How to turn ‘no shows’ into new hires - Recruiting Conversations podcast episode 140

Hey everyone, it's Richard Milligan here. With recruiting conversations, your host. I'm excited to be back with another podcast. I'm coming fresh out of a conversation with a leader who is doing some pretty cool things, and I want to share some of the frameworks that we're working through in my coaching that are fresh approach is fresh approaches. Yeah, fresh approaches. That are leading to some significantly different results. One of the things that I'm aware of is that as technology continues to improve and consolidate different tools, as an example of that, when I say consolidate different tools, if you think about CRMs today, they now integrate data sources that can point you in the direction of the recruit. They also incorporate power dialers for phone, SMS messaging for text. You know, the CRM is obviously a big part of that integration of email. And what has happened as CRMs have gotten better is that we've noticed that the noise related to especially top candidates has gone up significantly over the last 5 to 7 years. And if you're one of those candidates and you're getting 2, 3, 5 calls per day, you've gotten really good at getting out of conversations with a potential recruiter or recruiting leader. When I think about the normal message that most recruiters or recruiting leaders lead with, the thing that comes to mind for me is it's similar to if you've ever been in New York City, There are a lot of street vendors. If you ever go towards the area of Times Square, you'll have these street vendors and they sell— sometimes they sell different things. And one of those things might be like trinkets, like a pin that says, I love New York City. And if you ever come across one of those street vendors, one of the things you'll notice is they kind of have their, their line, their sales line down. And it's really nothing more than, do you want to buy? And they're in a great location. They get millions of people probably in a given year that come by them, and they can get away with that. And I swear a lot of recruiting leaders have embraced some similar lines. And I say that laughingly, but we're not that far removed when a leader uses the line, are you happy where you're at? Or if they're following up with someone they already have a relationship with, they say, I'm just checking in. And it's the same message over and over again. So I'm in the middle of doing a recruiting audit for an organization, and I do these consistently as part of what I do as a consultant. And as we're doing this, I actually get into live interviews with the people that are leaders inside the organization. And I'm really just coming in doing a discovery meeting. I'm curious, I'm asking questions. I've got a framework that I follow. And what I'm trying to figure out is, you know, what are they currently doing related to recruiting? What's their mindset around recruiting? And there's some, there's certain questions that I ask consistently. And one of those questions is in my surveys with a leader is how often do you follow up with your cold pipeline? And a cold pipeline to me is someone that you've been in a conversation with already that would know who you were that you would then be following up with periodically. And we asked the question, like, how often do you follow up? And what I find is that north of 90% of leaders say they follow up with a cold lead. This is someone that knows who they are, but they're now cold. They follow up with this individual every 9 to 12 months. And what the line that they use, because we then give them an option, well, when you follow up, like, what would you actually say when you're following up? And the line that they use primarily is just checking in. It's the same as the guy in Times Square that's saying, do you want to buy? They know why you're checking in. It's like, are you happy now? Is now the time for you to be making a move? And with all of the pressure that now comes out of recruit, it's time for leaders to actually improve their process to getting great people. So, over the last year, I've been working with a handful of leaders on an idea that really involves shifting this in a major way. And the idea really is, it revolves around 2 premises. And the first one is, is that at the onset of building the relationship, I mean, like early on within the first 72 hours, they become aware of who you are. That you should be giving extravagant value. Now, if you think about the word extravagant, the word extravagant means unreasonable. So, something that would be a bit of like a pattern breaker. It's like, I can't believe that this person just gave me something of this significance in terms of value. The second premise that we've been working with these leaders on is to give ascending value. So ascending value would be taking the initial idea of extravagant value, something that's unreasonable, and then continuing to improve on that thing of value by giving even more value. Stick with me here because I'll unpack this with you. But to give you an example of this, I was in a conversation earlier this week with the CEO of a company that I had never met before. Okay, I want you to visualize a bit of a value ladder, like these steps that kind of go up and continue to ascend up in terms of more value. Okay, and in the first part of this conversation, my question to this executive was like, how did you come across me? Like, how did you get on my Life Calendar? Now, my Life Calendar, it's advertised at the end of this podcast. It's on my LinkedIn. It's in a number of different places. You can find it on my Linktree. Like, There's a lot of ways to get on Richard's calendar. So I always ask that question. I want to know, how are people finding me? And his response was, well, I came across some of your LinkedIn content. And that was really in terms of the amount of value that I'd given him was at the lowest rung. Because then what he said was, and then I realized