Every Recruiting Leader Needs To Understand What The BAM Zone Is!
In this episode of Recruiting Conversations, host Richard Milligan explains why traditional recruiting approaches—focused on compensation, sign‑on bonuses, and a company’s “toolbox”—fail to attract and retain top talent at scale. Drawing on 25 years of experience, Milligan introduces the "BAM zone" (Belonging, Affirming, Meaning) as a higher‑order motivational framework rooted in Maslow’s hierarchy. He argues that recruiting leaders must shift from offering incremental improvements to presenting a new, authentic opportunity defined by vision, values, and purpose. The episode outlines concrete tactics for embedding the BAM zone into every stage of the hiring process: involving 5‑12 stakeholders (including executives) to convey belonging and affirmation; designing scripts and videos that highlight purpose; conducting local site visits; and creating community‑service initiatives that deliver meaning. Milligan backs these practices with data—e.g., 98% of top producers cite engaged executive involvement, and 25‑40% of new hires never show up, a rate that can be cut to 5‑10% by applying the BAM zone post‑offer. He also shares practical steps, such as researching candidates, affirming them personally, and leveraging social media for leadership branding. Listeners are invited to join his closed recruiting‑leader mastermind group, subscribe to his weekly email, and contact him for deeper resources or consulting.
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So the big question is this: how do recruiting leaders like us who have 12 to 15 other job responsibilities win at this game of recruiting? How do we build a system that allows us to recruit effectively in a minimal amount of time while motivating recruits towards meaningful change? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Richard Milligan, and welcome to Recruiting Conversations. Hi everybody, it's Richard Milligan. Welcome back to another Recruiting Conversations, and you If you haven't seen my video version of this, you really should check it out because I'm coming into this already having given away like 3 minutes of great content. And so I would encourage you, go check out my YouTube channel, go check out my Vimeo channel, go find me in social media somewhere. You can actually find— I actually manage a closed Facebook group for recruiting leaders, and it's a recruiting leader mastermind group that's closed group. If you go there and you say, I'm a recruiting leader and I've seen— I've heard you talk about this closed Facebook group on the podcast, guess what? If you knock, I'll let you in. How's that? And we deliver some content there as well, in addition to the things that we talk about here. And so it's a great place to get an advantage if you're looking to get an advantage in this area of recruiting. With that said, today I'm going to talk about something that will make zero sense to you when when I initially lead with it, but it's something that everybody needs to be aware of and everybody needs to know. And it's what I call the BAM zone. So I know all of you right now are having these incredible epiphany moments and you're like, oh my goodness, why haven't I ever thought of the BAM zone when I'm recruiting? And no one's doing that, right? Because no one even really understands what the BAM zone is. So I'm gonna share with you what the BAM zone is and how it relates to your recruiting efforts. Now, let me take you back into, um, really what I spent— the time I spent as a recruiting leader, which was close to 25 years. I spent almost a decade in one industry, transitioned into another industry for 15 years, and really didn't have success recruiting— what I would consider success recruiting— until the last 3 and a half years. I always had wins on the recruiting side. And in fact, um, you know, a lot of people would have looked at me as being ultra successful with my recruiting efforts, but, um, in terms of the amount of energy and effort that I invested in that and what I got out of that, I didn't see a direct correlation in the two until going into 2014 when I did some things really dramatically different. One of the things that I became aware of That just really just literally kept me awake at night because I realized that I was doing my recruiting wrong was how I was approaching people. And one of the ways that I was approaching and recruiting people was that I was leading with things like money, compensation, sign-on bonuses. And, and, you know, it's difficult to win. At scale, when you are leading with things like sign-on bonuses, compensation, things that are ultimately in what is really the lowest forms of human motivation. One of the ways that I would actually recruit and recruited for most of my career until the last 3 and a half years was I would recruit through the lens of what I, what I would consider the company toolbox. What are the things that the company offers? Support, culture, What tools, right? If you're a salesperson, you understand you need some tools, right? You need to be competitive in the market. You need to probably have a CRM for staying in front of your potential and past clients. So there's tools that you need at the company toolbox level, level, but I led with those. Those were my primary tools that I recruited with. And so what I would do is I would develop a sales pitch. And that sales pitch was what I would lead with. If I could get you into a face-to-face meeting or into a phone