need for finding and retaining and tracking talent. Fletcher, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Jim.

Well, it's my pleasure because we know that a business is as good as the people, even if they're temporary or they're freelancers. If we're building teams, we must have the right players. Fletcher, tell us about Discovered. Which is your AI performance hiring software, what it means to entrepreneurs, what difference can you help us to make in our business?

Yeah, as you mentioned, I mean, I think it's a forever problem. You know, there's 2 big challenges in hiring. One is just finding people. And I think in the last 5 to 7 years or so, you know, everybody understands how tight the labor markets are and the roller coaster of COVID and whatnot. So having the right tools to market your jobs and to be found and to be in the right places is really step one. How to be your own headhunter and nurture a talent base is a tool or is a skill set that you probably want to work on developing at some point in your entrepreneurial journey. There's several other techniques that you want to master and having the right tools to to make doing that easier because, as you mentioned, it's not your primary job responsibility. It's not the thing that you focus your time and energy on every day. You know, want to make that as easy as possible, right? So that you can be successful at building a pool of relevant, highly potential individuals, right?

And Fletcher, tell us how— yeah, sorry to cut you off there, but How do you operate differently to, for example, the job boards? Because there are loads and loads of job boards and then there's platforms like Glassdoor that helps the employee evaluate the employer. But how do you offer something different to the entrepreneur?

Yeah, diversity, right? So, if you rely on one source, you're limiting your opportunity to find and select that, you know, identify that best person. We're a platinum partner with Indeed. There's only 10 out of 300 applicant tracking systems out there in the world that are at that level, as well as partners with tools like ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn, Monster, and many, many others. So again, that really helps you expand your reach. You're not just reliant on one job board. Most of those, almost all of those job boards we are publish openings for free, no cost to the employer. And you can throw extra marketing dollars and things behind it. But then also things like employee referral programs and making those easy. The key behind those is just talking it up and going social media posting, mining your existing database of candidates. So, if you've been in business for a little while, you've built a pool of people. And if you're sitting on one platform, it can be very difficult to mine those people back out of your database and reengage them, creating talent benches. So, the platform helps people do all of those things, right? As well as sourcing talent, right?

So, we've got here Meet Your Hiring Hero. You've got a picture on your website of a video with a bot. So, Am I right in understanding, Fletcher, that what you're doing with Discovered ATS is you're really helping an entrepreneur by creating an assistant, a digital assistant, to go off and find on these job boards appropriate candidates and bring them back through one centralized recruitment system?

Something like that, yeah. You make one post, it's going to distribute your job across all these different channels, job boards, social, Internally, candidates come in, the bot's going to help you identify which of those people are highly likely to be a fit for you. And then it's going to help you do things like write ads and messages and nurture sequences, text messages, and then assessing those people to make sure that they're good. So it's going to assist people at every stage of the hiring process.

That's amazing. I can see that you've got automated candidate engagement and follow-up. And often it's that first tranche when you put out an advert and you get hundreds maybe of applicants, of which 60, 70% are completely irrelevant, right?

Irrelevant.

And you need to get down to the top 3 to 5 that you actually want to interview. So, what I'm understanding is that with discoveredATS, that kind of manual process is now taken care of in an intelligent way by the system. Is that correct?

Yeah. Candidates come in and we score them right away. And so, you can go and look at the 100 candidates that you got last few days and they're already ranked for you and it gives you a good starting point to say, okay, what do I want to do next? And then, you may want to have these people complete some assessments or skill-based testing or provide references. And it also— this will reach out to the candidate and ask them to do or complete those tasks and then report back how they did. Maybe you want to ask them to complete a one-way video interview, whatever it is that you want them to do and to get them through some of that initial screening. You know, when, when we do offshore hiring, the whole process is literally completely automated all the way to the final interview. Uh, it's pretty, pretty crazy.

Yeah, that's amazing, Fletcher. And by the way, Fletcher is going to offer some access to his platform for those of us listening today that are interested in using the Discovered ATS platform, so you get a trial. So do stick around because Fletcher is going to give you some places to go where you can get some free access. And he's also got a large number of tools and assessments on his website that he's going to give you access to. Fletcher, I can really, really understand how you're really giving us a virtual HR manager.

