How You Can Measure Your Recruiting Efforts to Bring Your Yearly Goals into a Daily Focus

Hi everyone, it's Richard Milligan, 4C Recruiting here. We are in the process of cutting a video for our upcoming podcast. And, uh, so today is a really continuation of what we talked about last week, which was there were 6 questions that really challenged everyone to ask themselves As they come into 2020. And those questions are really centered around what do you want to accomplish this year? And then getting very specific with a couple of things that you could do that would grow you personally, that would help develop you personally into 2020, and that would really stretch you ultimately. One of the things I love about stretching myself is that once I stretch myself, I have Very rarely go back. It's like a rubber band concept, right? It's like if I stretch the rubber band for a window of time, it never goes back to the same shape or size. And so that's how we grow. That's how we challenge ourselves to grow. So we— those 6 questions, go back to those last week if you didn't see those. We're gonna have a continuation of that conversation, which is how then do we make those real specific and make them actionable today? So we're gonna go live on the podcast here, so bear with me as we go live. Hope everybody's having a fantastic start to their year and that you have some very specific goals for the upcoming year. So here we go in 3 and in 2 and in 1. Hey everybody, it's Richard Milligan here with 4C Recruiting and Here on the podcast, Recruiting Conversations. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in today. I'm gonna have a continuation of last week's podcast, which is— okay, so if you're— let's just say this. If you're listening to this particular podcast, you'll probably want to go back to the prior podcast if you didn't listen to it. That'd be a great place for you to start. That was episode, I think, 45. This is episode 46. We were talking about 6 questions that you could ask yourself coming into 2020 that would give you clarity around the goals that you could have for the upcoming year. And what we talked about at a high level is just having a 10-year vision or a 10-year set of goals, breaking that down into the next upcoming year, asking yourself, what did you want to accomplish personally? What do you want to accomplish as business in that? And then a couple of really powerful questions, which is, why do you want to accomplish that? And then where could I double down? In the upcoming year? And then the last one is, where do I need to go outside of my normal arenas? What events do I need to attend? What voices do I need to lend my ear to? What books do I need to read? What places do I need to go in the upcoming year that's going to expose me to what I don't know? And we made that statement, you don't know what you don't know until you know something different. Well, it's up to us to really challenge ourselves to know the something different. Okay, so that was really establishing at a foundational level coming into this week that we would have a very clear idea of what we want to accomplish. Okay, so I'm going to assume that you've done that, and with that, we will proceed. So here's, here's something that I'm very aware of right now. Okay, we're in the first couple of weeks of 2020. I have, with probably close to 50 people, Gone over the goals that they have for the upcoming year. And in doing that, one of the things that I am— I already knew because it's just true about what is normal. I expected this coming into this year. And what, as I come through the past couple of weeks, that I've become even more aware of is that for the most part, most people, while they're setting goals, They're actually pretty vague. So I'll give you some examples of this, and you can just challenge yourself in this space to say, do I have specific goals, or are my goals kind of vague? The benefit— there's a benefit to having vague goals, right? The part that doesn't— is not a benefit to you is that it's highly unlikely you will accomplish a vague goal unless you just stumble into them. Specific goals then allow you to create specific measurements that hold you accountable, not just in a year, but that will hold you accountable into a day. And that's what we need. So, you know, some of the vernacular verbiage I hear used around this is people will say things like, you know, I'm hopeful we will— and they'll fill in the blank— we'll be somewhere between 25% and 35% growth. I have a range of X to X that I want to grow. And all of those are extremely vague goals. And that is the wrong place to start because without a very specific goal, you really leave yourself a lot of room to not accomplish that and then not have any real specific accountability around it. Here's one of the things I love. When you look at Greek mythology, the Greeks were They were feared warriors. And one of the reasons why they were feared warriors is because when they would land on another country's island or peninsula or piece of land, when they would take their boats and they would land on whatever new continent that they were going to invade, the first thing that they were known to do was they would burn their ships. And that's just a mindset in business, right? It's like being real intentional about setting a specific goal and then sharing that with the people around you and casting vision with your team around that of not just where we're going, but how we're going to get there. The leaders that do that, they really burn their ships because there's no turning back, right? It's like, we've said we're going to do this. Now we have to go do it. Look, last week I sat with my entire team and I, you know, one of the things I do every year is I have a vision casting meeting, a vision casting event where I bring the team together and we take a moment to look back at where we've been and we celebrate those accomplishments. And then we look into the future and we say, where are we going? And I want everyone to understand that. I need everybody to understand that. As an organization, We have some really big goals for this year and even in our 10-year plan that are going to require everybody to be on board with and that everybody's