conversation, what I would do is I would lead with my company value proposition quasi-sales pitch. What I began to realize is that that is not how you move content-cold happy candidates. Right. Think about this. If you are leading with your company tools and you're leading with compensation as the primary conduit to get people to your organization, you really are nothing more than an improvement over the current opportunity. It gets very difficult to convince someone to join an organization when you're simply offering an opportunity improvement. It doesn't matter whether it's 10% better, 30% better, 100% better. The opportunity improvement offer. If someone says to you, I'm happy where I'm at, I'm content where I'm at, it gets pretty close to impossible to motivate someone who says that through anything other than large sign-on bonuses, significant improvements in compensation. Right. And one of the things that I know is that if I recruit someone through that lens, Then I will lose someone from my team through that exact same lens. So if I win them over with comp and I win them over with my toolbox, what happens when another, another organization shows up and offers more comp and a better toolbox? Then I will lose that individual. But if I recruit correctly and I recruit through the lens of the— what I call the BAM zone, which I'm going to lead with my values. My convictions, my beliefs with my vision, I am no longer an opportunity improvement offer. I am now what I would consider a new opportunity. The reason why is that no one can duplicate your vision, your core value system, your convictions, and your beliefs. And if they do duplicate that, it's seriously, you know, it's not stealing like an artist. It's just straight up thievery. Right? If someone takes all of that on that's yours, they just straight up, straight up stole it and don't even care to hide it. And so, you know, they will lose. That's, you know, they will lose because they're non-authentic and people will figure that out. But at the end of the day, if you will present yourself through the lens of being what we call an attractive leader who has a clear vision, clear values, clear beliefs, clear vision, and articulate around those, you move out of that zone that I always call the opportunity improvement offer zone and you move into the new opportunity. So how do you get there? How do you have, how do you create more framework than just this idea of vision, values, right? Beliefs. One of the ways to approach this is through what I call the BAM zone. Now what BAM stands for is belonging, affirming, and meaning. Now, if you go back and you remember, maybe in high school or college, you probably learned to some degree a part of this through what's known as Maslow's, you know, hierarchy of human motivation. And what Maslow— the conclusion Maslow came to is that there, you know, if you, if you'll remember the pyramid, there were ultimately 5 stages of that pyramid, right? And the lowest forms of human motivation fall in the zones of Safety and security, protection and provision. So safety and security, protection and provision mean that, like, if my 90-day paycheck is intact and I feel comfortable that the company's safe and I feel comfortable in my position with the organization, right, if that's in place, I then am going to think about other things that matter more. And those things actually fall in the zone of belonging, affirming, and meaning. Now, here's what we whiff on. When someone says, I'm happy, when someone says, I'm content where I'm at, no, I'm good, I'm not interested, what we fail to realize is that that's actually a very viable opportunity. A lot of times I find that recruiting leaders kind of put a check and a checkmark in that box that says, this person, I talked to them, this person says they're happy, I'll follow up in 6 months. Wait, wait, wait. If 94 to 95% of the market is content and only 5 to 6% of the market is discontent, you have really taken your recruiting efforts and you've diminished anything that you're going to do. Like you're only going to pursue the people that are already actively looking. Like you can't win at scale when you're only looking for the needle in the haystack. So a problem to solve is how do you move cold, content talent? How do you move them? One of the ways you move them is through the BAM zone, and that's in that higher top 3 zone of motivation for us as human beings. This is how we've been designed. God designed us to want to belong and to want to live in community. Right, we've been designed to want to be, or to not just want to be, but to actually require affirmation. Like psychologists will tell you, like if you go back to the early stages of boys and girls, the most important thing that they— that will determine whether they become a healthy adult or a wounded adult. is, is the affirmation piece. Are they affirmed? Okay, specifically by the mother and the father, are they affirmed? So we've been designed to need affirmation. The other part of this is the meaning zone, right? So we've got belonging, we've got affirmation, and we've got meaning. And meaning is the highest form of human motivation. What does that mean? It means that we want to be a part of something bigger than the next transaction. It means that I want to play a larger part than just helping the next customer across the finish line. That falls into that lower form of human motivation. That's safety, security, protection, and provision. When I close the deal, I get paid, right? When