How Your Data And Technology Are Ruining Your Recruiting Opportunities

Hey everybody, welcome back. It's another Recruiting Conversations with your host Richard Milligan. And you know what we're going to talk about today? We're going to talk about the spam text. Yes, that's right. We're talking about the spam text that a lot of you are sending. I don't know if it's a lot of you, but oh Lord have mercy. I get throughout the week people that regularly email me LinkedIn me, text me, these spam messages that don't work that are being sent by recruiters or by recruiting leaders, right? That recruiting leader is someone who is leading a team and is also responsible for recruiting to that team. And I'm going to start right at the top here. If you listen to this podcast and one of these is your text messages, You know, you can be offended. That's okay. But you're wrong in sending this text message. So I'm going to read a couple of these. Just bear with me. All right. So I'm to protect the identity of the individuals that have sent this. I'm going to paraphrase some of this. I'll take out the names of the people that sent them and the names of the company that they sent them from. So where I'm going to start is this one starts out saying, hello, Jay. Blank at blank again. So he's saying his name and his company again. Before I throw in the towel, I had to try you one more time and let you know we really see something in you. I want to present you with an opportunity. Can you squeeze me in this week for a call? And then below that it says reply stop to opt out. Is there ever a red flag that something was spam? As a reply, stop to opt out of this campaign. I bet that the person that got this text message felt incredibly affirmed in the message to know that this message was not only sent to him but was sent to other people through your texting tech platform. Okay, here's another one. It says, uh, blank the name of the individual that they're sending it to. Your current setup could be awesome. There could also be something less than perfect. I'm not trying to convince you that you need to make a move. I'm just letting you know that there is interest from multiple options. Would you be against having a conversation just to discuss a few? And then he lists a couple names of companies that he's partnered with as an external recruiter. Okay, sent it with a meme of an old guy balding that says, my interest is piqued. I'm speechless. Okay, I'm speechless for a couple of reasons. One, there is a ton of tentative language being used in this. Um, 2, it doesn't quite make sense. 3, we all know that it's spam. Here's another one. It's blank from blank. Are you open to options to being more successful in 2023? Call or text me today at here's my number. Our company is doing fantastic. We should discuss an offer if you aren't happy where you're at. I'm sure a few thousand people got that text. Here's my last one before we get into some real meat on how do we Not represent ourselves like this, but use technology. Hi Jason, this is blank from blank. I sent you a text a few days ago to introduce myself. I want to present you with an extremely lucrative opportunity. We've been running a successful branching network for the last 20 years. We are designed perfectly for seasoned loan officers and branch managers. Would better pricing help you right now in this market? Our pricing will always be very competitive. But we know what a great backend, great pricing means. Without a great backend, great pricing means nothing. I'd be grateful if we could meet over the phone. If you want to learn more, here's more information to visit. And then it has reply stop to unsubscribe from. Okay. Oh my goodness. The people sending this need to listen to this podcast. Here's the challenge. This is where I want to go with this conversation to bring you value today. Here's the challenge. In certain industries, and I'm going to reference the mortgage industry, it's what I came out of. In certain industry, data combined with tech is making recruiting ineffective, not effective. Let me, let me explain this to you. So the mortgage industry, they started out 2023 with 317 Around 317,000 licensed loan officers. Okay. Wow, that's a big number. Of that number, let me just do some math. I'll give you some data around this. If you're in the mortgage industry, this is especially special to you. If you're not, think about your industry. So of the 317,000, here's what we know. We know that 93.7% of all production comes from— historically has come from 60% of the loan officers. What that means in a market that's shrinking. So, you know, $4.2 trillion in volume in 2022. The estimation for 2023 is $1.7 trillion in volume. What does that mean? Well, you start to do the math. There's a reduction of over 50% in the amount of volume the industry is going to see this year. And that's a trend for real estate. That's a trend for other microeconomies, other markets. So this data should mean something to you, even if you're not in the mortgage industry. If you think about it, if the market's going to shrink by more than 50%, and 93.7% comes from 60% of the producers, you're going to wipe 40% to 50% of all the producers off the landscape. They're not going to be here in 2024. So data is really important. I'm going to emphasize this. Data is really important. Quality data is really important. There, I said it 3 times, to your recruiting success. Here's the challenge. When you combine data with texting platforms, with technology, with email drip campaigns, with, you know, CRMs, Most recruiters and most recruiting leaders get lazy. I'm gonna say that again and really emphasize it. Most recruiters and most recruiting leaders get lazy. Here's why. We think it's a shortcut to success. If you go do a LinkedIn Sales Navigator search, search your industry for the leadership titles that would be recruiting. Okay, I did this with the mortgage industry. It's 54,500 recruiting leaders. These are leaders who are responsible for managing a team but are also responsible for recruiting to the team. There's also approximately 6,800 recruiters and another 7,200— those are 6,800 internal recruiters and approximately 7,200 external recruiters. That's just from LinkedIn. Okay, that's LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Go set up your searches and you'll pull similar