going to need to play a part in this if we're going to get there. So, where it creates vulnerability is where you don't truly execute on the strategy to get there as a leader. You do lose credibility. That's the vulnerability in that. For the right people, you need that on the line to really go at this, these goals that you have, at all costs. And that's an important statement here. Let's make it again: at all costs. As an organization, some of the things that we're moving towards in 2020, they're way bigger than us. It has nothing— in fact, several of these have nothing to do with specifically revenue growth, have nothing to do with number of clients that we add or customers that we add this year. These are things that we're pursuing that's really just chasing excellence. It's also, to a large degree, thinking way outside our organization and the impact that we can have on industries, Not just that, but one of the coolest things that we have in our vision for 2020 is to actually begin planting an orphanage in a third-world country. And so we've identified a place, a group of people that are in Uganda that we are going to create a roadmap as an organization to actually building an orphanage in a third-world country, and that's bigger than us. And so You start casting vision around things like that, of having this big, large impact. And if you're not willing to burn the ships and really move towards those at all costs, it can become vulnerability. I think a lot of leaders sense that, sense that if they were to do that, their credibility's on the line. And so where I want to encourage you is step into that risk. Because the high-quality leaders, the activators, I call them the 1 percenters, the people that have all the intangibles, they're hardworking, high integrity, innovative. I mean, those leaders, they always figure a way through that. But if you don't establish that larger vision, you don't share it, and then you don't create specific components around that that tell you whether you're going to win in the day-to-day, you'll just go at this and you'll probably grow. Yep, most people grow organically. If you're doing things right in your market, you're going to grow organically, but you're going to leave a lot of meat on that bone. You're going to leave a lot of room that you could have grown into your market, that you could have impacted people under your leadership and beyond, that It's available to you if you want it. And so, here's what we got to do. No more vague goals. No more hopefuls. No more, we're going to have this range of numbers. No more somewhere in between. We're going to get real specific with this. Now, most people think that they're being specific when they create that larger goal of volume or number of hires or number of teams that they're going to build. And those are— well, we need those. Those are ultimately not what I would consider lead metrics. Those are lagging metrics. Those are lagging measurements. I never hire— I don't know, I'll come up with an arbitrary number— 12 people to my team in the upcoming year unless I understand what are my lead metrics. The lead metrics are the daily activities that have to take place In order for you to be able to actually accomplish those lag metrics. So most people make a mistake of just tracking lag metrics, and then they show up in the year-to-year, and you know what they do? They say what I did for a decade, which was that I'm just going to work harder, I'm going to be more tenacious, I'm going to be more focused, I'm going to be more intentional. These are some larger goals and some larger things that we say we're going to be, and we think that the goal focusing on the goal is actually what's going to get us there. No, no, no, no. Let's not confuse this. It's the daily action. It's the daily action in alignment with the goal is what creates success. It's the daily action in alignment with the goal that's going to get us there. Excuse me. Here's what I know. Pearson had a law. This is like 1800s, It's called Pearson's Law, and I'm gonna give this to you now. And I think that this is something that every leader should memorize and every leader should implement into their business at every level. Pearson, while he created this law in the 1800s and spoke this into life, one of the things that you'll see again and again in great books on CEOs, on books on success and people that have built things of significance, you're gonna notice what I'm about to tell you is an undercurrent in that. So, for example, Peter Drucker wrote a great book, The Effective Executive. What I'm about to give you is an undercurrent through that entire book. Here's the statement: what is measured is improved. Let me repeat that again. What is measured is improved. What is measured and reported is improved exponentially. Right? So, what is measured is improved. We gotta measure, we gotta be able to measure these specific Daily behaviors, right? And then beyond that, I have to report those to get the exponential because what is measured and reported is improved exponentially. What does that mean? There's a layer of accountability here. If I'm going to measure my daily actions or my daily behaviors, then I have to have a formula or a person where I report these things to. Otherwise, I'll fail. Right? I mean, at some level, if I'm not having to report what I'm measuring, then what's the point? Look, this is the first of the year, and I think this will make a lot of sense to most people. It's the first of the year, and what we know about us Americans in general is that most people start the year with some sort of health goal. I'll lose weight. I'll get healthier. I'll work out more. I'll develop my cardio. I'll eat better. I mean, these are some of the things that people come up with. So, let me just give you an example around this. What is measured is improved and what is measured and reported is improved exponentially. Okay? So, here we go. What's measured is improved, right? So, if I just said, look, you asked me, Richard, what are your goals for 2020? And I said, I'm going to get into better shape. You said, great. That's impressive. How are you going to do that? I joined a gym. Oh, awesome. Congratulations. Right? And I know inside