Linkedin Webinar For Mortgage Recruiting Leaders

We're a couple minutes away from the start of our webinar. Here in just a moment, I'm going to pop up on the screen a 4C Recruiting logo. You'll see that, you'll know that you're connected. If you can hear me, then everything— you can see me, then everything's working well. You won't have to look at me for the entire duration of the webinar once we get started. It'll just be minimized up in the top right-hand corner. I can be a bit of a distraction. I'm a bit handsy and animated while I'm presenting, and so I'll try to keep that to a minimum. But glad to have you here. Look forward to bringing some value to each of you. We will start here in about 30 to 45 seconds. We'll give everybody a chance to get here. We'll start about 1 to 2 minutes after 2 o'clock. And, and until then, you're going to be seeing another screen. You'll see me minimize here in just one moment. Okay, let's go ahead and get started here. For those that don't know me, hold on one second, I got some chat coming in. Make sure everybody can see me. Um, you guys should be able to see me. I won't be able to see you since I'm the host. So if you can actually see the 4C Recruiting logo and the Recruiting Made Simple statement and me in the top right-hand corner, then everything's working for you, but I won't be able to see you. So let's go to get started. A little bit about me. I spent almost 15 years inside the mortgage industry. building teams. I originally got in the business as an originator, became a producing branch manager, and then grew into launching branches as an area vice president, and eventually left the business to start this company, 4C Recruiting, because of my vision, which is from my experience. I spent, I spent those 15— a large part of those 15 years inside the mortgage industry struggling on the recruiting side. not being able to connect the dots on what needed to be done in order to be successful. And so it wasn't until the last 2.5, 3 years in the business that I actually was able to connect the dots, having a lot of epiphany moments, as I would call them, where I actually built the Recruiting Made Simple model. And then that model is actually what I'm part of what I'm going to show you here today. So before I get started on this, I'm getting some chat in my— in the chat box right now. Will some people jump in here and just confirm you can hear me, you can see my screen, and that you can actually see me as well? I want to make sure everybody's able to connect. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, awesome. All right, then I will put that to the wayside. From time to time, a lot of the— some of the corporate servers can provide complications for you all. So with the assumption that the majority of the people here can actually see what's going on, I'm going to get started. So, so, so let me jump into this now. Okay, so here's what you can expect. This webinar is going to run about an hour. I will try to keep it within that timeframe to respect the time you've allocated on your calendars just to be here on a Friday afternoon heading into the New Year weekend. But what I want to show you is what I did to be successful on LinkedIn. Okay, so this is not going to be super complicated. I will I added some stuff to this webinar specifically for this group. I went through each of your profiles late last night, have a pretty good feel for where each of you are. Out of an audience of about 25 people that are here today, there's really one person out of this audience that's doing— that is— I don't want to be critical here, but that is actually in alignment with about 70% of what I'm actually going to present here today. There are a lot of people that are here, and I get why they're here because they just haven't been able to connect the dots on LinkedIn and how to use LinkedIn as a successful recruiting tool. So what I'm going to show you is what I've successfully shown other branch managers, area managers, regional managers— what I've shown them to do using LinkedIn. The original email that a lot of you came through is a story of a branch manager that I'm that I'm I'm currently coaching who actually has hired 7 loan officers in the last 60 days using some of the same strategies that I'm going to show you here. Now, the truth is that we are kind of in this sweet spot with LinkedIn. I love a quote by Newt Gingrich. I'm not for or against Newt Gingrich, but he had a quote that resonated with me and, and stuck in my brain. And I won't be able to give you the full quote, but The, the quote in essence was that we are all building bridges to these islands of excellence, and the lake of mediocrity gets up on our bridges and tears them down. So we are in an era of LinkedIn where we're really in the sweet spot. Okay. That's why this is a big deal to me. That's why on relatively short notice, we put this webinar together for you. To cover some strategies to get you jump-started going in 2018. Because when we look historically at tools like LinkedIn, we can take email for example. For example, marketers have ruined email. If you're getting a 1 to 4% open rate on your emails, you're very successful in email today. Marketers ruined the telephone. Like, you can't actually call somebody on the phone and not have them get annoyed if they aren't expecting your call a lot of the times. Marketers have ruined that. Marketers are in the process of ruining cell phones. You probably, like me, get multiple telemarketing calls from automated machines every single day. They're in the process of ruining LinkedIn. You may be getting spam link— or not LinkedIn, the text messaging— maybe getting spam text messaging like I do. But LinkedIn is really the way it's structured, and it is built for your position, the recruiting leader, To be successful. And so when we look at it and kind of the momentum that it has of people coming into this platform, where in the United States there's 128 million people currently on LinkedIn, we see this platform growing very quickly right now, people beginning to engage with it. Being the only business social media tool that's out there, we are in that zone where in 3 to 5 years we will look back at LinkedIn and go, remember the good old days. Now something else will take its place. We'll probably have Snapchat for business, or there will be something else out there that will take its place. But you need to understand this: if you wait— some of you are, are not in a position to really fully understand LinkedIn. 95% of people here aren't engaged on it at any level at all. And so if you wait 3 years to do this If you wait 5 years to do this, you have missed the sweet spot with LinkedIn. And so for us, what we see and what people are doing right now on the micro of the recruiting leader, this is a tool that you've got to be using. It needs to be a pillar in your business. So we're going to cover— when you leave here, you're going to know why you should be using LinkedIn. I'm going to show you the value of what I call jabbing versus right hooking, and I'll explain that to you in a moment. It's boxing terminology. And I'll also show you why a recruiting leader should be using LinkedIn differently than a recruiter. Now, the truth is that most recruiting leaders look at LinkedIn as a corporate recruiter tool, and you should not be taking the same approach. Corporate recruiters get the permission to right-hook people, which is to constantly ask people for meetings, to constantly be pressing people towards some sort of next step. As a recruiting leader, the hat you wear is a completely different hat. And so we work in smaller ponds. A corporate recruiter gets to fish in the big pond. They're all about numbers. They're all about, you know, not necessarily quality, but they're based on quantity. As a recruiting leader, we're in a completely different role where we are fishing in a small pond. Many of you are branch managers. You're fishing in your local market. If you're an area manager, you might be fishing in your state. If you're a regional, you might be one state or multiple states, but still you are in a smaller pond. And so the approach has to be more tactical in, in, in