data. Okay, when you put data with tech stack in the hand of a bunch of lazy recruiters and recruiting leaders, what you get is Spamville. We're literally building a village of spam. And what it's— what's happening is that it becomes Practically impossible for great leaders who have lots of value to bring to get to the people they want to get to because of the amount of noise that's being created in the system. I'm a bit speechless here because with technology and with data, if you really had strong strategy, you would be a dominant force. But we're taking very generic scripting. We're taking massive lists of people, and we're dropping them into tech, and we're creating a couple of meetings, and we're calling it wins. You—I'm going to use a framework: righteous anger. If any of you've been angry in like a good way, okay? I there's some righteous anger here. Where I say we can do better, gang. Like, we can do better than this. And the ones that do better, the ones that will slow down and put some thought into their sequence of communication with these specific data points that we're getting with this amazing technology that allows us to reach people quickly at scale. The people that will invest the time will not only win, they will be the dominant winners in this era. So I love the data. I love the tech. What I don't love is that recruiters and recruiting leaders think it's a shortcut to success. Real conversation more than a month ago with a recruiting leader. The conversation goes like this. I used the data points from a service provider that he got the data from, built a massive list. We're talking about 50,000, 60,000 people size list for salespeople in this person's industry. Dropped all of this into a texting campaign. Let's just pause there. Like, like, that's actually illegal. That breaks law to take 50,000 to 60,000 people that didn't opt into your texting campaign and dropping them into a texting machine and sending it out. Get prepared to be sued, and was considering it a win because they were getting 10 to 12 meetings a week through this funnel of sorts that they had built. So I allowed him to externally process through. He had some questions for me, wasn't a coaching client of mine, found me, found my calendar, wanted to spend an hour with me. I invested an hour with him. I asked lots of questions. Okay. After I asked a lot of questions, I asked a really good question that it took him some time to find the answer to. And the question I asked was this: what is your opt-out like? How many people that you're sending these messages to that fits your avatar? Because the data will tell you exactly who you want to go after. It will— when you define your avatar, the data can point you to a small bucket of people that fit that avatar. Well, in this case, it was simply the only part of the data that they were using. How many units, how many transactions had these salespeople been producing? When I asked the question, how many people are opting out of your campaign? He took a few minutes, clicked a few buttons inside his software. His technology to figure this out. It was over 55%, and we're celebrating 10 to 12 meetings a week. Leaders, we're literally torching, throwing hand grenades, dropping missiles on relationship bridges that we don't have the option to cross again when we get lazy in our approach to recruiting. So if you're with me on this, if you're following with me on this, okay, where I want to go is how do we use the data to get to better places with people in meaningful conversations? So here's a challenge for you. Stop being general in your message, because every one of those messages, I can look at those messages and in some way, shape, or form say, This was sent to a lot of people. It wasn't sent to me. And one of the markers for success in this is how much you affirm someone is an indicator for how many people say yes to meeting with you about your opportunity. So when— if we go back through some of these messages and we just ask, where's the affirmation? Where are they leading with affirmation? Right? The affirmation's incredibly general. It's not specific. Okay. Um, I wanted to let you know, we really see something in you. Really? You, you see something in me? You've never met me. Okay. You lost all credibility with that statement. That was the first text I read you. Right? The second one doesn't have— I guess it does. It says, I'm just letting you know there is interest from multiple options in you. That's not specific affirmation. It's general affirmation. It's spam. Right? The second one— the third one doesn't have any affirmation at all in it. The fourth one is— I'm skimming it again. No affirmation in this at all. Okay. And then 3 of the 4 have a click, you know, click, you know, punch stop. Or remove to come out of the spam messaging campaign. So affirmation, you focus on that. Big takeaway here is this, okay? With your data, you can put people into very specific buckets. Okay, we mentioned the mortgage industry earlier. Let's just talk about that industry for a second, because it's a real challenge for you leaders in that industry. Here's why. Loan officers in, in 2009, they were required to begin registering with the National Mortgage Licensing System. Each one of them was assigned a number. Okay, depending on when they entered NMLS depends on the size of that number, but most people have a 4 or 5 or 6-digit number. Okay, it's like being a prisoner. You have a number that represents you. Okay, so they've got a number. Now what happens is that how they track a loan officer's dealings is that when they— when a consumer takes out a loan with a company and they get to the closing table, on the mortgage application, there's a— that loan officer's NMLS number, their National Mortgage Licensing Number, is on that public document. Okay, so the mortgage is a public document filed of public record. It doesn't— the only thing it has on it that is personal information from the consumer is the, the amount. It has the address, it has their name. It doesn't have anything like Social Security numbers, date of birth, any of those personal income information, personal information. So it has all that information. It's filed as a public record. So what data companies do is they build these cool algorithms. These algorithms are computers that sort the data, that compile them