I do a good job, I get paid. I'm safe. I'm secure. I'm protected. I'm provided for. When we flip the script and we begin to focus on these pieces of belonging, affirming, and meaning, What we actually will find is that people that will say they're cold and they're content can actually have a seed of discontentment planted with them where a leader shows up and represents those 3 things correctly. Okay, so inside, you know, my organization, inside my coaching, inside my teaching, a big part of where we go back to and focus on Everything around recruiting efforts, when we're helping an organization build a better recruiting model, or we're helping an organization build a recruiting model that— where one didn't exist. We'll go back to this BAM zone again and again. How do we represent this? What's the messaging? What are we doing inside the organization to ensure that people see that they can belong to a strong community, a tribe of people? What are we doing to show that This is an organization that affirms people. How do we affirm them through the recruiting process? What are we doing to show that if you come here, you will be a part of something bigger than the next deal, something bigger than the next transaction, right? Something larger than you, something larger than this organization, something that's in that meaning zone. We'll wrap— we wrap this around everything. I'll give you a perfect example of how we wrap this around everything. Here recently had an executive-level leader come to me, someone that's inside my coaching, and say, look, we're as an organization, we're going to cut some recruiting— I put my quotations around recruiting videos— here over the next couple of weeks. We've all written scripts. I wrote my script. I'm not sure if it's the right script. And so what I would ask is, would you review the script that I'm going to use to be on video? Reviewed the script. As I reviewed the script, the script was really nothing more than a sales presentation. And what I found out later on is that every other executive leader inside the organization that went on video actually recorded a sales presentation type video which talked about why people should be joining the organization. Okay. When I looked at that script, the first thing that I asked myself was How do I help this leader represent something as critical and important as belonging? Okay, that if they come here, they belong to something bigger than what they currently are a part of. How can I show in this short 2-minute video that we're creating that this person, if they came to this organization, would be affirmed through leadership? And how can we reveal that this organization is all about something that's much larger Then money, then sign-on bonuses, then compensation. And so we wrote a beautiful script. And I, while I can't give the details of that script because we signed nondisclosure agreements, what I would tell you at a very high level is that we took this piece and we wrapped it around the entire script. We recreated the script. And what that script did was it aligned the leader And these 3 components directly to the organization and these 3 components. When we— this is a true story— when we're done, they recorded the videos. As they were leaving the studio, the video crew that was not part of the organization stopped this specific executive leader and just said, want to let you know, we had tears in our eyes when you were actually speaking your script to the camera. It was the best script hands down that we heard. And the reason why Is because we as human beings are intrinsically designed to want to be a part of these 3 components. Okay, so anytime you're looking at what you're going to do on the recruiting side, come back to this piece. Let me give you an example of how you can do this. When I'm doing surveys, anytime I do an audit for an organization and the recruiting efforts, when I'm doing an audit for them, one of the things that I assess is Who, who all inside the organization is involved in the recruiting process. And so we will follow that process from the time that a recruit gets initially contacted all the way through the end to where they cross the finish line. And we want to map this out, whiteboard this out. Who's everyone that plays a role in this? As we've done this again and again, here's, here's a data piece that just jumps off the charts at me. Organizations that involve 5 or more people win at scale inside their recruiting efforts. Organizations that are limiting the number of people that are involved in the recruiting process lose at scale when they're recruiting. Okay, think about this. If I'm going to recruit you and I wrap the people, the amazing people inside my organization around you in this process of recruiting you, What am I showing to you? Well, I'm showing you that you would belong to something bigger than yourself, right? I'm revealing to you what it looks like to be a part of a community, what it looks like to be part of a tribe, right? While I'm doing that, I can have more people affirming you. It's actually affirming to have more people involved, right? I feel important because, you know, versus one person being involved, 8 people are involved, right? If a CEO, an executive-level leader is involved, then I feel absolutely affirmed in this recruiting process. And so if your executive-level leaders are not involved in the recruiting model, you've got to get them involved. Okay, this isn't Richard's opinion. Data supports this. Like, I mean, when