Few Recruiting Leaders Have a Clear Vision of Where They Are Going.
In this episode of Recruiting Conversations, host Richard Milligan tackles the core challenge recruiting leaders face: juggling multiple responsibilities while trying to build effective recruiting systems. He argues that the missing ingredient for most leaders is a clear, compelling vision paired with a concrete set of core values. Milligan introduces his "3 C's of Vision" framework—Creating, Clarity, and Casting—as a step‑by‑step process for developing a vision that can be articulated, shared, and lived. He shares his own journey, describing how a personal "why we do this" document in 2013 led to a bold 10‑year vision to help 10,000 recruiting leaders each year by 2027. He breaks down how that big vision drives daily actions, from content production to hiring practices, and how core values (no jerks, trust good intentions, high expectations, open communication) serve as the operational lens for achieving the vision. Milligan also provides practical resources—a downloadable vision document, PDFs, templates, and a step‑by‑step presentation—hosted at recruitingconversations.com/vision. Throughout, he emphasizes that clarity fuels passion, direction, and perseverance, turning abstract goals into tangible business outcomes. The episode ends with a call to action for listeners to define their own vision and values, leverage the provided tools, and share the message with peers.
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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. Everybody, it's Richard Milligan. Welcome to another episode of of Recruiting Conversations. I've got a bunch of new technology here, and so I'm a little bit— I'm pausing as I come into this just to go, is like everything working? Everything here working all right? Like, I look around me and I've got like 3 new monitors, I've got new mics, I've got new speakers, I've got a new location for my web camera, for my iPhone. I record on my iPhone X this as well, and it goes on my YouTube channel. And so I'm like, I'm looking at everything to go, yes, Okay, thumbs up. It is working. And so it is possible to be smarter than technology, but I also know I've experienced the other end of that to where I have not been able to figure it out. And I've had to call in people that are more knowledgeable than me, but today's not that day. Today is a day where we are going to talk about vision and values. Now, if you've listened to this podcast much, podcast much at all, you know, vision and values is something that's really important to me. Now, typically how I approach this is we'll talk about attractive leadership and how the attractive leader has these 3 traits that represent them, right? They've got a clear vision, a clear value system. They then are able to articulate around that extremely well. And then they live and they act in alignment with it. And while that sounds super cool, and it is my job, I find it is my job to oversimplify things, Right? Because one of our taglines is that we are part of Recruiting Made Simple. We believe that recruiting is simple. We own the copyright on both of those statements. And we actually own the website, the URLs, recruitingmadesimple.com and recruitingissimple.com. And so I'm always trying to formulate ideas to oversimplify things so that people can move towards them. I find for so many years, I never moved towards that vision and values because To some degree, it felt as though it was a game of wordcraft. Like, I'm trying to formulate these thoughts and these ideas that clearly represent who I am, and it really felt as though I had to come up with multiple paragraphs, multiple statements that, that articulated that extremely well. And so I just never did it. I gave it multiple shots. There were seasons where I had a partial vision or partial clarity around it. But until 2013, end of 2013, uh, where there were a couple of events in my life that took place that led me to this, to actually owning this and making it through this. For the majority of my career, while I was clear on my values and I was clear on my goals, I knew where I was headed. I was not able to truly articulate it well to people. I was living it out until, and I would say that to a large degree, I was living it out. Now I think ultimate clarity comes from really getting to a place where you're so crystal clear that you're constantly articulating this. You're now putting it on a mouse pad, painting it on a wall, right? You're bringing it up in all of your meetings. Like, I never got to that place. And so because I never got to that place, I couldn't say that I was 100% living inside my vision and my value zone, that I was there probably 90%. And so I think a lot of my bad decisions that I made came from not Living in alignment with it. What I found is that, man, difficult decisions became much easier for me when I had clear vision and where I actually had this ability to articulate my value system very clearly. That clarity gave me the ability to move towards things and to move away from things very quickly. So with that said, I want to give you some more. I want to give you some more input around the vision piece, because I know a lot of people struggle. In fact, when we first started coaching around vision and values, what I found is that it took about 8 weeks for people to get to a place where they had ultimate clarity on this. Now, when I first started coaching, I was actually offering an 8-week coaching program. And so that was a problem. Like, if I'm spending the entire 8 weeks trying to coach you to building a recruiting system, and now the only thing we're going to accomplish is vision and values, which can tend to be you know, something that's theory to a lot of people. They