going after the individual loan officer and going after an individual branch manager. And so our approach has to be completely different. We'll talk about that in a moment. So here's my ask for you. I'm going to give you an incredible hour of Content. What tends to happen being in the role of a recruiting leader is that you wear 12 to 15 hats in a day, and I get that. And so your door is probably going to open, your Facebook might be up, your LinkedIn might be up, your email might be on, your phone might be ringing. I'm going to give you a nugget to stay focused on this all the way to the end. I'm going to give you a recruiting tip that's completely outside of LinkedIn. that you'll want to stay for all the way through the end that will help you going into the beginning of 2018, because I have an idea that really propelled my career as a recruiting leader that, that I'll share with you, that I share in my coaching system with other, with other managers, recruiting managers, recruiting leaders. So a little bit about me. I got in the business as an originator, became a producing branch manager, then an area manager, regional manager, and vice president for around 15 years. In the last 3 years, really, I was in the business. I launched 21 branches, hired over 120 loan officers, and it wasn't until 2014 that I really connected the dots on recruiting. So, um, at the end of 2013, I went completely off the grid and disconnected from the matrix and said, I have to put together a recruiting model, recruiting system that works for me. And so after about 7 days of being off the grid, of not being in the office, of not, you know, responding to email. I came back into the, into the matrix with a full system in place, and I implemented that system at the end of 2013 going into 2014. And part of what I'm going to show you today with LinkedIn is what I used in that system in 2014. And what happened between December and February of 2000— December 2013 and December and February of 2014, which is a 3-month span, I set almost 40 what I would call local or corporate site visits with branch managers or loan officers in that 3-month window of time. And LinkedIn was the tool that I used to set those, those visits, face-to-face meetings with those recruits. So I'm going to show that to you. What ended up coming from that was in 14 months, I launched 7 branches. using that Recruiting Made Simple system. And now today what I do is I actually specialize in helping recruiting leaders achieve high growth by building individual recruiting models for them. So in all of that, I've done a lot of things right, but I also want to discredit myself for a second because when I have conversations with recruiting managers, recruiting leaders, what I hear again and again is that most people say, I'm just not that great of a recruiter. And there's this, there's this belief, which is really a false belief, that you have to be a super salesman, that you have to be extremely high in woo, and that those are some of the key components to being a strong recruiter. And the truth is that being a recruiter, a good recruiter, is like being a good parent. I have 4 kids today. My oldest is 15. and my youngest is 4. And what I know is that my 4-year-old has a much better parent than my 15-year-old had. So I got— we got to— the 15-year-old will probably be in counseling and, you know, he'll live a very jaded life because, you know, we weren't the parents that we are today. And so great recruiters can be developed. Great recruiters are people that are just willing to work on this craft. And so you just don't know what you don't know. That's the truth, just like parenting. So it's not that you can't, it's that you're not equipped. So let me just share with you some of the things that I did wrong with LinkedIn. One of the things that I did with LinkedIn was I connected and immediately tried to set up meetings. That is, um, the fastest way to get a brick wall built is to connect and immediately try to set up a meeting. I'll show you a process around this and how to do it right, but that's how I did it wrong. At one point I bought LinkedIn InMails, and we'll talk specifically about the InMails in a second. But, you know, InMails are very expensive. They're $10 apiece. I sent out hundreds of those to candidates, potential candidates, recruits, and I can tell you I had 0% return on that investment. That was something I did wrong. At one point, I actually got my LinkedIn account flagged for spam. And we'll talk about this in a moment, how to keep— how to prevent yourself from actually getting your LinkedIn account flagged. But I got my account shut down for about a week before I was able to get it turned back on because too many people clicked the little button that said that my connection request to them was spam. For a 6-year window, if I look at 2008, which is when I came onto LinkedIn, to 2014, that 6-year window of time, I only connected with 3,000 people. And I say only because today I have almost 15,000 connections. So in 6 years, um, it— I, I developed 3,000 connections. And what I'm going to show you is the proof that just in the last 6 months, I have gone from just over 5,000 to almost 15,000. And we'll talk about how I've been able to do that. And then the typical LinkedIn post that I would send out was quotes. It was these cool pictures, you know, brainyquotes.com or, you know, those that we would, it would have some sort of quote across the picture. That was my typical post. And it, and a lot of you are currently doing that. Some of you are doing that through social bots. I saw a number using the same social bot to post. So your, your messages that are being pushed out are identical to everyone else's messages. And we'll talk about why you don't want to do that. And the last one here is I never documented myself as an attractive leader, right? Vision. Well, let's just pause for a moment. We'll talk about the attractive leader. Okay, because that may be a word, a terminology you've never heard used before, and you may not be, may not be aware of what that, what I mean when I say that. The attractive leader is someone that has a very clear vision. That person can actually articulate that vision. So the living proof of whether you are that attractive leader is if I ask you right now, tell me your vision, you can, you can very clearly articulate that and cast that for me. Okay. We call, I call those visioneers. But, um, so, you know, the first thing is if you're not, if you don't have that vision, you've got to get that vision. That would be a takeaway for me from this. Um, the second part of that is you have to have a lot of clarity around the vision and be able to cast it to people. Then what I'm going to show you is why you should be using LinkedIn to simply document yourself as an attractive leader. This isn't an egotistical approach to what's going on. It's simply documenting the things that you're already doing. I'll show you some methodology around that in just a moment. Here's what I figured out. This picture of this dog just cracks me up, and here's why. It's because that picture Is the perfect example of me in 2010, '11, '12. I knew exactly what I wanted to accomplish, and I knew exactly where I needed to go to get there, but I just couldn't seem to make it happen. And if you've ever seen the video of this dog trying to get this stick across this bridge, he goes on and on forever trying to figure out how to get this stick across the bridge, and eventually he does get— he does figure it out. But that was me in recruiting, and that you may be able to relate to that as well, where I'm going to set some goals for 2018, right? But I really don't have an idea how I'm going to get there. I'm just going to get there. And that was really my methodology around recruiting. What I figured out though with LinkedIn is that LinkedIn should be a primary pillar to your recruiting efforts. So when I say recruiting pillar, what I mean is this, is that when you build a house, you build a house on these cornerstones, right? You build a house on 4 cornerstones, and those are the pillars that support the house. But yet in recruiting— and, and well, let me just pause