I talk about data, in one industry, a survey of 13,000 top producers Top producers said one of the key factors in them making a decision to join the organization, to join the organization they went to, was that 98% said they saw engaged and responsive executive management. Think about that. Top producers are saying that because executive management is involved and they're engaged and they're responsive in this process, that they're more likely to join the organization. Okay, so data supports this, not just my data, the larger data supports this. Getting more people involved equals more success, more wins, right? And it makes sense. I get a larger sense of what I'm going to belong to. I'm affirmed through the process. And here's the last part of this. The meaning zone can be revealed at a much larger scale when you get more people involved. Okay, so let's just talk about this meaning zone. For a lot of you, you've got to solve this problem. A lot of you have not identified the meaning zone. Okay, the meaning zone is, if I join your team, if I join your organization, what else am I going to be a larger part of? What else is there for me to be a larger part of? Now, if you're at a local level, let me just reduce this down to some very practical things that you can do. If you're a local leader in a market, okay, one of the things that you can do is you can very easily bring meaning into the organization that you're creating. One of the ways that you can do this is at Christmas, go partner up with some organization that finds needy families and then generates Christmas lists for them and then sponsors trees. to corporations and individuals. And so you can sponsor a tree for a needy family and buy all the gifts that they need and buy the tree that they need. And that can be part of the team's Meaning Zone. Okay, it's one of the things that I did as a leader. Not only did we do that, but the week of Christmas, we always invited these families in. We would stage the trees inside our local office. We'd invite the families in. We'd have Santa Claus come in. And that Santa Claus would actually do pictures with the families, would then give them the gifts. We made a big presentation. Okay, the entire team was a part of that. Okay, there's larger meaning in being a part of that. That's now not transactional. It's not about the next deal, the next contract, the next customer. It is actually more fulfillment. Right. So we would do that at Thanksgiving. It wasn't uncommon for us to get together as a group and deliver, deliver turkeys and Thanksgiving meals. The morning of Thanksgiving. Was it uncommon to be serving at a homeless shelter, to be serving meals together once a quarter? Was it uncommon to be partnering with and building a HUD home? Okay, and taking the team out for an entire day of the office. These were very normal things. It was very normal for me to actually push my team into these opportunities. And the reason why is because when we were aligned in doing these things together, We were actually creating larger meaning in what we do as a unit. There's more cohesiveness, connectedness. This unity in doing this is something that everybody wants to be a part of. I don't want to just show up at work, right? Think about this. This is such a large investment of time. Why do I want to just show up to just turn on a paycheck? Right? Why do I want to just show up to every 2 weeks end up with money in my account? Give me something more than that. Now this should be something at the highest level of the work. This should be a problem solved at the highest level of every organization. But where this is solved at that level, a lot of times there's a disconnect at the local level where you may have a larger nonprofit entity that you're donating money to that represents some sort of large, you know, piece of what is ever at the top of the organization, but it doesn't filter down well. So this has to happen at a local level. And the reason why is because the local leader, the one that the recruit's going to go work immediately for, is the one that needs to represent this. So if there's a disconnect there, create a connection to that. And if there's not something available for you at a corporate level, go create it yourself. Because meaning is the largest form, the highest form of motivation for us as human beings. So getting more people involved matters, right? And so here's a couple questions you should be asking yourself. How many people are involved in my recruiting process? If it's less than 5, then you got to solve that problem. If it's more than 5, what I would tell you is that it can't be more than 12. Because my data supports that more than 12, it actually diminishes the results. Okay, so a sweet spot is somewhere in that 5 to 12 range. Get that many people involved and it makes it easier for you to represent this BAM zone. The other question you got to ask yourself is, how can I best represent this idea that someone will belong to a tribe, that someone will belong to a community? How can I best represent this, this idea that we are an affirming Leadership group. Like, very simply, while you're recruiting people, like, you can affirm them like crazy, right? Here's a very easy way to do it. Engage another leader in the conversation with the person you're recruiting, and you simply lead in a conversation with, I was talking to Richard, and wow, Richard speaks extremely highly of you. I'm excited to have the opportunity to meet you. That's affirming somebody, right? Here's