understand the importance of it, but they've never practically seen it lived out and articulated over a season of work to where it impacts their business. And so a lot of people don't feel as though that's something tangible of value. So that was a problem for me in my coaching, and so I had to solve it. And we created some great tools for people and, and how they come to this much quicker. And now I find that people are able to get to a place where they have clarity on their vision In terms of creating it in the first couple of weeks that we're working with them. Now I say creating it because I do believe creating it is the first phase of vision, not perfecting it. I think a lot of times we get caught where we try to perfect the vision versus just creating it. So creating it, always make that phase 1. I applaud people for getting through a place where they've got it written on paper and now they can begin to truly get ultimate clarity on it. And what I found is that that second stage, I call them the 3 C's of vision, which the first one's creating, second one's clarity, and the third one's casting. If you get to a place where you've got clarity on it, then you can move into this place where you become a visionary, which is someone that can actually cast a vision so clearly that they can get anyone excited about joining them. Now, if you've ever met a visionary, you'll, you'll know what I'm talking about. I've seen from a practical perspective, a lot of these come through network marketing. And a lot of that happens because network marketers are really clear on why they're doing what they're doing and what they want to accomplish. And so that clarity gives them some things that are very tangible, things that we're going to talk about today that leads them to being great recruiters of people. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about how do we get through these 3 phases of creating, you know, clarity and getting to a place where I can cast this vision so clear that people want to be a part of this. So here's part of my own process. Okay. When I started this organization, one of the things that I did was I sat down and I wrote a why we do this document. Now, if you want to, if you want to, if you want to get an idea what that document looks like, you can actually go to recruitingconversations.com/vision. And there will be a copy of our vision here. The one of the reasons I want to share that with you is it'll give you an idea of what a vision document can look like. Now for us, there's multiple pieces to this. One is, why do we do what we do? And that gave us, by writing that, that gave us ultimate clarity on taking that first step of actually creating the vision. So, you know, in that, you know, some of the things that we say is that we do this because we love people and people matter to us. We do this because we empathize with the recruiting leaders' struggle. We do this because great leaders influence things outside the walls of their business leadership. So That why we do this document really moved us to a place emotionally where we had lots of clarity as to, you know, this being more than a company, this being more than a job or career. This was our calling. So imagine that if we believe that we've been led to this place, inspired to this place, equipped to do this, right, then we're going to have way more passion about why we're doing what we're doing. Than the person who's simply operating from a, from an unarticulated, unclear— I put in quotations— true north, right? The person who's actually— that believes they're moving in the right direction simply based off a feeling or based off of their belief that what they're doing is the right thing. So I started with, why do we do this? Now, what came from that was a 10-year vision. And in the 10-year vision, one of the things that we said was Really, what do we want to accomplish? How are we going to measure success? Okay, so the— in the 10-year vision in 2017, one of the things that we said was we would measure success by helping 10,000 recruiting leaders each year live an ideal life and lifestyle only possible through growing their brands. Okay, so that was part of our vision. Now, when we started this in 2017, 10,000 The number 10,000 was a monstrous number. Okay, I'm trying to be, you know, putting— I'm trying to put a lot of emphasis on that because it was huge. If you haven't actually helped one person and you want to help 10,000 people each year, you know, make something as big as living an ideal life and lifestyle happen, like, that's a really big vision. So here's why. the vision was so big. One is, OK, I am that kind of an individual. My personality profile index tends to skew towards being someone who dreams big, right? I am more of an idealist than maybe a realist. But one of the things that I knew is this, that if I was going to accomplish something of significance— and I do believe that I've been created for something of significance, and I hope every single one of you Believes the same thing about yourself, that I needed to stretch myself to get there. Okay, getting to 100 seemed pretty reasonable. Getting to 1,000 seemed like a stretch. Getting to 10,000 was a big stretch for us. And what did that mean? It meant that we were gonna have to think outside the, outside the normal context of coaching and consulting. Like, we were gonna have to do some pretty big things. We're gonna have to create a lot of content. We're gonna probably have to write some books. We're gonna have to do a lot of video coaching series, a lot of webinars. Like we're really having to think creatively outside our normal boundaries, outside our box, in order to get to that destination. But here's what we did. We said, what's it going to take in year 1? So