for a moment. You'll— we will coach loan officers, have multiple pillars in your business, right? You just don't have real estate agents. You'll have financial planners. You should have builders. You should have a grassroots network. You probably should be involved in some sort of networking group, business networking group. So they may have 4 or 5 or more pillars in their business. But yet as recruiting leaders, we ultimately have one pillar typically. The best ones have 2. And that pillar that we typically lean on, and you can just look at where you're getting your people. How are you getting your people into your recruiting model? Most people are doing this through identifying talent. Through title companies, MI reps, their current loan officers. They might be using a tool like CoreLogix, their MarketTrax report. They might be using Zillow and the lender reviews that are on there to do that, which that's a phenomenal place to go to get those if you're not doing that. But that's where we start. And then we're identifying that talent, we're calling them. We're calling them over the phone. So our single pillar, that's our single pillar of how we develop our recruiting efforts out. LinkedIn should be an additional pillar of that. Now you should have more pillars than that, and one of the things that I work with people on is developing other methods to support the recruiting piece. But LinkedIn has to be a primary pillar for this. And when I figured this out, it was as though I put my recruiting efforts on steroids. One of the things I figured out is that you can build relationships faster using LinkedIn. It's an incredible passive communication tool that you can build relationships with quickly. It's an opportunity to share your vision. So when you call a candidate, that first thing that that candidate does is he goes to LinkedIn, she goes to LinkedIn, and they check you out. And that's a continuation of what, what just took place. If you're calling to set an appointment, they will go check you out. That is a continuation of the conversation, whether you like it or not, it's taking place. So allowing that to be a place where you share your vision is so powerful. And, and then I figured out that documenting is what I should be doing. I should be documenting what I'm doing. I'm holding a sales meeting. I'm going to document that. I'm actually at a company venue. I'm going to take pictures and document that. My team is in the office doing a luncheon. I'm going to document that. I'm helping my loan officer present at a realtor event. I'm going to document that. I have a thought, right? I'm preparing for my sales meeting and there's one key thought for my sales meeting. I'm going to document that. What most of us try to do and what I tried to do initially with LinkedIn was create. And so if you're using a social bot, you're creating. Nothing there is authentically you. Okay. Most of the best that I saw from this is those that are actually taking the corporate creating, you know, the corporate marketing departments creating stuff for you and you're posting it. That's the best that I saw. There's nobody that's on this webinar today that's actually documenting on an ongoing basis, on a daily basis, their attractive leadership through LinkedIn. And when I figured this out, what I figured is that it was much easier to move people through a recruiting system when I had done this for a season. Okay, so we'll talk about how to do that. The other thing that I figured out when I posted boldly, I was polarizing. I was pushing people away while at the same time pulling people in. Vision should do that. When I say polarizing and posting boldly, I'm not talking about a Donald Trump Twitter account here. What I'm talking about as attractive leaders, we have ideas, we have beliefs, we have vision, we have these things that we're doing and we're acting on. We should be posting those and being okay with those landing in a place where people are going to see that. And the last thing that I really picked up on is that, you know, how to connect through a jab. And I'll talk about jabbing here in just a second. So I discovered this the hard way. I'm going to give you the easy way. What we talked about is that in a 3-month window, I set 40 face-to-face visits with candidates. But I want to back up. This was not originally my presentation, but when I started to review some of the profiles here, and I would say the majority of the profiles here, what I realized is that most don't understand the power of LinkedIn. and why it's so critical. So I'm going to go quickly through this, um, in order to stay on track here, but here's what the data says. There's 128 million users on LinkedIn in the United States. There's a reason why Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. If you know anything about the Microsoft buying LinkedIn, what you know is that LinkedIn's valuation was around $1 billion. Microsoft overpaid for LinkedIn almost 26 to 1. And the reason why is that there are going to be things coming with LinkedIn that Microsoft sees as opportunities. So now is the perfect time to be positioning yourself for that. LinkedIn is the, is the only successful business social media platform out there today. 13% of LinkedIn users log in at least once per day on LinkedIn. 36— you are 36 times more likely to receive a message if you add a photo to your profile. Everyone here has a photo on their profile, but it's something to coach your loan officers on. You're 17 times more likely to be viewed if you list 5 or more skills. That's some area a few of you could focus on. You're 80%— or 80% of people consider professional networking important to career success. That's why people are willing to connect with you. 89.7% of users find it extremely useful in growing their network. Then here's an interesting trend that we saw, that in 2015, that people with a professional— what I would call professional headshot— were 14 times more likely to have their profile viewed. Then in 2017, that had increased all the way to 21 times. Now the truth is that while that sounds very simple, LinkedIn can be a bit complicated. And the reason why I bring this up is that throughout this group here, there are a range of privacy settings that are, that are actually helping or hurting you. And you may have a mindset behind your privacy settings and why you have them set up that way. You may not realize you have them set up that way. But there are 18 default privacy settings, and those things can limit people from seeing your post, can limit people from seeing what you're liking, what posts you're liking, who you're engaging with, can keep people from seeing your connections, can actually limit people being able to see how many connections you have. So it's important to understand what privacy settings you have, especially because this is a place where the attractive leader should thrive. When you come to my profile and you see that I have almost 15,000 connections, you think he's connected, right? What you have to understand is that those 15,000 connections are a doorway. That doorway, if you connect with me, which some of you still need to connect with me, I have connection requests out to some of you that are That are old. And so some of you just need to connect with me. But when you connect with me, what it does is it opens a door. It opens the door to 1.5 million other, other LinkedIn users that you can have, that you have access to through the first, second, and third-degree connections. That means that you can connect with them without having to send InMail. So it broadens the number of people you see, and it broadens the number of people that you can connect with. And so as you grow your network, you want people to see that. That's attractive. You want people to see that you understand the tool, are using the tool, and are connected on the tool. That's why privacy settings are important. Best day and time to post is Tuesday, 10 to 11, and Thursday afternoons around 1 o'clock. Again, another key time. If you post 20 times per month— let me just stop here. I don't believe there's a single person when I went back and looked that's even coming close to that. But if you were to post 20 times per month, you'd reach 60% of your LinkedIn audience. 