Yeah.

Aren't you? That's working for us.

Recruiting manager. But yeah, I get put in the HR bucket, but I'm not an HR person, actually. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a business leader. I've been a leader in businesses my whole life in every role that I've had from captain of the football team to running a business. But, you know, it's talent acquisition or recruiter is probably, you know, I think a little bit better. But, and I think that's an important thing for people, small businesses to understand that hiring is not an HR function. It's completely different mindset. You know, you don't hire an HR person to win at hiring. You hire a talent acquisition expert to win at hiring.

Oh, that's it. I hadn't understood that differentiation before. Fletcher, what's the difference then? Help me to understand why are those 2 things different?

Yeah, primarily HR is focused on compliance and what you do with the people once you have them on the team. So oftentimes they're doing things like payroll or benefits or putting on parties or doing other administrative tasks of managing the team. And oftentimes they're tasked with doing recruiting, but you have to keep in mind most HR professionals are not trained as talent acquisition or recruiting experts. They're trained in legal compliance administrators to make sure that the human resources are dealt with compliantly. And recruiting is not that.

It's very, very interesting. I suppose as an entrepreneur without that level of sophistication, I used to just think of it as going out and finding people and hoping to attract people. But it's really, really valuable to get that distinction. As you say, you've got almost a sales function, haven't you, to go out and find good talent? And then you've got the administration, the hunters and the farmers, I suppose.

Yeah.

Uh, would be maybe a way of looking at it. But you have mentioned you're an entrepreneur, Fletcher. You know, on this show I try and find people who've got goods and services or products and services that are useful, but I also like to find out about you and how you build that business. So yeah, tell us, with Discovered ATS, as an entrepreneur, how are you building this brand? How are you getting people to come and be your clients and partners?

Yeah. Well, I think one thing, you know, I think is important for me to note is everything we've done has been bootstrapped. So we've taken no external money or partners, and I am a solo entrepreneur. So I have no business partners. And that's its own unique path, I feel, at least in this day and age. But, you know, I found, you know, in through our previous business units or channels here that, you know, there's been a handful of things have been very successful for us. Number one, SEO has been inbound content-based or organic search marketing has always been our number one generator of leads and customers ultimately. And that's been number one. Number two is doing things like this. So being on podcasts, standing on stages, speaking to small groups and doing workshops and One of our core values is educate first. So that fits the content marketing and the SEO side. It fits, you know, getting on stage, being on podcasts. So those have been very successful. Cold email has been very successful in our executive search business. And yeah, I think those are the big ones. I feel like I'm missing a lot.

Those are the big ones. But I will pick you up because Fletcher, You have also on your on your website a lot of certifications, and you've got Captera, you've got Trustpilot, you've got ItApp, you've got one I can't read. We've got SHRM ATP. Do you want to just tell us about that? If you like, so that it's social corporate proof strategy that you've got.

Yeah. You know, I lean— I've leaned into that idea over the years for a long time. And, you know, we do a really wonderful job. We transform our clients' businesses, right? We were talking in the pregame, you know, nothing is more satisfying than coming back to our clients a year later, which we do to all our clients. We check back in and say, hey, how's it going? How did that hire go? Or how are those hire— how's hiring going for you for higher volume clients, right? And to hear them, I mean, I had a concrete company the other day tell me, you know, they went from couldn't get their trucks out of the yard because they couldn't find drivers to buying more trucks. And that's a, you know, $5 million a year impact on their business.

Right? Yeah, that's incredible. As you say, if labor finding people is the bottleneck in the growth of the business, then if you like, it sounds like it's almost a meta engine that you've built there that helps people to manage all of that is very powerful indeed. You've— you do have a number here on your website that clients have collectively enhanced their bottom line revenue by over $643 million. How do you get that number? Because, you know, on the whole, clients are very reticent to share their successes. So I'm impressed that you've got a number as well.

