How To Improve The Quality Of The Recruit You Are Pursuing

Hey everybody, it's Richard Milligan here with Forsee Recruiting, and we're going to cut another podcast today. It's episode 34. Welcome to the intro to the intro of episode 34 via video. You've probably seen this on Vimeo or YouTube or in a short video clip someplace else, and so thanks so much for checking this out. Today we're going to discuss a conversation I had recently with a recruiting leader that was around this losing time because they weren't validating and verifying that the person they were speaking with, or persons in this case they were speaking with, were quality individuals. And they figured those things out by getting into a face-to-face meeting, which was a huge waste of time. And so because of the size of the market and the time to get to the meeting, In the end, over the course of a week, 5 appointments, 4 of those were non-beneficial appointments. Those equated to about 2.5 days lost. So this idea of verifying, validating, making sure that you've got a system in place to really focus on quality recruits versus focusing on quantity of contacts. Is something that I think is relative that we should all be aware of, that we should all have a game plan for. And so we're gonna talk about that today. So we're gonna go live in our podcast here with episode 34 in just a second. So gimme a second here to tee this up. We're gonna go live and my energy's gonna increase when I go live. Like, how crazy is that? Welcome back to another Recruiting Conversations. It's your host, Richard Milligan. And today I'm going to share a recent conversation I had with a leader that was losing time. Now, I'm sure no one else has ever done that like me, has made a decision that cost you time, right? I mean, when I think about, especially the older I get, how many places I have wasted my time, gosh, I really don't want to look back on that because I realize that time is the only commodity that matters to us. Yes or yes? Yes. I can replace money. That replenishes itself. I can make more money. But the one thing I'm realizing at the ripe old age— old is always relative, right? But 46, I remember when my mom and dad turned 30 and I thought my mom and dad were old. Now I'm rooting for 46 to be middle-aged. Time is something that's very precious to me. Part of that is that I have 4 kids and I look at the next decade and I map out my 6-year-old will be 16, my 9-year-old will be 19, my 12-year-old will be My 17th year, I'll be 27, and this season of life is gonna pass me like that. I just know it. And so time is something that is really precious and something we want to actually be very considerate of. And so recent conversations I had was this: a recruiting leader that had had 5 appointments in a week with recruits. And now you look at that and you go, win! Fist pump! Win! Right? 5 meetings in a week. That's a huge win. And for most people, that would be considered a huge win. But as I dug beneath the surface of that, we began to talk about those 5 appointments that they had. 4 of the 5 appointments were with highly unqualified candidates. Let me just repeat that. Highly unqualified candidates. Not qualified, unqualified. So, as we began to back into this and ask even deeper questions, which was, where were the meetings at in relationship to where your office is located? How much time did it take to get there? How much time did you time block for it? How much time was involved in the meeting? What we came up with was a loss of an equivalent of 2.5 days for that particular week simply because we were meeting with unqualified candidates. So the conversation really becomes this: quality or quantity? Now, I know most of you that are here are probably like me. You ended up in this space of being a recruiting leader because you were a great salesperson. And most great salespeople spent a season really focusing on quantity, number of dials that you make. And so we come from these environments where, you know, people talk about having this power hour or, you know, these contests of how many connections can you make in a certain window of time. Like, I remember one. When I, as a salesperson, dialing for dollars. Now there's one that a lot of you have probably heard of, or something that's focused primarily on what I would call muddying the waters. Now, if you haven't heard that term, muddying the waters, then let me explain to you what I mean. A lot of times when we focus on quality versus quantity, what it means is that we reduce the number of calls that we make. But when we focus on quantity over quality, we increase. The number of calls that we make. And our mindset, which I think is the wrong mindset, is let's just go make contacts. Let's go create some energy, some synergy around our business. And while it's right, it's also wrong. And the reason why it's wrong is specifically for the recruiting leader. Now, what is the recruiting leader? If this is your first podcast and you're showing up on the scene of this just now for the first time, the recruiting leader is someone who manages a team but is also responsible for recruiting to that team. If that's you, and it may not be you, and there's lots of nuggets here for people that are recruiters. But if that recruiting leader is you, what you know is this. You wear 15 hats almost every day that you're alive, Monday through Friday. Well, sometimes probably Saturday and Sunday. But you wear about 15 hats. And so, you're leading the team. You're responsible for everything around the team. And sometimes, this is someone who's actually also producing. This podcast gets heard by primarily real estate, insurance, and mortgage people that are in those roles. And so if you're in that role in one of those industries, one of the things that I know is that you are extremely busy. And so the amount of time you can dedicate to recruiting is actually very small. You can't recruit 8 to 12 hours a day to recruit because you already have these preexisting responsibilities that you have to manage and manage well. So you have to be very concise. You are a sniper when it comes to recruiting. And so what does that mean? We're not going to focus over— we're not going to focus on quantity. We are going to focus on quality. Okay? So let's have that conversation because this is the conversation I had recently with the individual