50% increase in comments when you ask a question on a post, 45% increase in engagement when you actually drop a link in a post, and then 98% increase in comments when a post contains an image. Now that some of these can actually work in the favor of a recruiting leader, but some of these can actually work against a recruiting leader. You are not this— the general audience on LinkedIn. And so what I will show you here in just a moment is why that last statement of 98% increase in comments when a post contains an image can actually be deceiving. We'll come back to that in just a moment. So still, we're still in the LinkedIn overview. Your profile makes a difference. Okay, you must have a primary picture and a secondary picture. Okay, the secondary picture is— again, statistical data says that where you have a secondary picture, you're 4 to 7 times more likely to have someone engage with you. And a lot of you don't have that secondary picture. You're using the general LinkedIn blue screen. Okay, so that's a must. You've got to change that. Job titles that are non-descriptive can actually hurt you. You know, a title like branch manager, that's a very nondescriptive title. It is your job title, and I get that, but that can actually hurt you. So in— so with a LinkedIn title, they're actually called LinkedIn headline. What you want to do is show this undeniable proof that you're credible and that you're unique. Okay, in a good way. Yeah, I guess there's a— you could be credible Not credible and unique in a bad way, but in a good way. You're really going to do 4 things. You're going to tell them what you are, so branch manager, great. The second piece of that is just say who you helped. That's a great way to have another piece in there. Another way to do that is to show how you make someone's life or work better. The last part of that, the fourth piece of that, could be give proof that you're credible. So if you saw my title, if I post something, my title shows up as President and Recruiting Coach. That's what shows up. Now, I could just have President, but because I have Recruiting Coach on the end of that, it really says, who am I helping? Whose life am I making better? And it gives proof that I'm credible. If I come onto another post and I make a statement about vision or make a statement about recruiting, People go, oh, okay, he immediately has social credibility. So I want you to think about that and think about the job title that you should be using. Number of experience— LinkedIn calls them experiences, we would typically call them employers. The number of employers or experiences you have on there, it actually matters. Statistically, you should not have any more than 3. So for some of you, that's fine. For those of you that have more than 3, you're going to have to get creative. Okay, that means that you're going to combine. You can look at my profile as an example. I have combined employment or experiences in order to stick to that 3. Statistical data says that people are more likely to engage and to follow your profile through if you limit those experiences to 3. And then social bots. We talked about this already. The social bot just— it isn't you. I get the mindset behind having a social bot. But anyone can look at the tag on that and see that it's not you. Okay, if you're going— now, if you're not going to use LinkedIn as a recruiting tool, then don't worry about it. If the only reason why you're here is to get some additional data around LinkedIn, then fine, stick with the social bot. But what I will tell you is that a social bot is actually going to hurt you. It's not going to lend you credibility. It's not going to give people this feel that anything that comes from you is actually you. And you want this, you want LinkedIn, your LinkedIn account, your LinkedIn posts, your LinkedIn articles, everything you do to be authentically you. That's what people will— that's what's polarizing. That will pull people into you as the attractive reader. And then your summary, that's the about you part, the about me part. That is very, very, very important. There were 2 people that I reviewed that did a good job at this. A couple of suggestions even of those 2. And I'll give that suggestion to you in a second. But in, in general, the summary— this cannot be about the company you work for. This is not a headline for ABC Mortgage Company. This is you. Like, this is you, the leader, the attractive leader. So it should be personal. It should have your vision in there. It should probably have a few nuggets of information about you. What do you like? What's your family structure? You know, those things. What do you believe about business? Like, I want— if I— if you call me and I'm a candidate, I'm a recruit, and you give me your name and I look you up on LinkedIn and it's a very formal, structured, businessy about you, about you part, that's not a continuation of that conversation. So I'm very passionate about this because this works. You have to trust me on this. This summary, the about you part, it's, It's critical because it is the lens that somebody is going to look at you through. So it can't— it can be too short, but it probably can't be too long. Now, if you want to write pages and pages, yes, it probably could be too long, but don't be fearful of going too long in this. As you write this, what you have to do is you have to break this up. So the suggestion to the 2 of you that have this nailed, go back to your About Me part, your summary. And look and review that because it's blocked together. You don't want it all blocked together. So statistically, social media stats, they say that our attention span is much shorter. If you give me block text, we're not going to read it anymore. It's just, that's just the truth. So you have to break your block text up. You don't have to do this in perfect paragraph. In fact, I would encourage you not to do it in perfect paragraph format. Do it in flow. And every 2 to 3 sentences, break it up. If there's a sentence that's really important to you, break it up on the top and the bottom so that it stands out. But you should be breaking up the About You part, the About Me part, the summary piece. And then if you want to view your profile strength, there's a simple instruction there. Take a snapshot of that. You know, that's how you'll figure out— they will give you all the way up to All-Star status. If you got All-Star status and you're doing it perfect, If not, that'll tell you what things you need to actually fill in. Number of connections matters, and here's why. Who you're connected with to the first degree determines how many people you can connect with without having to use InMail. If you've ever spent $10 a pop to buy InMails, you realize it can get pretty expensive to connect with people quickly. The other reason is this, is that There's no option to filter and search specifically for members who fall outside the category. And so if you're not in the 3rd-degree connection, then you can't filter and you can't search for them. So this is why connections matter. The larger the network, the more influence you have. And that's why I call this an influencer platform. This is your influencer platform. And as a, as a recruiting leader, you want this as big inside the mortgage industry as possible. Now let me walk you through the 3 phases of building connections, because I just said inside the mortgage industry, and a question I get asked a lot is, should I only connect with people inside the industry? So there is actually 3 phases to this that, that will make you more successful in having a larger audience, larger number of connections faster. Phase 1 is what I call becoming the— becoming a lion. And you may have seen people with the title out beside them that says their name and then lion. LION just stands for LinkedIn Open Networker. So if you're— that just tells everybody that if anyone sends you a request, that you're not going to mark them as spam, that you're actually going to accept and connect with them. So you become more appealing. People automatically know that you're not going to