Well, I learned this from a content guy, and I learned this from Gallup. If anybody's probably familiar with Gallup, right? They published an article, I don't know, 2019, right before the pandemic, that turnover is a $2 trillion a year problem for US businesses, right? And they didn't go out and survey every US business to figure this out, but they used some great deductive reasoning and You know, looked at the publicly available database, but the 20% of, there's an average turnover of 20%. The average pay is about $50,000 a year. That cost of turning that person over, they use an estimate of, I think, like 1.5 times that salary. And we did something kind of similar to that. We looked at, hey, you know, we're helping our clients collectively last year make 1,000 hires roughly. It was 963 hires or something like that, right? And so we could, we could do the math pretty quickly in going back through our records there and saying, hey, you know, if these folks are, you know, making these hires and they're able to retain these folks and, you know, through these testimonials and surveying our clients, you know, we know that they have very, very high success rates with the people they hire using our tools and our methodology, that, that has, you know, an impact on their business that, you know, When we did the math, came out to $643 million, excuse me, and probably a bunch of other numbers. We just rounded it up, you know, but, you know, it's a pretty good approximation of the impact we've been able to make, right?

Yeah, that's it. It's impressive. But also, I do like the way that you're trying to quantify the impact that you're making because potential clients will be seeing that and want obviously to be part of that as well. You do have another business, and I know that your heart is currently in this new business, in this AI-driven business. Do you want to just talk to us a little bit about the strategy when you've got, if you like, uh, you know, an established company, which is— you've got, if you like, a recruitment and a search business, um, you've got those established ones and you've launched a new one with a new brand?

Yeah.

Many, many entrepreneurs, me included, have suffered with kind of losing much wind in the first business as we try and fill the sails in the new business. How have you managed to build a second and a third brand without impacting the revenue on the earlier ones?

Yeah, I think it's a, I mean, it is a real challenge, Jim, frankly, right? But, you know, it came from very early on within a few years of the business. You know, we were doing search work, had this executive search, retained search business, and then we had this assessment business. And at first they were all together and intermingled and the employees and the people on my team, you know, we sort of just did everything, right? And which is true. It's always, you know, we're always wearing lots of hats, but we got to a point where we realized they were very distinct businesses and made that separation. We got clearer about who our target audience was and we separated the teams. And so, There's a team of people who focus on the search business and the things that make that business move forward and the things that make the assessment business move forward. And immediately the first year doubled revenue, right? As soon as we made that switch, just a focus switch, right? And in terms of that, you know, sticking true to that, you know, we've, in order to do this, you know, it's been very, very much having to create a new team around the new brand and the new focus. So the new brand though is ultimately a parent to the others. And that is a, as we talked about, it's kind of for me as a, the culmination of my journey in helping people solve the hiring problem. And so it is a, some way it's a reunification of them.

But it's interesting that you found by separating the company into multiple brands, that actually each one of them has become more efficient and more effective because of the impact of focus.

Yeah.

Whereas before, it's sort of a, sort of an amalgam of business models under one brand. So you really have got mitosis there, haven't you? You know, uh, where you managed to create, you know, 2 cells properly from one. Um, Fletcher, so It sounds like a bit of a textbook case that you've managed to build the business and separate and grow businesses. As an entrepreneur based over in Surfside, California, which sounds beautiful, any things that haven't gone quite your way? Any marketing mistakes that you've made that you could share?

Yeah, we've been toiling on this one, you know, pregame. You know, I think, you know, it has been the shiny object, you know, chasing of ideas. You know, I think, you know, I've struggled with paid ads mightily. You know, it's been a big one for me. I've, you know, I've struggled with the lack of focus. The best thing that happens is focus, but lack of focus has also been, you know, a challenge there. You know, agencies has been always a failure for me.

So, in what way do you mean using agencies? Yeah, using external parties. Why is that?

Yeah, I've never successfully hired a marketing team. I've turned probably 7 of them over the 11 years that I've—

Is that right?

Yeah.