whose story I just shared. How do we get to the quality? So here's what I know about the 3 industries that I just mentioned. Insurance, real estate, and mortgages. There are some tools available to you that will help you get to a place where you can determine, is this a quality individual that I should be investing my time with? Okay, we're going to talk about those tools today. Now, I saw some recent research from an organization inside that's specific to the mortgage industry. Let me just give you a stat as to why quality is important to you in this industry. And this is really true of most industries. The stat that I saw was that 60% of all loan officers, loan originators, loan consultants, loan advisors, whatever you want to call them, that 60% of loan originators actually create almost 94% of all production. Let's reverse engineer that. 40% of all loan originators Create about 6% of all production. So what does this mean? Well, wouldn't you rather focus your efforts and your energies on the 60% that are delivering the 94% of all production? Again, yes or yes? And this is true about most industries. This is not an anomaly. The mortgage industry is not the golden unicorn in the sales universe. Most industries have very similar data that speaks to this. The top producers are generating the majority of the business. The Pareto principle says there's this 80/20 rule where it's like 80% of all production comes from 20% of the people in the business. Now inside that, Perry Duncan wrote a book called 80/20 Marketing, and one of the things that he studied inside that book is The Pareto principle inside the Pareto principle, which is that there's actually an 80/20 rule inside the 80/20 rule. And what I just kind of gave you was that data, right? Like 94% of all production is coming from a handful of people inside this industry. So quality matters because I could take— if I focus my energy on just generally every loan originator in this industry, what would happen is I would chase my tail. On the 40% to find out that I don't want them on my team if I was to focus on quantity over this quality. So I'm going to give you 3 questions that you should be asking yourself before you make contact. What does this mean? We're going to do some research. These 3 questions are really going to qualify some places that you should be going and doing research prior to actually making contact. Because I do think that there are some places that you can go and see, is this somebody that you would like to have on your team? Now, let me pause here for a second. Some of this, I'm not going to qualify any of this as in HR compliant. I'm not going to dive off into that. You need to do that at an organizational level. But one of the things I'm going to teach you is how to have the eyes to see whether this is someone that makes sense for you to go and pursue. I'm not qualifying people on things that are going to fall under an HR umbrella. But what I'm saying is that, as having spent more than 20 years as a recruiting leader myself, and almost 15 years of that in one industry, what I know is that there are some indicators out there that I can see. For example, on social would be one area. I can see things. That would tell me, is this person going to be a fit? Is this person going to actually be someone who is delivering production, has influence, some things that actually matter to my brand? So, we're going to talk about those things. Here are 3 things, 3 questions I want you to ask yourself prior to making contact. Number 1, do they have a social presence? Why does this matter? Well, what I know is this, is that those that have the strongest social presence in the 3 industries that I discussed are the ones that have the most influence. If I go back and I look at that data specific to the mortgage industry of these top originators that are creating almost 94% of all production, what I know is that majority of them, if not all of them, it's a really high percentage of them, have strong social brands. Okay? They get— I mean, if you're going to be a professional, it is 2019. I mean, we go back and it's social. Facebook really got strong like 2009, so we're a decade into Facebook overtaking our environment in terms of social presence. And so, a decade into this, does social presence matter? Yes, it does. If you are in a front-facing business where, you know, for real estate, insurance, and mortgages, the consumer relationship matters and matters a lot. Your referral partner relationships matter and matter a lot. What's the easiest way to maintain that? Well, having a social presence. One of the things that we've seen on this end is that as you look at producers that have no social presence— now, it's not always true, but at a high percentage, this is true— where there's a lack of social presence, Those people fall into the category of low-end producers. So if I'm going to focus on quality over quantity, then social presence is going to matter. Now let's go one step beyond that and say, what are some of the things that we can see through social presence? A lot of organizations are now incorporating a review of social presence before they hire someone. Why is that? Well, I can tell if someone's involved in the community from their social presence. I can tell if someone's got focuses that are in alignment with my business simply through their social presence. Some of the things I can see are not positive, are negative. Someone who's spewing negativity, look, it's not my kind of person. One of our mantras that we abide by, that's one of our core value statements, is no jerks allowed. How do I figure out if you're a jerk? Gosh, if you spend any time on social media, you know there's a lot of hateful things that get spewed out there. I can tell in just a few-second glance at your social profile whether you're going to be positive or whether you're going to be negative. That's an easy way for me to say in a quality conversation, is this my tribe? Is this my person? Is someone— look, one of the things that I've seen is people posting Videos of themselves getting drunk at the lake every weekend. That's not gonna fit into my professional presence, especially if I'm a recruiting leader, because recruiting leaders are fishing in small ponds, they're fishing in markets, or they're fishing in a state, or at most a regional is fishing