spam, you're not going to alert them as a spammer, that you're going to automatically connect them. So phase 1 is really opening up your network. You want to connect to people like me that have the larger audience because your audience gets larger. You can connect with more people much easier. So phase 1 is really connecting and building that, that your number of people that you're connected with. Phase 2 for me, what I did was actually connect within with key industry contacts. So, you know, recruiters are a perfect example of this. Most people I have recruiting. I'm a president of a recruiting company. I'm a recruiting coach. A lot of people think I'm trying to recruit them. So if I send a connection, a lot of times they don't accept it. So it's harder for me to connect with people than most. And, um, and so, um, connecting with recruiters is a great way to open up your network because they already have large networks. So go find— that would be phase 2 after you grow to that 3,000 to 5,000 connections. Then open up, and that's what I call the Lion Open Network, phase 1. Phase 2, connect with key industry contacts. And then as you grow to 7,000 and 10,000 connections, what you would want to do is begin pruning your contacts at those, at those key stages. And so today, if you look at the 15,000 people that I'm connected to, I've pruned it. I'm at a place where I've pruned it over and over again to where now it's specifically inside the industry. But I couldn't do that to start in order to grow quickly. Okay. So, so understand the reason why I have this up there, that this account's been restricted. That 3-phase process will get you, will keep you from actually getting your account restricted. Because if you have a small audience that you're already connected to, and many of you are under 3,000, in fact, most of you are under 3,000. I think maybe 3 or over 3,000. If you're underneath that limit, You're— when people flag you as spam, it counts for a higher percentage than, say, someone that's got 10,000. And so you want to make sure that people you're connecting with are going to actually accept, you know, your connection. And then you can get to this place where I am today, where I could probably connect with 1,000 people a day and not have to worry about it. So let me just show you, this is where I was on June 25th of this year. I have my total connections were just over 5,000. I don't even know why I took a screenshot of it then. I'm just stoked that I actually have a screenshot of it. I was— because I was preparing for this just to be able to show you why this is important is that in order to be seen as an attractive leader, you need to show people you have a following. All attractive leaders have a following. Okay, this is the lens that people see you through on LinkedIn. So, so what you want to do is build out your connections. A lot of people think that 500 or more is the key number, but if you just look underneath your profile picture, that's what it says, 500 or more. But when you scroll down on your profile, in most, most privacy settings, what you're going to actually see is how many people are they're actually connected to. 5,000 is a critical mass number. What I found that at 5,000, um, I began to automatically show up more in the LinkedIn algorithm. people to connect with me. My posts actually showed up more in the LinkedIn algorithm so that people were seeing my posts more regularly. That was a critical mass number for me. Then where I am today. The reason I took this snapshot last night, I wanted you to see this. The 14,800, that's cool. This is an interesting shift for me because as my network has grown and as I stayed consistent and posting my vision and posting my core convictions, my belief system, what I found is that people are now following me, right? You see the amount that I'm following and now the amount of people that are following me. Before, I was following more people than were actually following me. And now today, I've got 20— almost 2,200 people that are following me that I'm not even connected with. This is the power of this network, and it will only get more powerful for me because of the size of my network. Right now I'm getting anywhere from 40 to 50 connection requests per day, and about 60, 70% of those are inside the industry. And so now it's at a place of critical mass where I don't have to work that hard at this in order for it to continue to grow. LinkedIn Social Selling Index. If you're not familiar with this, I'm going to drop this into the chat box. Some of you have already done this. Let me hit the chat box real quick. We'll drop in the LinkedIn Social Selling Index. If you're not familiar with this, there you go. You can click that link and it will automatically score you. Why this is critical is because this is basically your scorecard, your scorecard for LinkedIn. Now LinkedIn will score you up to 100. The industry average is an 18. Now this is not a foolproof scoring system. What— because I work with— I've worked with over 100 recruiting leaders this year. What I know is that this number can skew from time to time. Where someone has a smaller network, some of these measurements go much higher. So where you have maybe 1,200 to 2,000 connections, some of these numbers such as finding the right people can skew higher. Engaging with insights, you don't have very many people to engage with. So where you do a little bit of connecting with people's posts, that can skew much higher. You'll typically— where you will lose points if you've got a smaller network is in the building relationships piece. But here's a healthy— what you're looking at is a healthy score. You should be able to score regularly somewhere between 80 and 90, which is where my trend is. I'll go— this is my current score. I'll skew somewhere on the low end around 80 and somewhere on the high end around 90. And that's with a network of almost 15,000 people. Okay, so let's go through. We've talked about some basic fundamentals around LinkedIn. I really want to get into strategy now because that's what I really intended for this entire presentation to be about. And so I'll ask— I'm going a little bit long here. I'm going to ask for permission in a second to go a little bit longer. Some of you may have to jump off of this, but I want to do strategy now. So these are the 3 secrets that you need to know in order to have recruiting success on LinkedIn. Number 1, you have to become an attractive leader through the lens of LinkedIn. Okay, we've talked a little bit about that. Secret number 2, jabbing works on cold call— on cold candidates, right hooks don't. So there's 3 people on LinkedIn. You've got your hot candidates, those are the ones that are going to be looking and actively responding at all times. You're going to have your warm candidates, these are the people that may be interested over the next 6 months. And so you may be able to get some response out of them, but for the most part, they're just kind of lookie-loos as well. And then you've got your cold candidates. Very rarely will you get a response out of them. Okay. So, but that's how you're going to build your brand. You're going to build a big branch. You're going to build big teams based on the cold candidates. These are the people that move every 5 to 7 years. These are the people that are the good producers. that when they show up, they bring a pipeline with them. Um, you— and we're going to talk about why what I call jabbing works on cold candidates and why your right hooks won't. And then the power of having a system and a process with LinkedIn. So, um, you know, the epiphany moment for me around secret number 1, the attractive leader and the lens of LinkedIn, was, um, was, was when I heard one of my loan officers say, this is the reason— this was a new loan officer— I said, this is the reason why I'm here. And what they began to lay out was this lens that I'd been living through on LinkedIn, which was what was my vision? What were the things that I was all about in my offices? What were the things that we were doing? And so you have to understand that others are going to label you. If you don't define yourself, others will label you