And what do you think has been the recurring issue there? Because it's interesting how many Entrepreneurs I meet who do fail with agencies. And, you know, when people get to 14, 15 people, they hire an agency before hiring a marketing manager. Yeah, you know, it tends to be the rubric. Yeah. And then they find it doesn't work. So I'm interested to hear what's been your experience and what we might learn from that.

Well, I think, I mean, what I like, I mean, I think what we do is pretty unique, especially when you talk about the assessment and the discovered platform and But these things, there's not really a lot of us out there in the world that do what I do, right? There may be a few hundred, which might sound like a lot, but, you know, unlike the recruiting world where there's thousands, right?

Yes.

Competitors in that space, right? And so like any hire, you have to train and onboard them and you have to, you know, brain dump and, you know, get them up to speed with you. And, you know, marketing agencies tend to be pretty expensive. to work with. And so as a, on a bootstrap shoestring budget, paying somebody $5,000 or $10,000 or $15,000 a month to only get a fraction of their time and their energy and attention is a real big investment and it's super challenging. And to get them on message, helping getting them to understand the product, the service, the ideal customer, Everything about marketing your business, you know, ultimately it really, you know, I find it came for me. I've ultimately been my own CMO for the whole time and for better or worse, you know, and over the recent years, you know, we found we just brought it all in-house and, you know, we get 15x the volume of work done, you know, and, you know, are more focused, right?

Yeah, interesting. That's an interesting observation here. Agencies, um, can be a consortium of very smart creative people, and there's an energy inside of that company, uh, and a sort of a creative, creative sort of boiling pot really. Um, but as you say, getting them to be in alignment with the company's understanding, values, uh, customers, customer journey can be quite difficult sometimes. Uh, they tend to do very well with larger corporate clients where, you know, there's bigger resources as well, which is why I started The Unnoticed Entrepreneur actually was because I've seen agencies not always work out for the smaller company, but then where do you get the strategy from that you do need to find the strategy that's not just in Google, right? Or someone else's blog.

Yeah, I've always learned from them. I've always taken something away from them. Some of them have had different, you know, positive strengths and the things that they bring to the table. So I've also taken advantage of, okay, well, if I'm going to spend this amount of money with an agency, like, let me at least internalize, learn from them. So I am, you know, taking away something that I can use forever as opposed to just like, oh, you go do it. And then when they fail, I'm just disappointed and mad and out. Thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, right? So I don't know. It's you know it's a challenge again. It's a particular challenge for my business because of its uniqueness. You know, I I have friend plenty of friends who are own marketing agencies, and they're you know they have wonderful case studies and do wonderful things for their clients. But I see a trend that they're typically hyper focused in a particular sector, like they work with dentists. or construction companies, right? So it's easier for them to adopt a new customer because some of the industry, some of the uniqueness of their business is taken out, you know, taken out and they're less to assimilate with, right?

Yeah, in the McKinsey speak, they call it T-shaped consulting. So you have across the horizontal, you have an expertise, marketing, for example, PR, and then on the vertical, You have the industry expertise, and it used to be that you could be fairly horizontal across multiple industries. In the last 10, 20 years, just for the reason that you're explaining, clients need to have some domain expertise because of the language and the people and the media contacts, for example. You need to know the industry as well as the practice.

And the size too, right? big national dental brand, or are you a small corner shop, you know, dentist?

Yeah.

You know, 2 different animals.

Very, very different challenges. One, one thing I will pick you up on, Fletcher, you're one of the first people to have an accessibility button on your website. This is completely random, I know, but I couldn't help but notice on the left-hand side of your website you have the picture of the, of the person with their arms and legs outstretched.

Yeah.

And you've got the accessibility where I can change, I can look for online dictionary, I can increase the Uh, the, the font size, I can do dyslexia-friendly. Yeah. Um, as well. Um, that's very interesting. Visually pleasing experience. How has this impacted your business, or has it not, or is it really just a, a bit of a gimmick?

Well, I, I, I— there's a lot to unload there, so I don't know what impact it's made, honestly. I wish I did. Frankly, but, you know, it is important. It was important to us. It's important to me that we are following the best practices. As I mentioned earlier, our number one success driver has been organic search. And this is a best practice in organic search. So, you know, the search engines want to know that you're accommodating to all types of people. Also, this is a joke, you know, I'm not in HR, but often are lumped into the HR bucket and, you know, being sensitive to people with unique learning abilities or different disabilities or cognitive abilities is a really, you know, important topic there.