another way to affirm them. Do a little research on them. Hey, Richard. Wow. I did a little research on you. My research, I see that you are just, just an incredible father. Like you're leading in putting your family over work. I applaud you for that. Well done. You just affirmed me. And if you do your research, you can find lots of space to affirm people. Here's the thing that's changed inside recruiting. Even 5 years ago, if you would have gone and looked at their Facebook page, looked at their Instagram page, studied their LinkedIn, You know, research them through just an organic Google search and connect the dots on the individual, it might have been considered stalking. Okay, not always, but if you got the wrong individual, it might have been considered stalking. Guess what? It's an expectation today. The rules of the game have changed. If you haven't done your homework, then you're missing out on a huge opportunity to connect with somebody. The other thing is this, is that they're going to do their homework on you. If they know you're meeting with— they're meeting with you, they will do their homework on you. And that goes to some of the other podcasts that I've already produced, which is that your leadership brand matters on social media today. And so you need to go back if you haven't listened to one of those and listen to one of those because it matters. Because this is now fair game. Your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, whatever it is, all of that's fair game. Okay, and so you need to ask yourself, go back to the question of how can I best represent the BAM zone, right? And you're going to break down those 3 pieces inside your entire process. One of the things that I work with my clients on is that one of the most powerful things you can do is taking a recruit and bringing them into the local office. I call it a local site visit. Now some companies do these larger corporate site visits and those are great and those can definitely play a critical component to it. But when you bring the local office in, right, and you, the people that this individual is going to actually work alongside, and they have an opportunity to interact with them, and you wrap belonging, affirming, and meaning around that particular local office visit, there is some secret science/sauce in creating that and building it right. And if you want to see a model around how that can be done, shoot me an email. It's rmilligan@4crecruiting.com. I'll shoot you back an actual document that will show you the breakdown of the things that you can do inside just a simple local office visit where you say, hey, I'd love to host you at our local office. Would you be willing to come by and grab a cup of coffee? Not everyone's willing to do that, but the people that are will— this will allow you to wrap this BAM Zone all the way around them, and they will leave that place knowing That, that's an organization that they want to, that they want to align with, that they want to work for. Okay. So the BAM zone has now been revealed. Go to this again and again and again and constantly ask yourself, what are we doing to represent this BAM zone in all of our recruiting efforts? And if you do this, what you will find is that you'll have more wins on the recruiting side because we as human beings want more. than money, compensation, sign-on bonuses, whatever you want to call it. We want more than that. That's how we've been designed. And so build a better recruiting model that actually is designed around getting to the highest forms of human motivation, which are going to be in that belonging, affirming, and meaning zone. Excited to have been able to share this with you. We will come back to this again and again. This is something that, that is that important. We'll talk about how you can actually create scripts at some point using this idea. We'll talk about some more specific things in how you connect the dots, the BAM zone, even after you've given someone an offer. Because one of the things that I know is that somewhere between 25% and as high as 40% of people that receive an offer actually don't show up for the first day of work. Okay, that's real data. And so if this BAM zone gets wrapped around that process beyond the signing of an offer letter, you can actually take that 25 to 40% that you're losing and you can reduce that to 5 to 10%. I know this, I've seen it, I've worked to make sure that organizations are executing in this space. And so you can take this part that I've just given you today and implement this in every aspect, every part of what you're doing. As a recruiting leader or an organization, and it will make your process better. If this brought value to you today, I'd be honored to have you share it. You can find more podcasts like this on my website. You can also find more podcasts like this on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify. We're in a lot of places. And so look forward to coming back next time and sharing more ideas with you. around this Recruiting Conversation piece, which is this ongoing conversation that I have on a daily basis with recruiting leaders like yourself. So until that happens again, until next time, have a great week, everybody, and we will look forward to hosting you again here on Recruiting Conversations. Want more Recruiting Conversations? You can register for my weekly email at 4crecruiting.com. If you need help creating your own unique recruiting system, you can book a time with me at bookrichardnow.com.