regardless, and you'll get to keep those labels. So identifying who you are on LinkedIn is really important for the continuation of the conversation. So Here's, here's how you do it. You know, the attractive leader and your positioning is really critical. I like to use the word polarizing because polarizing is this. If I tell you my beliefs and I'm very clear in those beliefs, it's going to do one of two things with you. You're either going to push away or you're going to pull in. You're going to go, that really resonates with me. You're going to say, I don't really align with that. And either way, that polarization is a win for me. Because as a leader, there's certain things that I represent. And if you come to my branch, if you come to my brand and I represent those things and you're not up, you're not in on that vision, then I will lose you. You will leave. And so the polarizing part is a lot of people get nervous in that space. I encourage it because you're going to build a tribe over building something that will be a dysfunctional branch where you're constantly rotating. It's a constant rotating door. You have to understand the next bullet point. Your profile tells a story. Like, what's the story that you're telling? All right, look at your profile. We've talked about that. You have to use LinkedIn to articulate your vision regularly. So if you want some formatting around this, here's a good way to do it. You can just talk about my vision is to this. Right, share it on LinkedIn. I'll come back to it. Find your voice in that because the 3 stages of vision are really Number 1, creating. Number 2, you're getting clarity in it, finding your voice in it. That's why I bring it up. When you find your voice in it, then you move towards the visionary. And the visionary is someone who can very clearly cast vision. And that, that's important in recruiting and why LinkedIn helps you with that. It's because you get to do it on a daily basis. Cast your vision, right? My vision is to this. Um, let's make this statement. I'm going to accomplish my vision by doing this, right? I am accomplishing my vision by doing this. The last one is how am I measuring success around my vision? I will— you can even make statements. I will measure success by this. Those are all things you can do in LinkedIn to cast your vision. Now here's what you need to know, and this has nothing to do with LinkedIn, but this has everything to do with recruiting. Recruiting is all about heart. It has nothing to do about head. Okay, I see high 90% of recruiting leaders recruiting with what I call left-brain thinking. You have to move to vision, which is right-brain thinking. You have to move to storytelling, which is right-brain thinking. Most people recruit with things like products and compensation structure and marketing support and CRMs and those types of things. If they're doing good, they might be bringing in corporate culture. Majority of that, 90% of that is all left-brain thinking. And even corporate culture, Doesn't answer the question for a recruit of what's in it for them. What's in it for me, right? The WIFM— what's in it for me? So corporate culture just says, what's the corporate— what's the culture like at corporate? What are underwriters and closers and, you know, VPs and these people that sit at corporate, what are they experiencing? It doesn't tell me at the local level what should I experience. So where you can get clarity in your vision and use LinkedIn to live that out You will move people through your recruiting process much faster because they're going to, they're going to see you through a different lens. Just simply, the next one is simply communicate who you are as the attractive leader. Make, make statements. I believe, right? Answer the questions. What's my why? If you go, if you see my post, I'll post a picture of me with my family. I'll post a picture of me with my son sitting in a deer blind, right? Those are the things that are my why. And so that's polarizing. People that can align with that and understand that and feel that with their heart, they're going to move towards me. Let me give you an example of this, of what it can look like in post. I'm going to show you 2 different sets of this. I go back to one of the statistics we talked about at the very beginning, or close to the beginning, which is that 98% of posts that look like this one actually get a higher comment or a higher response rate. More likes. When you're the recruiting leader, what you have to understand is that people are not always going to click the like button. They're not, and very rarely will they click the comment button. And that goes for me as well. They see me as a recruiting guy, so they will view it, but they won't touch it. And so what I'm after in this situation is I'm after views. If I can get to my larger audience Consistently with my message, whatever my vision is. And if you follow me, you'll know in this particular post, boldness. I always say that the recruiting leader has to be bold a minimum of 5 times per day to be successful. That's one of my views. It's one of my beliefs. Um, you'll look and notice that, and this was a recent post. I pulled this last night. This is from 3 weeks ago. Um, I had 868 people view this. Now in the size of the network of 15,000, that's roughly 5, 6%. of my audience viewed it. Where your voice actually matters is where people are going to view this, right? What are my core values? What are my core beliefs? I'm pulling people into this. These are 2 posts that I did back to back that tie into this. One of those has 4,400 views. One has 5,100 views. Now I'm getting to 30, almost 30-plus percent of my audience. And so this is the power of posting around core values, core beliefs, vision, So this is what I'm encouraging you to do right now. I know as a recruiting leader, what you're thinking is, I don't have time to do this. Okay, so there is some strategy in this. You should, as a minimum, post once per day. We'll talk about that in a second. But there is definitely some strategy in this. Well, here's what I do. On a Friday afternoon, I time block 30 minutes and I will write my posts for the next week and I'll just go through my week. Like what's transpired, what's taken place. If a key moment comes up, I'll take a picture and I'll post with that picture. But for the most part, 90% of my posts are coming from one day of the week, something that I've time-blocked 30 minutes because I understand the power of LinkedIn. And when you understand the power of LinkedIn, you understand the importance of making time for this tool. Okay, so this is still part of secret number 1. You know, the post and profile, ongoing conversation about you very easily. What's authentic? What's true about you? We've talked about documenting. That's really easy for you to do. Document your sales meeting, document the things that are going on. You just had a great meeting with a loan officer. There was maybe a cool thought that came from that. Post it. Become a storyteller. There's basically 3 key components. There's a 3X, a 3X structure. To storytelling. I don't have time to go through that, but it really incorporates— storytelling should incorporate right-brain thinking. And the more you can move people to the heart part of this instead of the head part of this, the faster you're going to have people gravitate towards you. I'm going faster because we're at— we're 50 minutes into this. Jabs over right hooks. The mindset behind this is this: you should be jabbing. It's a boxing terminology. Gary Vaynerchuk wrote a great book about it called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. That's the actual title of the book. Jabbing is giving value. Jabbing is contribution. Right hooks are asking for something. A right hook and what most recruiting leaders do is they connect and they ask to meet, or they connect and they wait a couple of weeks and they ask to meet, or they connect and they like a couple of somebody's posts and they ask to meet. Those are all right hooks. So this business has gotten to a place where our candidates are ducking because they always expect the right hooks. So jabbing is what you want to