Yeah.

We want to be sensitive to that. And in fact, we want to, you know, figure out how to be more inclusive. I have somebody with Asperger's on my team. I have somebody with Tourette's on my team. And, You know, all of that was frankly by accident, but no intentionality there. Just, we put them through the same process we put everybody through. And turns out, none of them told me this in the hiring process either.

But it is interesting though. So, for anyone that wants to see that at work, you can go to discoveredats.com to see on the left-hand side, the accessibility. And also, I've been doing screen recording if you want to go to the YouTube channel to see that, because you're the person Fletcher I've seen that's got that accessibility bar. So congratulations to you. Now we must just move on to sort of my penultimate question before we're going to have the, the offers that you're kind of going to make. Um, a number one tip that you would give as an entrepreneur to my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs about getting noticed?

About getting noticed? Um, oh boy. Well, I mean, I, I Like I said, I've committed, I mean, one of our core values is educate first. And so I've just leaned into that and content all the way, right? You know, I don't want to spoil my favorite book, but it's all about, you know, being brutal transparency. I mean, just being, sharing your knowledge and, you know, coming from a place of giving first.

Yeah.

was always important to me and still is. And if anything, you know, constantly reminding myself of that. And, you know, that's created a lot of opportunities to be on podcasts like yours or stages speaking to other entrepreneurs. And that's been a huge driver for us and revenue.

Okay, so give first maybe a tip, and we're going to get from you your favorite book that you'd like to share as well.

So, I'm in love with Marcus Sheridan. If you're out there listening, Marcus, I want to give you a hug and a kiss. But his book, They Ask, You Answer, is everything I hope I want to be when I grow up and I've wanted to be for 11 years. And I've aspired to and done many of the things that he's suggested and will continue to be a student of his.

Okay, that's one of— he wrote a book also including a case study, I believe, about writing on his website about the best pool types, didn't he?

And he had a pool business in Florida. Is a case study of how he almost went bankrupt and is now the largest manufacturer of in-ground pools. What are they? I don't know.

Swimming pools, right? Yeah, based on a blog post giving people guidance on Ways to buy a pool. So there's a great, great story. I heard him give a talk online about that. Yeah. Fletcher, speaking of being online, I mustn't keep you any longer. If you want to find out more about you and those kind offers that you'd like to make, where can they go?

Yeah, so discoveredats.com. That's our website. Feel free. There's a— in the pricing section, there's a free plan there. You should check it out. You'll get a free applicant tracking system. Now, some of the cool things about that is you get a free career page that's branded to match your brand. You can embed it on your website. So I think many small businesses haven't quite got there yet or have been longing, oh man, I wish I had that or don't want to spend the money on the marketing team to do it. There's a performance management tool, a really simple, effective performance management tool because that's super important in your workforce planning and hiring and how you do and Measuring success of hiring. We'll also give you 5 free DiSC assessments, or you can try one of our other 30+ assessments or some of our other 30+ assessments. And there's a bunch of other tools embedded, interview guides, candidate scorecards, all free, and access to our AI tools to help accelerate your hiring efforts, all part of that free plan. So I just definitely encourage people to check it out, at least dip their toe in the water. Starting to hire better.

Fletcher Wimbush, you have been discovered. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you.

So, we've been listening to Fletcher Wimbush in the rather glamorous-sounding Surfside, California. And I'm just here in Wiltshire. My name is Jim James. Thank you for joining my guest Fletcher and I to talk about hiring and the importance of it. And I think this idea as well that he's come and shared from a business point of view is the importance of focus and that you create a brand and a focus around a particular business need. And that's actually liberating, not debilitating. And so that's wonderful. And also finally, that to give first is a great long-term strategy. So thank you for letting me give to you another episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. If you've enjoyed it, do please review it on your player. And share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur because we don't want anyone to go unnoticed. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.