in a multi-state area. Brand is important, and you get that the people you're bringing into your team is an extension of your brand. And so, I'm going to look at the contextualization of the things that you're talking about. I'm going to look at the videos that you're posting. And if you're someone right now that's going, oh gosh, I hadn't thought about someone being able to see that, and you don't want people to see that, guess what? You can protect that. And you can go from having a public setting to having a private setting so people can't see that. And so, that actually can shield some of this so that I can't see it. And that's— Up to you to do that. But if it's available to the public, I'm going to go look for that, and I'm going to identify this person as being someone in terms of social, of being a quality conversation that I want to have, or being a conversation that I don't want to have. Okay, so the first question you ask yourself is, do they have a social presence? Can I find them on social media? And if I can, what does that brand look like? Okay, here's the second question you're going to ask yourself. What are their production numbers? Now, you can't always see this in every industry, but guess what? I've got a partnership with a company called Mobility RE. I know Ben Tierlink, who's the CEO over there. And if you're not familiar with Mobility RE, what it does is for the mortgage industry and for the real estate industry, it actually creates the data in terms of production numbers. So I'm going to drop a link here. That you all can go to, which is an overview of this particular tool that will just show you how I coach to the tool, because it is something I coach to, how I coach the tool and why having this data matters. So here's a link you can check out. It's recruitingconversations.com. That's the website that we drop all of our, all of our podcasts on. There's actually some other content on that website as well, but it's recruitingconversations.com. /datamatters. Okay, so what we're going to do in that video, it's going to model me actually using the tool. It's a short video, me using the tool and showing you how you can actually extract data to actually have quality conversations versus focusing on quantity of conversations. Production numbers matter. Yes or yes? Like, going and focusing my energies on low-end producers is a waste of my time. Okay? Now, I get the fact that if you're 1 year into the industry and you haven't yet arrived and you're still looking to— trying to build your book of business, that's different. Okay? But production numbers matter. Get your hands on some production numbers. That will allow you to have a better conversation. Your time is the only commodity that matters. I'll repeat that again. Your time is the only commodity that matters. If you can recruit in 30 to 45 minutes per day, guess what? You'll recruit every day. But if this is a conversation about smiling and dialing, if this conversation about just making contact with people, it's a waste of your time. So know the production numbers. So the second question here you're gonna ask yourself prior to making contact is, what are their production numbers? Third question. How long have they been employed? What is their average tenure? Look, length of time employer matters, right? And there's places where you can get that data. There's places where you can get that information, right? LinkedIn is an easy place. Now, look, LinkedIn can be fluffed, right? Like, I can go make up whatever numbers I want to, and to some degree, LinkedIn's a little bit like a resume for people in that it is fluffed. If you've ever gone through the process of verifying dates of employment, most people extend the resume by a month or 2 either direction. I get it. No one wants to have a gap in employment. Some people will disqualify immediately because of that, so they're covering their bases in some of that. But look, length of— in a general term, length of time at employer in a larger window of time matters. Okay? I can get that on LinkedIn. In the 3 communities that I coach, insurance, real estate, mortgages, you've got licensing portals, right? The NMLS Consumer Access Licensing Portal is an incredible portal to go find and look and see what tenure actually is. Length of time at employer matters. Someone that's transitioned, that's got 7 employers in 2 years, look, if you're going to make that many bad decisions in a 2-year window of time, I don't want to be the 8th. Right? That's not going to be a quality conversation for you. What I'm going to say is this, length of time an employer matters. I'm going to figure out how I can get that information, and I'm going to have some prerequisites around that. I'm working with a company right now that says 3 years average tenure over the last 10 years is what they're looking for. Right? Now, is it a disqualifier if you're at 2 years and 10 months? No, there's other things that they evaluate, and production matters. That's another evaluation, another piece of the evaluation equation that they're looking at. Social presence, it's another part that they're looking at. All these things matter to you. Okay, so figure out your licensing portal. If you don't understand what that is in the mortgage industry, that's simply the NMLS Consumer Access. Get comfortable with that portal because you can see length of time at employer, and you can qualify better. Let someone else chase the low-end producers. Let's be— if you're part of my audience and you're listening to the 34th podcast, please do me a favor. Take some of the content that I'm delivering to you and use it. Your time is extremely precious to you. And if you're in a season like me where you have small kids, and they're not so small anymore, but 6 and 9 is still small enough. That's still cool. That's still cool with a 12-year-old. Somebody asked me that question the other day, like, what age do you get uncool? I'm not quite sure. I know with my 17-year-old there was a specific moment where it was like, hey, Dad, I don't want to be seen with you, and that actually happened. But I'm still in a stage with 3 of my kids where I'm extremely cool and I value my time. If I can put quality time into this, And I can disqualify people that would just be based off of sheer numbers, trying to get in front of sheer numbers, then we can