that you had a podcast and I listened to several of your episodes and that inspired me to actually buy your book. And he picked up a copy of my book. And showed it to me. He said, I haven't started reading the book yet, but I do have a copy of the book. And here I am in an hour with him, and I gave him my best input for an hour. And in essence, he had basically a free hour of coaching or a free hour of consulting. And from that, he ascended into my actual consulting. When you think about that, I had given some extravagant value at the onset of the relationship, and then I had continued ascending him through these series of steps where I was giving him more value. As a recruiting leader, that idea of giving people extravagant value early and then continuing to give more value quickly is a way for you to actually speed up the process that someone moves towards you. So in a lot of industries, what you'll look— and this is really a national data— you look at national surveys and you see how many people have how many employers by X, By the age of 50, the average American has approximately 12 employers. So, if you just look at, if someone goes to college and they get there at the age of 19 and they take, let's just say, 5 years to complete college, some of you are overachievers and you do it in 4 years, but let's just say 5 years. For easy math, you're at the age of 24, maybe 25 when you get out of college. And then, 25 to 26 years later, you've had— 12. 12 employers. If I do a little bit of math there, the average time that someone spends at an employer is about 2 years. Now, one of the industries that I do a lot of work in, which is the mortgage industry, some of the— I have some real specific data related to salespeople. The average salesperson in the mortgage industry stays 3.1 years. So, it's now a very specific avatar. It's someone who's a salesperson in a specific industry. So, we could just say the average person is likely to stay between 2 and 3 years at one company. What I know is that in my own journey, I used the same CRM for my recruiting from 2009 all the way to 2016 before I left that industry and started 4C Recruiting. I pulled my data out of that CRM. And from 2009 to 2013, in my story, that the 5 years, there was something that pivoted in my journey that really leads me to where I am today as a coach and consultant. That changed the trajectory of how I recruited and who I recruited and what I said when I recruited and the entire process that I took people through. But before that happened, which accelerated the pace that people moved towards me, before that happened, I had 5 years of data. And in my 5 years of data, when I pulled that, it was taking me 2.1 years to recruit someone from the first time I had a conversation to the moment they crossed the line, the hiring line. It was 2.1 years. Wow. Now I changed some things at the beginning of 2014. I repulled that data from '14, '15, and '16, 3 years later, and it was taking me 62 days. When I look at that season, the last 3 years where I 10x'd the speed that people were moving towards me, when I look at that, one of the things that really jumped out at me is that I was giving way more value than other people were giving when they were recruiting people. So here we are, fast forward now from that moment of like when I started 4C Recruiting, which is 2017, almost 8 years ago. And a lot of things have changed in the last 8 years. And when you think about some of the things that are changing like right now, you really see artificial intelligence playing a major role in everything that's going on. I mean, I had this conversation with someone earlier today where I said AI is helping me get somewhere between 40 and 80 hours of additional work out of my calendar because of how I'm using it and the fact that it's cloning me to some degree in a lot of different ways. So the journey I want to take you on here for the next couple of minutes is this. I want to take this idea of extravagant value and ascending value, and I want to give you just an example of this. Okay, so let's just look at the real estate industry as an example of this. And, and so if I was going to show up as a real estate broker and I was going to bring value to a real estate agent that I wanted to attract to my team, I would show up having identified that person as someone of interest. So I would have done my research and identified that person as someone I was interested in having a conversation with. I would have crossed that relationship bridge very quickly. There's a number of ways that you could cross it. You could cross it via the phone. You could cross it via social media. You could also initiate that by text. But within 72 hours of establishing that relationship with my initial contact, I would show up and I would bring something very extravagant in terms of value. And I know everyone here is like, what is that? Tell me what that is. Well, if I went over here and I went to one of the second largest search engine in the world, And I searched for real estate agent coach, someone that's going to pop up is going to be Tom Ferry. Tom Ferry is touted as the number one real estate agent coach in the world. And if I went to Tom Ferry's YouTube channel, there's about 2,000 prerecorded videos that Tom has created with all kinds of amazing strategies. And any of the content that I've seen from Tom Ferry has been impressive, and he's got lots of joint interviews with people and Some of my favorites have been the moments that he shared with Gary Vee. And you could take any of those recordings that Tom has, and I could take the transcription of it. And if you don't know this, YouTube transcribes all of the videos, and I can move that transcription into ChatGPT, and I could give it a command, and I could say, will you give me an outline for this meeting? And it would kind of show me exactly what Tom had discussed in that meeting. I could then give it a command and ask it to create a blueprint from Tom's advice in the video, and