your mind right now, you like me are thinking, that's never going to happen. Like if that's the extent of how you're going to measure what you want to improve is that you simply just joined a gym, you're not going to get there. But let me give you an analogy of this where this does work. What is measured is improved and reported is improved exponentially. You ask me that same question, Richard, what are some of your goals for 2020? And I say, I want to get in better health. And you say, well, how are you going to do that? And I say, well, first off, I hired a workout coach and I'm going to be meeting with him on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays and be working out with him for the first 90 days for a full hour until I can kind of get my rhythm and my routine down. Oh, that's awesome. Anything else? Yeah, absolutely. I hired a nutritionist. To actually build a food plan for me, and then in turn, she's actually going to sign me up for a service where they're going to ship my food in these prepackaged portions directly to my house every single week, so I don't have to go to the grocery store and expose myself to Oreo cookies and ice cream and cake, right? Whatever it is, whatever your vice is, right? You're like, oh wow, that's impressive, right? And that's not it. My nutritionist is actually having me measure everything that I eat on a daily basis right now, and so I'm having to write it all down, not just like what I'm eating but the calories and the macros. I'm having to write down proteins and carbs and sugars and all of those things that I'm actually ingesting into my body. As I get into this, you can kind of understand like, yes, what is measured is improved but what is measured and reported will be improved exponentially. If I have to report what I'm going to eat to somebody, you automatically know. Like, you're not gonna drink that Coke and you're not gonna eat that Snickers candy bar, okay? It's just not. I'm not gonna be able to make eye contact with you when I slide that one sheet across that has all of those calories on it. I'm just not gonna be able to do it, right? Because that one extra component of reporting it to someone is where we get the exponential improvement. So, in this, yes, let's get specific on our goals. Let's actually then break those goals down into what I would consider lead metrics. This is going to be what are we going to do on Monday? What am I going to do on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday? I'm going to establish goals around those behaviors or actions. And if you're a recruiting leader, this isn't complicated. What are the behaviors? Well, in recruiting, there's only 3 major behaviors really, right? Identifying talent, Making initial contact and following up and following up forever. So those are the 3 major components: identifying talent, making initial contact, and follow-up. So I need to have specific behaviors and actions around every single one of those. And then if I do and I put that into some framework like a weekly recruiting scorecard and I have to report that to somebody, Now, I have something that's of substance. Now, I have something that I can, with confidence, say I'm going to achieve in 2020. I think this is a great analogy for this. For the most part, how people go at their year is they're just driving down a highway. It's like 2020 is the highway. US Highway 2020, here we go. We're driving down the road. And we start to slowly veer off. We're fired up in January. Come the 15th of January, it's like now we're starting to focus on some other things and, you know, life's kind of getting busy now. We're kind of getting into the rhythm of the year. We get into February, we're about 4 lanes over, right? We don't have any way to really pull ourselves back into that lane we started on January 1st. By the time we get to June, I'm 12 lanes over, right? We get there And by that time, it's like these goals or these things that we really want to accomplish, they're a thing of the past, right? But if I'm driving down Highway 2020, okay, and I have these rumble strips, and I don't know if you've got rumble strips in your state, but they scare the crap out of me when I hit them at night, right? So, these little strips that they've cut in the asphalt along the side of the road, that when you hit them, they make your tires make this weird rumbling noise. We call them rumble strips where I'm from. You may call them something else. But when I hit those rumble strips now, that's my— where I'm reporting my behavior and my actions to someone. I hit the rumble strips. Now suddenly, I can correct. I've got someone that I've given permission to say, I need to be held accountable. And if you've got a leader over you, if your leader's not providing that, then you need to step into and ask your leader to provide that. And if you're a leader that's leading other people that are recruiting, gosh, you've got to create this for your people. It's necessary. Let me just tell you why it's necessary. This isn't about micromanagement if you present it correctly. So I think all great leaders allow the other leaders or the other people on their team to a large degree self-establish goals. They just simply lead it. Right. But if the goal isn't my goal and the goal is your goal as a leader, man, there's no commitment level to that. There just isn't. So, I think great leaders allow the people underneath them to actually establish their own goals. Now, they give them direction and they set kind of some guide rails for this. But if there's ownership of this because I've created it, then where you as a leader show up and lead them into an accountability system of sorts, You're just coming alongside them and saying, I want to help you accomplish your goals. And I think that's what great leaders do is they help other people accomplish what they're motivated to accomplish. So, there's the big win is that I'm going to help you accomplish this by putting some framework in place. I'm on your team. The other part that it does is this. This metric system, so to speak, where I'm tracking my behaviors and my actions on a Monday through Friday or a Monday through Sunday framework. What it does is, as a leader, and even as an