do. Jab, jab, jab. Give value. Okay, let me— I'll give you an example of value here in a second, but think, how can I get— how can I make contribution to somebody through LinkedIn? Um, you know, the part of this is that it, you know, um, Not having any strings attached and giving value actually activates this law of reciprocity, right? And we're just not activating it. What happens is we connect and then we ask to meet and then we don't get a response and they never respond. And we go, well, LinkedIn doesn't work. The truth is that you're doing it wrong. Okay. A jab means you're giving value. So let me give you, I'll give you an idea around this as an example of this. I just worked with a recruiting leader. That we built out what I call a JAB process, a JAB workflow. So if you connect with him, then— and I'll show you something similar to this in just a moment— you would actually receive a thank you and nothing else. And then a week later, you would receive some high-value content. When I say high-value content, he's actually interviewing, doing 15-minute interviews with 10 people in his organization that are Scotsman's Guide top— their top 200 producers. He's going to drop those onto YouTube and that's going to be one of his jabs. His goal is to get 12 of those and he'll jab one each month, right? High-value content. Like if you're someone that's doing 4 units a month and you provide an interview, a 15-minute interview with someone that's doing 15, you got my attention. That's a high value. That's high value. Okay? That's a jab. Right hook, we've talked about it. That's asking for value to be given. Jabbing is Is the quickest way to recruiting success. If there's one takeaway to this, besides growing your network, growing your audience on LinkedIn, become a jabber. Okay, I don't know if jabber, if that's exact terminology, correct terminology, but we created it. Become someone who jabs through giving value and figure out how do I give not just a little value, but how do I give a lot of value? Here's what you'll find. The people that I coach, when they get to the 5th, 6th, 7th time where they've jabbed and they've given great value, people become suspicious. Because this is a conversation I had earlier today. I have 15,000 connections. Do you know how many people jab me? I've had one person in the last year jab me. They jabbed me 3 times. That was it. 3 times. And I have no clue why they jab me. They're not— they have nothing to do with recruiting or mortgage industry or real estate or finance or any of that. I have no clue what they do. But I remember it because nobody jabs on LinkedIn. You want to build LinkedIn into a powerhouse, figure out how to jab correctly. It's the quickest way to engage people. What will happen is around 5th, 6th, 7th time, someone's going to ask you a question and they're going to say something along the lines of, I really enjoy the content. Um, why are you sending this to me? Right? Like, that's going to be it. Their guard's going to be like, why are you doing this? Right? This doesn't make sense. I'm enjoying the content, but this is so out of the ordinary. I'm not used to seeing this. So bring over-the-top value on your jabs. Here's an example. I'll read this out loud. This is one of my jabs. Now I'm in a different arena than you guys are, but I want to give you kind of an idea, a template around that. So I came across Andy Andrews. Andy Andrews, if you're not familiar with him, he's written 20 books. I don't know what the exact number is. One of the best storytellers of our era. If you don't believe me, go to YouTube and Google Butterfly Effect Andy Andrews and watch the 20-minute presentation of him telling that story. Powerful story. One of my beliefs— so this is centered around my beliefs— I jab in accordance with my vision. I jab in accordance with my core convictions. Right. So this is in, in straight line with that. One of my core convictions is that in recruiting, you better become a good storyteller. And I have processes in helping recruiting leaders become better storytellers. So I send this and it talks about why storytelling is important to what you do and why you need to become a great storyteller. And by the way, here's an hour-long webinar, which by the way, if you'd like access to that webinar, just shoot me an email and I'll send you the link. But I send this out to people as a jab and I'm delivering really high content. When somebody watches that, They're getting probably the best webinar on storytelling that's available through the best storyteller of our era. And so that's an example jab that you could use. Now, create your own jab, jab, jab process. Make it unique to you. What's your vision? What are your core convictions? Identify those things and then figure out how do you jab around them. Now, this is my system. My system is I focus on delivering one per week. So I'll build this every quarter. 13 weeks is one quarter. I will sit down, I'll time block, and I'll actually build a jab process for the next quarter. Be all new content because, um, you know, I'll have people coming in that are relatively new and I'll have people that are, that have made it through the 13 weeks and I'm still jabbing them. But the keyword here is sustainability. Okay? If you're looking at this and going, that's just too overwhelming, then, then don't do it because recruiting is all about sustainability. Right. We— short-term effort, right, versus long-term sustainable activity. The long-term sustainable activity will win every time. It's the story of the tortoise and the hare, right? The tortoise actually wins the race. That's what my belief model is around this. So if you're looking at this and going, I could never do that, fine, then build 7 steps and stick to those 7 steps. Like, 7 is a critical number in recruiting. You should at least be engaging people to the 7th time. That's just a sales number, a general sales number that works. You have to engage on average 7 times to actually move someone through a sales process, but build something that's sustainable. Okay, secret number 3, the power of having a system, a process. The word sustain comes up again. You want to focus on giving value to your top recruits. So first off, if you don't have a top recruits list, create one. Sustainable, 30, a top 30 recruits. This is sustainable. It's one per day. Go 31 if you want to go 31, because some days, some months have 31. Go 29, I don't care, but have a number. 30 is an easy number. Today is the 29th. If I fell on the 29th, Richard Milligan would be your recruit that you would focus on the 29th, and then you would go on that day and you would passively call me. You would call me, you would email me, you would text me. You would connect with me on LinkedIn. You would do something with me. So have a top recruits list, but specifically, if you're not going to do this with the people, the loan officers or branch managers that are coming through your LinkedIn account, do it specific to a top recruits list and start there. That's definitively sustainable. You can do this with 30 people. So create a new rut, create a new daily discipline. And when that rut is there, then add to it. Okay. Build templates you can use again and again, right? I could go back to that Andy Andrews. That's a cut and paste for me now. I don't have to create that. So once you create your jazz, you simply cut and paste again and again and again. Okay. Daily habits. I mean, that we've talked about that. Post a minimum once per day. So it's It's important that as a leader, when you post, your people are engaging with your post. From the best that we can figure with, with not knowing the LinkedIn algorithms, once you post, that first hour is critical to you. When you post, what happens in that first hour determines whether LinkedIn is going to feed that through other people's newsfeeds or whether they're not. So create a culture around LinkedIn with your team. Okay, I don't have time to go over this, but I will tell you that create a culture around LinkedIn with your team. What this means— there's, I think there's a couple of people on here from Loan Depot. Loan Depot has done a great job of this, right? Anthony, when he