while I had a 10-year vision, okay, so we started with why are we going to do this? Why are we going to do what we're going to do? We started with the 10-year vision, right? How many recruiting leaders each year did we want to help? We backed it all the way into year 1. Okay, so in year 1, in 2017, we said we wanted to help 100 recruiting leaders live an ideal life and lifestyle only possible through growing their brands. What do we do? Well, we went into— in that first year, we actually helped 138 people. So we beat our goal. We were extremely excited about that because we had to build a brand, create a lot of awareness around what we were doing. And so in that, we accomplished our 1-year vision and it moved us 1 year closer to the 2027 vision, which was to help 10,000 people each year. Okay. Now, why do I share this with you? One of the reasons why I share this with you is this: if you're going to actually create a vision, it needs to be something that's very tangible, that's so clear. What is that finish line that you— that you're going to actually drive towards, that you're going to cross one day? And it needs to be big and it needs to be bold. And here's why. If I'm going to call people into this thing that I do, which is helping recruiting leaders live an ideal life and lifestyle possible through growing their brands, right? If I'm going to call people into this, okay, then I'm going to have to cast a really big vision because I've got to get them interested, excited, bought in. All those things have to take place now. It's pretty easy to get bought into 100 people in year 1, right? That's pretty easy to do. Now, 10,000 a year, you know, 10 years from now is, is, is, is huge, right? So it's going to take a lot of other resources, a lot of other ideas, a lot of other passionate people surrounding me to get there. So part of casting a big vision is this: I want to attract the right people. I want to attract people that want to be a part of something bigger than what they're currently a part of, right? So by casting that big vision, I'm attracting people in that would say, I want to be a part of that story. Okay, here's what I know. Most people are— would say they're content where they're at. So one of the things you're up against as a recruiting leader is that when you make contact with people, most times people are going to say that they're happy where they're at. So how do you call someone that's happy where they're at into your story, into your journey, into whatever your vision is? Well, one of the ways you do that is by casting an extremely big vision. Okay, now you've got to believe in this. And, and if you sat here with me and you saw how I actually have a plan to get to 2,000 recruiting leaders each year, it hurts your brain, right? 2019, we've got a book coming out in October. We've got a second book coming out at the beginning of 2020. We're doing daily video content at scale. We're doing podcasts. We're constantly writing articles. We now have 2 and a half, I don't know if that's possible, but we've got 2 plus another half of a content writer, a full-time freelance writer that's writing for us. Those are the things that we're doing simply because we have a 10,000 recruiting leader promise to ourselves that in 2027 we're going to get there. And the only way we're going to get there is by finding a lot of passionate people that wanna be a part of something bigger than were currently a part of. Here's one thing that's jumped out at me. Most people are content where they are. Most people are happy for the status quo. Now here's— this is interesting. And when I saw this for the first time, I think I actually laughed out loud, physically laughed out loud. LOL, right? I laughed out loud at this because the words, the framework, the phrase status quo in Latin actually means mess we're in. Okay, think about that. Like, if you're content and you're settling for wherever it is where you are, and you're not being called into something bigger, something much larger, then a lot of times you're settling for something that's typically a mess that you're in. It's like, it's, it's very average at best. Most people, when they say I'm happy where I'm at, are happy in a, in a place where it's average. Like, I honestly believe this. And when someone shows up and someone's excited about where they're going and someone has a big vision and can actually articulate to you the things that they believe and why they're going to get there, that actually plants a seed of desire in that individual. If you're just content, if you're just settling for the status quo, right? And so as I look at this and I say, why is it important to have a vision? And not just any vision, why is it important to have a really large vision? It's because you can get people excited about the clarity of where you're going and the energy of where you're going, because most people are settling for a smaller story and you're calling them into a much larger story. Okay. So this is part of the importance around vision. Now I'm going to upload this to recruitingconversations/vision, our entire, entire document, which will be why do we do this? What's our 2019 vision? What's our 2027 vision? Because that's the 10-year vision. And it's got a list of our core values. Now, our core values is the lens that we pursue our vision through. What does that mean? Like, the way we're going to act, the way we're going to operate is in the lens of our core values. That's going to tell me in the day-to-day, like, what are we going to do? Like, one of the things that's part of our core value system is no jerks allowed. Like, I don't want people inside my organization that are individuals who aren't aligned with all the other individuals. And so an easy way for us to see if