it would gimme a blueprint for it. And now I could take that information, I could start to play around with it and make it mine. And so I probably would, you know, in my own ChatGPT, a lot of my coaching is already uploaded into that. I've asked my ChatGPT to remember it. And so ChatGPT can take some of my information with Tom's information and can blend that. And if I gave it a command, And I said, will you give me a 90-day blueprint for implementing this strategy? It would spit that out for me. And, and I could take that and I could even say, hey, ChatGPT, give me some cool hook associated with this playbook around this being like the number one real estate agent coach's input in the mortgage industry. And it'll probably give me some really cool tagline. The number one real estate agent coach's advice for the coming year. And I could take that as a piece of extravagant value. And maybe it's like how to actually do annual planning, how to jumpstart your year in January. And I could take that recruit and after my first initial contact with them within 72 hours, I could actually bring that of value to them. And I would say, hey, I was recently acting as a journalist looking for great information. I uncovered this cool piece of content advice. I put it into a blueprint with some awesome notes and I wanted to share it with you. It's a blueprint for how you can actually make 2025 your best year yet. And that would be what I would call a pattern breaker. I don't know anybody that's gonna show up and say, hey, here's a blueprint for success. Okay, and what I would do is then I would build on that thing of value. I'd go back over to ChatGPT and I would say, based on what you know about me, can you give me some ideas for templates that I could create that would actually improve this blueprint? And it would give me some ideas, and I could go into one of those ideas and say, will you expand on this idea? And I can continue to ask it questions, and it will actually produce something of value for me that I can actually ask it to export as a PDF or ask it to export as an Excel spreadsheet that I could then show up within a week and say, hey, I wanted to give you additional value based on what I sent to you last week. Here's a great worksheet for that aligns with this playbook that I sent you that will help you continue to grow your business in 2025. I could then continue asking questions like, for example, I could say, hey, can you give me a 12-week coaching model that aligns with this playbook based on what you know from this. What would be 12 individual sessions that I could coach people around based on what you know? And it will give it to me. I could say, can you give me content that's aligned with this for my brand that I could post? Ideas for content that I could be creating? And it would give it to me. And I could keep going. There's all kinds of questions that I could ask here. But if I'm following an ascending value framework, I would probably go from a playbook to some templates that I would include to, I'd love to invite you to a webinar I'm going to host where I'm going to discuss this, to a coaching framework. And earlier this year, I took a leader through a similar framework as this, where we started out with extravagant value very quickly. We moved people through ascensions of that value. And this leader eventually got to a place where if recruits fit a specific avatar, this leader would invite these people into a 12-week coaching framework pro bono. And we established a really big reason why this guy's been super successful in the industry that he's in, and he's super passionate about giving value away based on the framework that this industry has been so amazing for him. And so, he could sit with the recruit and say, hey, this business has been amazing for me and I want to give back. And one of the ways that I give back is actually bringing value to people that are in my environment, my ecosystem. And I've chose you as someone I would like to invite into a coaching framework that I'm launching next week, next month, 3 months from now, whatever. For him, it was at the first of every month for 3 months straight. We created a 12-week coaching framework that he would take recruits through. And there was an early-on heavy loading, great, amazing, crazy content that blows people's mind to get them really hooked on the coaching framework. But he started out with small groups, groups of 3, and filled those groups relatively easily. And the idea was like, hey, are you willing to invest 4 hours to beta test this to get proof of concept? So 4 hours in month 1, 3 people through this coaching that are ascending in value up to it. And then continue that for 12 weeks. You're going to commit 12 hours to this. And by the end of month 1, there was a strong proof of concept. People were already raising their hand and saying, hey, I'd love to have a conversation with you about joining your team. And so he launched a second coaching framework, which now was like 8 hours in month 2. That worked incredibly well, was having people move forward with recruiting out of that coaching framework. That then moved him to a third coaching framework in month 3. And so all in He was contributing 12 hours a month to this idea of like, I'm holding a session every single week for 3 different groups of 3 different people that fit my avatar, that I am working through this idea of giving them value. And from that, in a very short window of time, 3 months after he launched this idea, he had 18 people that, that joined his team. And in the 4th month had a significant leap even beyond that of people that were actually joining his team. And so I think a lot of leaders that are like, ugh, don't know if I'm willing to commit that much time, would probably look in the mirror and say, hey, if I could hire 18 quality salespeople to my team, I would be willing to invest 12 hours a month doing this. As a leader, the thing that you need to understand is this: you can take 3 years to