posts, leadership jumps on his post, and what happens? His posts blow up. And the reason is because the LinkedIn algorithm sees that as something that other people want to see. and it pushes it through people's newsfeeds. If you saw my newsfeed, and I am connected to fewer Loan Depot people than probably anybody else, I would say, you would see that my newsfeed gets pounded by Loan Depot. And the reason for that is because the algorithms are picking that up. So create a culture around LinkedIn that says, this is something we're going to do as a team. When I post, or when you post, or when a loan officer posts, or when Somebody at corporate posts, we're going to actually be influencers. We're going to like, we're going to comment, we're going to share. That will increase that feeding through newsfeeds. If you don't have this, you can take a snapshot of this right now. You should have some sort of recruiting scorecard. We're talking about disciplines, behaviors. We're going into the new year. What is measured is improved. And you need to measure your activity on LinkedIn. Okay, that's just true. So as a scorecard around recruiting, 3 to 5 of these behaviors should be LinkedIn. You should be posting. That should be a behavior. It should be an action. You should be connecting with loan officers, branch managers, mortgage insiders. That should be a behavior. You should be engaging with insights. You should be liking posts, commenting on posts. You should make time for those. Now, You can do all of that in a matter of 2 to 5 minutes a day. Okay. We ran out of time to discuss— we're right at an hour right now. We ran out of time to discuss the system that I use to build my LinkedIn connections from 5,000 to 15,000. I'll give you an opportunity to have some more information around that here in just a moment. We ran out of time to discuss specific messages, 3 killer messages that will help move your recruits to the next steps. We, you know, in-depth strategy. We didn't get to go into an in-depth strategy. We're really talking about incorporating vision. We glossed over that real quickly, but hopefully you've got some good material around that. LinkedIn strategy for building the microculture, creating this attractive microculture. We just talked about that, but there's an actual strategy. Like, you should be doing things within your team to promote it. You can take certain things like the Social Selling Index and run a contest. You can run a contest around the most connections for the week. You can actually assign someone for the entire week to post for the team and everybody else is to jump in and to like that. There are these things that you can do to create this audience on LinkedIn where people are from the outside looking in saying you have an attractive culture, you're an attractive leader. Where you post and it's just blank, and it's happening to all of you. You're posting and your team's not coming in, right? That's not an attractive leader. Like, people, there are certain traits that people wanna be associated with, right? When you do this right, people see unity, people see synergy, people see connectedness, right? Is there ever a candidate, ever a recruit that didn't want 3 things like that? It's just, that's the truth, but where you post, and the audience, your audience, your own branch, your own company don't respond, then you're missing out on a huge opportunity. It actually hinders your recruiting efforts. Okay. I didn't have a chance to go over all of the LinkedIn stats. We abbreviated those. Um, we actually have a 210 list of LinkedIn stats that matter. Um, we didn't get a chance to talk about writing articles, the power of that. Um, freelance writers, you can actually get freelance writers that will write articles for you. You give them bullet points, they'll write the article for $5 to $15. And, um, and we could go on and on and on in terms of what, um, um, what we could have discussed here. I promised you a nugget at the end of this. Here you go. Here's, here's a really cool idea. This is one that, um, jumpstarted my recruiting going into the recruiting season because January, February, March, um, 70% of the industry moves in those 3 months. And so if you want to jumpstart on this, get ready, here it comes. At the end of every year between Christmas and New Year's, what I would do is I would take a book and I would send it to all my, all my new, all my recruits, all my top recruits. The book is John Gordon's book, One Word. So what I would ask you to do, take a moment and identify anyone that you've been in front of this year that you want to pursue in 2018. Make that list. That's step 1. Send a text to them. You should have their cell phone number. And, and so send a text to them letting them know that you're going to be going through this One Word book and that you'd heard great things about it and that you wanted them to go on this journey with you and ask for their home address. The home address on recruiting is a critical component. Okay. When you're doing your face-to-face meetings, you should be getting this home address at the end of the face-to-face meeting. You should be transitioning by saying, I'd love to send you something tangible. Now that could be a book, it could be something else, but a great tangible thing to send is a book. You get the home address and now you're engaging a conversation with the spouse. And what we don't— what I figured out as an epiphany is that when I engage the spouse in a passive conversation, because now I was sending things to the home, I moved my candidates quicker. And here's why. The person, even the people that work in great environments, When they go home, everything comes through the spouse filter. When they have a spat with a processor, they have a disagreement with the manager. When they have a deal that busts out, even if it was their own fault, they go home and they talk to the spouse. And what happens? The budget for next month gets revamped, right? And so the spouse has this lens that this company over here is always letting them down. Okay, that's just the truth. And so as a good recruiting leader, you can reverse recruit and you should reverse recruit your own, the own, the People you have and their spouses figure out creatively how to do that. But as a good recruiting leader that understands there's opportunity there, you should be figuring out a way to have a passive conversation over here. Because when I send my one-word book by John Gordon to the house with a note, what happens? That's the— a spouse sees that and says, who'd the book come from? It came from a guy in the industry that's trying to recruit me. Really? Now conversation takes place. And then when I send my Christmas card, a conversation will take place. And then when I do something else, right, because I will, I'll do it, have an ongoing conversation with them at home. This will come up again and again and again. So, great book, One Word. It's an easy read. You'll read it in 4 hours. The concept behind it is simply this. Instead of goal setting, develop one word for the year. So, my one word for 2017 was contentment. My one word for 2016 was free. I could keep going back 5 years on my one words. And so that has really framed my entire 2017, that one word. I could tell you, I could spend 15, 20 minutes telling you what it meant to my 2018. What you're doing when you do this is you're presenting attractive leadership to someone, right? This says I'm an attractive leader, right, who believes in engaging my people in this ongoing conversation of personal development. I'm transparent, I'm authentic. Here is my one word, and then you're engaging in a larger conversation moving forward because of that. There's me skydiving. I don't know why that's the picture that's on there, but we like to have a little fun around here. I want to thank you for attending, but I also want to give you an opportunity. If you're looking at this and you're going, this seems a little bit overwhelming, but I realize that I need to do something with my LinkedIn. We do actually coach people specific to LinkedIn. So we have a 2-week process that we take people through that actually is complete overhaul