someone in this really truly in this with aligned with us is someone that comes in and creates discord, whatever you want to call it, confusion, that doesn't want to be a part of a team, that's a jerk. Okay, that's the easiest way to articulate it to you is someone being a jerk. They're just not— we're just not going to tolerate it. We're not going to allow it. If that's who you want to be, you're not a part of the team. Okay. One of the other things that we say is we trust in the good intentions of others. What does that mean? Well, that means that when we have some of these specific situations, we— in that go on between, you know, one person or another person. As human beings, we can be messy and sometimes we don't communicate well. And that's just part of being a human being, that when someone does something that appears to not be in the good intention of somebody else, we're still going to trust that they're thinking along the lines of, you know, teamwork and unity and camaraderie. And so if it means we have to have a conversation around their intentions, we will, but we're going to Trust. We're going to trust in their good intentions. Okay. One of the things that we say is that we embrace high expectations. Okay, we are constantly improving. We practice open, real communication. These are the things that— these are the values that we're going to actually, in the day-to-day, live out that we're going to move us towards our vision through. Okay. So some of it's very practical in the day-to-day. The vision is what, where, what's the, the big finish line that we're going to actually accomplish, that we're going to cross. Okay, vision literally means to see, right? Like one day I anticipate we're going to see that finish line. We're going to cross that finish line of that 10,000 recruiting leaders that we're going to impact in one year. Okay, but we do that in the day-to-day through the lens of our core values. Now, why? Like, right, a lot of people will say, well, I get it, core values, clarity, I get it, vision, right? It's kind of like a goal. I get it. It'll help us move the needle in our business. But here's why it matters more than you think. Clarity matters. Okay? Clarity of mission gives you passion. Like when I sit down with someone for the first time coming into our organization, I go over that vision that, you know, our 10-year plan is to actually impact 10,000 recruiting leaders Like, I can get really excited about that. And the reason why I, I get excited about that is because, you know, I think there's an intersection where recruiting and leading overlap each other. Great leaders are great recruiters and great recruiters are great leaders. That's what I found. So if I can impact a leader by improving their leadership capability and also impact their ability to grow a team, I can get really excited about that because ultimately what I do Right, because I have clarity on this. Remember, I got lots of clarity around why I'm doing what I'm doing. Ultimately, what I'm doing is when I improve a leader, I improve a team. I improve the lives of other people, right, on the team. So I can get really excited and I can get really passionate about that piece. So clarity matters because it gives you passion. Another reason why clarity matters is it gives you direction, right? I'm talking about a book. Another book. I'm talking about daily content. I'm talking about freelance writers. I'm talking about, like, you know, things that are going to move the needle on our company. Because I think that in the era that we live in, you've got to be a media company first. I'm a coaching, consulting, recruiting leader coach second. I'm a media company first. So because I'm a media company first, like, if I'm going to go impact 10,000 recruiting leaders, Man, that gives me the direction that I need to just act in the day-to-day. So not only does clarity give me passion, clarity gives me direction. And then the last part of this is, look, business is not easy, okay? In business, ultimately there's 5 stages, right? It's the dream, and we can get really excited about the dream. And that's when I wrote that— I wrote that, um, why we do what we do document, and that inspired me to take the leap. which is the second typical phase in business. But then you got this big dip. It's a big fight zone, right? And in the fight zone, like anything of significance that's going to happen typically happens because you're willing to fight for it. Right. And then the final 2 stages, which are not relative in this conversation right now, but eventually if you fight long enough, you'll get the energy and you'll get the direction that you need to actually start to climb. And then if you climb long enough, if you Stay in that climb zone long enough, you actually achieve and you accomplish whatever it was you set out to accomplish. And so those are the 5 stages. But clarity gives me perseverance. Right? Like, if I've got to go through a fight zone, I got to climb a mountain to get where I'm going, like clarity of knowing why I'm struggling. Right? That matters. Like, why am I doing this? Like, what am I doing this for? Like, why should I struggle, period, end of story, if I don't have clarity? Like, I give up. I absolutely give up. Here's what I find in most industries. Average tenure somewhere around 2.5 to 3 years. Most people are in a position for around 2.5 to 3 years. Okay, if you don't know why you're struggling or what you're struggling for, then why struggle? Move on. So I find that people leave one organization and go to another organization because of a lack of clarity. If clarity gives me passion, there's a lack of passion. If clarity gives me direction, there's a lack of direction. If clarity gives me perseverance and this willingness to