get to a better conversation. Because look, in the conversation that I had where someone had wasted 2.5 days in 1 week, this isn't just about wasting the time on the phone. This is about wasting time in the 3 major components, right? Yes, we have to identify talent. So as I'm identifying talent, I'm going to disqualify people based on these 3 parameters. The other thing is this, is that I'm going to look at my initial contact, and there's a lot of energy that goes into initial contact. That may be on LinkedIn, that may be through phone, that, that's then going to progress along into a face-to-face meeting. There's an enormous amount of time that gets wrapped up in that. And then beyond that, where we, where the great recruiters actually excel is in the third component, which is going to be in the follow-up. Why in the world would we follow up with someone that's an unqualified candidate? Right? So this becomes a multiple time multiplier for you. This isn't about just making phone contact and wasting your time there. Multiply, multiply, multiply. When you're done, this is a very large equation in relationship to your time. So let's be recruiting leaders that focus over quality and not quantity. So Look, here's one thing that you're going to be up against. If you are at a market leader role, a lot of times you're in middle management and you've got layers of management over. You might have an area, you might have a regional, you might have a divisional. What I have seen to a fault— now, if you're a divisional, a regional, an area, this is a great piece for you. What happens when organizations Stop growing or they churn more than they're actually growing, a lot of times the noise starts at the top, which is, we need to grow. And so, the natural knee-jerk reaction as that message comes from a CEO or a president to a divisional, a regional, or an area is that they immediately begin to move towards some of these things I've already mentioned. Let's do a power hour 2 times per week and we're going to have contests. Okay, I get that you're working to try and motivate, but the concept of this, if you're missing quality and it's simply quantity, that concept's broken. And what you're doing is you're motivating your people towards a broken model, which means that they're just gonna lose more. So you gotta educate. One of the things that we say here is that you educate before you motivate or you discourage. Let me say that again. Educate before you motivate or you discourage. If you're in that divisional, regional area role and you're not educating your people to this particular space, that quality conversations matter over quantity, then what will happen is you're just accelerating the rate that they will actually lose, the rate of the time that they're investing that they will lose. Okay, so this is important for you to get. Here's an equation for success. It's education plus motivation plus application equals transformation. So you start with educating people and then you motivate them. And if they will apply that, then their business will be transformed. So there's some great content for you today. Take this, apply it to your business. And what it will do is it's a multiplier for the number of wins that you will have. It's a reducer for the amount of time that you actually have to invest into this to win. And so share this with somebody that needs this because there's a lot of people out there like me that came from a sales background that simply focus on muddying the waters and making contacts. And they think because they're doing that, they're winning. Be better than that. One of the things that I tell my son all the time who plays basketball, we got to be better than the refs because he plays basketball. We got to be better than the underlying factors in our markets. And we all have a lot of candidates in our markets that are people that will not bring value to our team. Let somebody else recruit them. Don't let the listeners of this podcast be those. So until we meet again on our next podcast, share this with someone that this will bring value to. And we'd love to hear your feedback. I got several messages here over the course of last week. From people that said, awesome, love what you're doing, great content, keep it up. Appreciate the positive feedback. You know, we invest somewhere between $1,200 and $1,500 every single time we kick off a podcast because that's what it actually takes for us to produce these. So, you know, share this with somebody that will bring value to them and drop me a line and let me know it's bringing value to you. The nugget, the additional nugget of the day is check out that link recruitingconversations.com/growth. Data Matters. There'll be an extra video there. You want to see what it looks like to actually have access to some great information. And if you want, um, if you want additional information around that, uh, Ben over at Mobility RE has given us the ability to provide this to our, um, to our clients or to even people that listen to our podcast, um, at a much reduced rate. Um, most organizations that are getting access to that are actually having to have it at an organizational level, and Ben allows us to offer it to our coaching clients on an individual level. So, if you like what you see there and you want access to it, we'll definitely give you access on that link to get more information around that. So, until next week, enjoy your week, everybody, and we look forward to sharing another podcast with you then. All the best. There you have it. Podcast 34 is in the books, ladies and gentlemen. By the way, let me just say this. Over the course of the Of the next 4 or 5 months, I'm gonna be doing a lot of additional podcasts where I'll be on other podcasts. I think it's 24 to be exact between now and the very first part of next year. This is September of 2019 that I'm recording this. So there will be more content and there'll be more contextualization around some of the things that I teach and I coach too. So I look forward to sharing those with you. If you're not connected with me on LinkedIn, do connect with me on LinkedIn. That'll be a place that I will share a lot of that content. So, hope this video brought value to you today. Look forward to seeing you again next time here on a video, when we go live with our podcast. Have a great week, everybody. Bye.