into buckets. So now you're getting this information sorted according to buckets. Now, what— when I say buckets, what I mean is this, is that you can find someone that does 62% FHA loans. You can find someone that does 63% purchase. with that other bucket of FHA loans. So you have these buckets that exist, which are the specific products that those loan officers specialize in. With those data points, you can build incredible strategy. This is how you've got to be thinking. Let me just see if I can riff an idea here for you live. I spent 15 years in the mortgage industry, so— and I was a producer and then a producing manager for 11, 12 years at a really high level. So I still remember what it's like, what product offerings were like, and where people fell into buckets. So give you an example. I worked at a company that did USDA loans manually underwritten below a 620 credit score. Now, that may mean nothing to you if you're a financial advisor, if you're an insurance broker building a team or real estate broker building a team. Okay, but that's a specific bucket of data that you could pull. Now, you can't pull credit scores, but you can pull USDA in your bucket. How much USDA does this person do? And there is a specific idea that you could present to all the people that fell into that bucket. That's called strategy. Okay. And, and so with a strategy like that, You could send one message to 327 people that fit into that bucket. And the message might be something along the lines of, hey, Richard, I was doing some research on you. And of course, your tech will put the first person, the name of the person into this. Hey, Richard, I was doing some research on you. I was doing my research. I noticed that you're one of the top 500 USDA producers in the US. Congrats. I didn't know if you knew this. Wow, that's specific affirmation. I don't know this because the producer doesn't have access to the data point, right? And so you might send that with a link to a video, and the video might be, hey Richard, I sent an email to my underwriting help desk and I asked them this question: do we do USDA manually underwritten under a 620 credit score? And here's my response. And you're doing a video of your email and then showing me the response, yes, we do that, and then flipping the camera around to yourself and you're saying, hey, Here's the deal. I know you're a top USDA producer in the US. I would love to have a conversation with you about how we handle USDA loans because I'm convinced I can help you grow your business in this specific area. Now you've got a specific strategy. This is where data will accelerate your recruiting efforts. This is where when you combine it with tech, You can reach lots of people in one-off style messages, but you have got to stop being lazy and letting the machine take over this. And you got to insert your humanness with the machine. The machine doesn't know your company might do a sub-620 manual underwrite on a USDA loan. It will never know that at a point where it can insert it into a very specific strategy. Your humanness needs to be inserted into the machine. In order for this to work. This is why if you work hard to develop these strategies, you will not all you will not just win; you will dominate recruiting in the digital world. So this is why I'm this is I'm maybe a little over the top emphatic today because I get these texts throughout a week, and I know what's taking place. And what is becoming complicated is getting into a normal conversation with someone where you legitimately can bring them value. Okay, so get this right. I'm a fan of the data. I'm a fan of the tech. I'm not a fan of how we're using it, how we're utilizing it. We have become too recrutery And I don't— that's not a word, I just made it up. But salesy. We are treating complex sales processes as though they are widget sales. You ever bought a widget? A widget's like $29. It breaks in like a week. This is a complex— treat it like a complex software sale. You would never show up If you were selling software, you would never show up in front of a CEO on LinkedIn and say, my software is $50 million, I'd love to, love to showcase it to you. I'd love to close you on the opportunity. I'd love to show you how awesome it is. You would go through this process of defining the hierarchy of that company. Where should you enter? Where should you begin the conversation? And when you get a conversation with someone, you're going to uncover, discover that, right? There's a process. Does my software work in progression with the journey that you have created as an organization with your own software? What all software components are you using? What would it look like to blend my software in? It's complex, right? Does the language we wrote our software in work with the language of your software? That— those are complex issues. When you understand that recruiting a top salesperson in your business has complexity to it. You understand that you have to have a better recruiting sequence, a better recruiting strategy. The spam that you're sending says a lot about who you are as a leader. And in a simple framework, you're trying to convince the recruits in your market that you're a leader worth following. If you send me spam, you will never be a leader worth following. So this is a conversation to have at a company level. It's a conversation to have at a recruiter level. It's a conversation to have at a recruiting leader level. And if your company is taking this over and is running with this and it's impacting your microbrand at a market level, You need to elevate your voice in this. If you're a company that's doing this and you're head of recruiting or your recruiter that's doing this, you need to elevate your voice in this. The people that make the decision around how we're going to treat the data, how we're going to communicate to people with our tech, those people need to change the sequence The process, how we're utilizing this information, and what we need to build is better strategy for how we're going to approach— how we're going to actually get recruits into meaningful conversations. There you go. The righteous anger's off my chest. I will sleep better tonight. Until I talk to you again on another Recruiting Conversations, that's all I have for you today. I look forward to next time. Have a great week, everybody.