fight and I lack those 3 things, then why wouldn't I leave a team, a leader, an organization and go someplace else? So it does matter. This is why vision is very practical. This is not theory. This is why core values and understanding your core values is very practical. It's not theory. Okay. So I'm going to calm down for a moment because I can get really fired up about this. And there's, there are lots of reasons why. Look, vision has impacted my family. Like, the reason why I have a strong, healthy family today is because I have a vision and I've got a mission and I understand my core values and I've got purpose statements inside my family unit. Right? So it's impacted me at a very personal level. It has definitively defined my business career. The whole reason why I'm able to coach is because of the successes and the wins that I had. I wouldn't have had those wins, those successes, if I hadn't started with defining a very clear vision and being very clear on my core values and being able to articulate that to people. It wasn't until 2013 that I began that. And when I began that, Things changed for me almost instantly within 90 days inside my business. So here's what I believe. People move towards clarity. So ask yourself right now, do you have a clear vision? Do— am I able to articulate my core values very clearly? And if I'm not, okay, then I need to do that. That's phase 1. Identifying those is phase 1. Phase 2 is being able to articulate it extremely well. You can write a why I believe document, why I do what I do document like I have. That will help you move towards being able to articulate it. Okay, now go back to one of my podcasts that I did on storytelling, because storytelling your values, storytelling your vision is, is an additional next level that I find the best of the best do. They not only have identified it, they're able to storytell it to you. The reason why storytelling matters is that your values didn't just happen upon you one day. Okay, your values matter to you because your life experiences. Like when you go back and you look at why things are important to you, they're important to you because of the story of the journey to get to where you are. Like I've had bad leaders as much as I've had good leaders. Okay, what I could tell you is that inside the bad leadership that I've had The bad leadership that I've had has actually been a determining factor in some of my values as much as the great leadership that I've had. Like, model something for me poorly and I don't want to be like that anymore. Model something for me well and I want to be more like that, right? So a lot of times our values come through those. It can be how we were raised, how we were taught, but again, that's an experience, right? So taking the journey and following the timeline of your life back, a lot of times back to these places where we have fresh starts, new beginnings. A lot of times we leave something and move towards something else because of our value system. So it's a great place to go back and to say, what's the story of that moment? Why did my values lead me from one place to another place? And defining that moment will help you get clarity around what your values are. Okay. So remember this: clarity matters. Where there's clarity, you have passion. Where there's clarity, you have direction. Where there's clarity, you're willing to fight. You're willing to persevere, the 12-letter dirty word perseverance that no one likes to hear. But what I've found is that all great things come from perseverance. A lack of clarity will, will, will never lead you through a season of suffering, through a season of struggling. Ultimate clarity will. So if you want something worth having in this life, then you got to start with vision. You've got to start with values. So this podcast today is trying to make this very practical to you. It is a heart cry. It's a plea from me to start here, to define this for yourself and for your team. Okay. Um, on the, on the recruitingconversations.com/vision, I'm going to put a couple of additional tools, a couple of additional resources there for you, um, that you can tap into. One is a presentation around creating vision. One's going to— we've already talked about the 4C recruiting vision and values. We'll put that there as well. There's lots of methodologies that come into clarity on your vision. So we're going to lay that out in a simple PDF document that you'll be able to download. And so I'm hopeful that this podcast motivates you and inspires you to take some next steps in gaining clarity on your vision, defining your value system, because it matters to your career and it matters to the people underneath your leadership. So, until we meet again on another Recruiting Conversations, pass this along to somebody. And the reason why I would say this one particular pass along is that of the 138 people that I coached in 2018, only one person had clarity around their vision, their values. These are the 1 percenters. The people that are in my coaching are already the best of the best. These are people willing to pay for coaching. They're the 1 percenters. Of that, less than 1% of the 1%ers have clarity around their vision, their values. You want a big advantage. If you want a big advantage as a recruiting leader, start here. Okay, pass this along. Trust me, the people that you're going to pass this along to most likely lack vision and lack values. So share the joy of this moment. And lots of great content that can be had from the Um, from, from the links that I've given on this, on this podcast as well. And until we talk again on another Recruiting Conversations, have a great week, everybody. Have fun recruiting, and we will talk to you then. 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.