give people value, and you can also take 3 years to recruit someone. You can take 3 months to give people compressed or accelerated value, and you can take 3 months to recruit someone. If someone came to me and said, Richard, you have to recruit X number of people or else— I don't know, give me a city— Chicago. You got to go to Chicago in this particular industry, and you got to hire 30 different successful salespeople in a 90-day window of time. And I don't know anybody in Chicago. How are you going to do it? I know that I would identify talent that fits my avatar in that market. I know that I would very quickly try to cross the relationship bridge with them, and I would compress value. I would show up giving extravagant value early on, and I would continue ascending that value, giving more value very quickly. And if I did that, I'm confident that I would have Crazy amounts of success, and here's partially why. In most industries, there's not strong sales culture; there's not strong sales leadership. And if I were to do that, I would showcase to people in a very simple premise that more was available. And when we think of like more being available, we tend to say like well, our toolbox or our support or our compensation plan or. Whatever it is, I don't know that we actually think about this a whole lot, that the leader is the product that we're selling. And one of the most difficult things for a leader is to be able to articulate them in a way that there's ingredients that get people energized about moving towards them. And if I compress all my value into a short window of time and I can showcase to you that I'm the kind of leader that's going to bring you value and it's tangible value and it's helping in your business with no strings attached, it's easy to assimilate that that's the exact same way that I would lead if you're inside my team. Recruiting is showing people on the outside what it's like to be on the inside while they're still on the outside. You're trying to solve for that as a leader. And when you do that and you accelerate that, you will accelerate people to you. I just want to encourage you, this is where recruiting is going for you. Because information is more readily available than it's ever been today, it's really important for you as a leader to establish that you bring more value than the leaders who have the amazing salespeople in your marketplace that you want on your team. The challenge for you is closing that gap of how you actually reveal that to people. The digital world has simplified that. The AI world has made it easy For you to be able to showcase that. The ideas are there. AI will give you the frameworks that you need. Now it's your job to actually expose those ideas to the recruits that you want on your team. And if you'll do this, there's a proof of concept here. I already have it. It will work. The goal isn't to convince someone to join your team, and I think we confuse this. The goal is to reveal to people That more is available when they come alongside you and join your team and you're leading them. And when that moment happens, desire shows up. Think about this recent story of mine over Thanksgiving. So my wife asked me to smoke a turkey at Thanksgiving. And in transparency, Richard doesn't smoke meats. He's not like the guy that has like the smoker. I don't know how to do it. But I was willing to learn. I'm like, maybe there's an extra notch on my man card if I can do this thing, right? I've always wanted to, but busy guy, never made it a point to actually do it. So I did a little bit of research. I'm like, it's going to probably be about $500 to $700 to buy a smoker. And so I went out to buy the smoker and ended up buying a smoker that's a Traeger that's over $2,000. I went probably 4x over the amount that I thought I was going to spend. And here's why. I didn't realize that you could buy a smoker that has an automatic igniter. You don't have to light— you don't have to light it. It lights itself. I didn't realize that there were smokers that were self-feeding. They literally feed the pellets to the machine itself. I didn't realize that Wi-Fi could be attached. I didn't realize you could program Wi-Fi to actually determine the actual temperature that the smoker cooks at. I didn't realize that there are probes that connected to the Wi-Fi that reported back to my phone the exact temperature of the meat that I was smoking. When I realized more is available, that's the moment that I was willing to actually spend a lot more money. Just like when a recruit understands that more is available through you, the leader, that you will bring more value than their current leader, That's the moment that desire is conjured up for them. So your goal in 2025 is this: identify the talent in your market that you want on your team and bring them extravagant value and ascending value in shorter windows of time. And if you'll do that, 2025 will be your best recruiting year yet. Don't forget, you have to continue this inside the team that you're already leading. If there's a disconnect between how you date or how you actually recruit people to how you actually— how it actually is when you're married to them or when they're on your team, you can attract talent, but you also lose talent. That has to be part of your plan. So maybe we'll pick up that conversation in our next podcast. But until then, this is an amazing blueprint for you to start the new year. Run towards this, play around with AI, get really good at creating value that's of value to the people that fit your avatar. And 2025 is gonna be your best recruiting year yet. And if you need any help with this, you know how to reach me. It's about to do an outro with my calendar. bookrichardnow.com. I would love to be someone that comes alongside you and helps you, just like I helped the individual in the story, have their best year in 2024. So until we do another Recruiting Conversations podcast, have a great end of the year, everybody, and we will talk to you again soon.