individual that I'm doing this myself, it allows me to see early where there's an issue. If I go one week and I'm off base and I'm at 50% of whatever my behavior or actions were supposed to be for that week, it's easy to now self-correct. If I have no measurement over the course of the year other than a big, large established goal that's at the very end of the year, I can get all the way to June and it doesn't really matter whether I'm on track or whether I'm not on track. So, I need a way to establish an early alert system, right? Where is there an issue? And that issue might be time. It could be time management. Let's just say that. For the most part, for most people, it is time management. It's an inability to manage the 12 to 15 hats they have in a day. This is We're talking about, you know, you actually wear 12 to 15 hats. You're probably the equivalent of 5 to 7 people in an organization, right? So, if recruiting and growth is one of our number goals, and what I found is that for most leaders, it can be as much as 60% of whether they win or they lose in a given year. I've got to have a system that tells me whether I'm on track or not early, not late. Okay. And that's where I would consider a weekly recruiting scorecard Is an important component to whether you're going to win or lose. So here's what I want to do. I'm going to actually put a weekly recruiting scorecard, a blank example of one that we use, that we coach to. I'm gonna put it on my website, 4crecruiting.com/scorecard. Okay, I'll put it there. Now, I've had this up before. I'll tell you what, and one of the things I will also do, we've had this up before on our recruitingconversations.com website. We've had some problems with that website. We've actually had, because we have so much content on that website, we've actually had that website actually taken over a couple of times by people that are in foreign countries. And so we're in the process of actually fixing that situation. So I'm trying to provide a workaround here. So here's a good workaround. I'm gonna post this in my social media feeds tomorrow. Okay, so this will be on LinkedIn. Go find me, Richard Milligan, and just search my recent posts and you'll be able to find this. It's going to be as a document in a recent post, which by the way, you can do this on LinkedIn if you didn't know this. What a cool tool. I'm going to go to LinkedIn and provide this document as a public document. Go get it there. But then I'll also load it onto our 4crecruiting.com website/scorecard and you'll be able to find it there as well. This is a great place to start. Leaders, Please implement a system around this with the people that are other recruiting leaders underneath your leadership. And if you're an individual that doesn't have a leader who's leading this, figure out creatively how you can lead yourself through this. You could create a creative accountability system with someone else in the organization that wants to win as much as you, that's in the same position as you, and say, hey, here's a podcast or 2, listen to this. Here's the scorecard that I'm going to start using. Would you be willing to hold me accountable? Would you be interested in using this as well? And figure out how you can measure this and report this, because when you do, you get the exponential, which is what we're after here. I don't want normal returns. I want exponential returns. And that's why I'm willing to measure myself on a daily basis. That's why I'm willing to report this to somebody else as accountability, because when I do, I get the exponential return. Okay. So another Recruiting Conversations in the books, and we are off to the races in 2020. I hope you're having an awesome start to your year. And if there's ever any way that I can help you, look, my calendar is— it's normally booked about 2 weeks out right now, and I'm thankful for that. But if there's anything I can do to help, you are welcome to get on my calendar at bookrichardnow.com. Into the future. I, I actually had an Army recruiter in New Jersey who got on my calendar and, uh, was asking and asking me questions, and, and I loved it. I loved every minute of it. And so if you're in a recruiting role and you want to just have an hour conversation with Richard, I time block everything. Any time slot that's available on that live calendar there is available to you, and I would love to pour into you and just provide you with some value, no strings attached. That's what we're about here is actually helping support the recruiting leader as much as we can in the season that we're at. There will come a time and a place where that will not be available and I won't have the time to do that. And I'm sure that that will happen later on this year when we launch our book, The Attractive Leader, where recruiting and leading overlap. But until then, I want to be as accessible as I can to my audience. And so there you have it. Have a great week, and I look forward to seeing you again here next time, next week, on another Recruiting Conversations. Have a great week, everybody. There you have it, another Recruiting Conversations in the books. I hope you're having a great start to your 2020. These things matter a lot, okay? So the content I just gave you here around this scorecard It ultimately changed my entire career. I go back to around 2010, 2011, 2012 in that season, and framework for me was that I'd always been very driven. I've always been— not always been, I am very driven, and that has only got me so far. Being able to get more specific in the daily actions and the daily behaviors and measuring those to keep me on track for the larger goals was critical to me being able to ultimately in 2014 to 2016, I launched 18 branches versus launching 3 in the previous 10 and a half years. So it's worth it and it will help you get the results that you want. And I know you're going to put in the effort, right? You're here, you're listening to this. To this audio or this video. And so there's no doubt about whether you have all the intangibles to do this. You deserve to win. Do this because it matters and it will help you cross that finish line that you want to accomplish. Okay? So until our next video, have a good week, everybody. I'll see you then.