Prioritizing Recruiting Above Everything Or Watch Your Vision Die

So the big question is this: how do recruiting leaders like us who have 12 to 15 other job responsibilities win at this game of recruiting? How do we build a system that allows us to recruit effectively in a minimal amount of time while motivating recruits towards meaningful change? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Richard Milligan, and welcome to Recruiting Conversations. Hey everybody, welcome back to another Recruiting Conversations. It's your host, Richard Milligan. And I'm going to share with you a behind the scenes in a recent coaching session that I had. Every once in a while, I get on a roll in a coaching session where I get kind of on my stage, in front of my pulpit. One of those moments where you're a little fiery and you're ready to actually deliver a message to somebody. And I had one of those messages that I delivered recently to a recruiting leader. And the setup for this is very typical. Look, the recruiting leader has the most difficult job in any business. And it's because they wear so many hats, then they're also responsible for recruiting. And so since recruiting is not front and center all the time, it's not something that is of essence to putting the deal together that's immediately in front of them or putting the fire out. That is in their inbox, whether that be email or voicemail or text or wherever, then recruiting gets pushed over and over and over again. And there's always a day of reckoning with a lack of recruiting because teams churn people. I mean, in some industries, as much as 30% of salespeople leave every single year. You can take a team of 20 people and over the course of 3 or 4 years, if you're not recruiting, You're suddenly in a position where you are no longer a leader. So the struggle is real in that there's so many things to do for a leader who also recruits that recruiting goes to the back burner. And now more than ever, because the, because the season is busy, right? I mean, we're juggling more things now, trying to work in a virtual environment with this season of COVID Depending on what industry you're in, you have an enormous workload if you're in real estate or in mortgages or in insurance. If you're not and you're in some other industry, there's more pressure on you to make things happen if you're on the sales side. So, the struggle is real for every recruiting leader to carve out time to do what they know is necessary to be successful. And it's this consistent behavior that's in alignment with our long-term goals. It's that which creates sustainable success— consistent behavior in alignment with our long-term goals. So in this moment, I have a leader that I'm coaching that has had a recent struggle of just making time to recruit. To put it on his calendar and not just manage to that, but allocate to that, right? There's a difference between time management and time allocation. Time management assumes that you can manage time, and you can't manage time. You can allocate it. If you're a recruiting leader, you're trying to manage time. You are going to get wrapped up in everything around you because it's always going to come in between you And ultimately, what you need to accomplish, what you want to accomplish to move your larger vision of growth forward. I have some crazy personal stories around this, and the little clip I'm going to share with you won't actually share some of those stories. I'll share one with you here now. I remember this season of struggle where I was always setting these big goals, and then failing the goal, and inevitably, I felt so frustrated because the operational component of running a team was always getting in the way. There was always a fire to put out. So I began to evaluate everything. And when I say evaluate everything, like, where's my office located at? What are the things in my office that are distractions for me? Why can't I seem to get over this hurdle and just do the things that I know I want to do, that I need to do, that are important to me? I looked at my office one day and realized that my office location inside the larger office was in front of a hallway leading to my operations team, which meant that anytime someone had an issue on the sales side and needed to go talk to operations, they would walk right by my office. Now, my office setup was that I had a French glass door and I had these 2 big windows that were paned windows on either side of the doors. So there was no hiding in my office. You, if you came up to my office, and I wasn't on the phone, or, you know, even if I was on the phone, there were times where people would just walk in. So it was hard for me to hide in that environment to just get things done, because people saw me available. I was the, the leader of the team that would come into my office to ask me the question, to pose a scenario, to Put out, put, help put out the fire, whatever it was. So I went through this process and just said, I'm going to be intentional about carving out my time. And so I remember being on the phone one day. I literally was on the phone when this happened. I hear a knock on my door and I kind of put my hand up. I didn't even turn towards the door because my computer was facing away from the door. I kind of put my hand up as to stop. And I pointed to my ears because I was on the phone. And just kept talking. And I heard the door creak open and I heard someone sit down in the chair on the other side of my desk from me. And just immediately I'm like a little bit frustrated in this situation because I'm in the middle of a conversation with the recruit. I know this conversation is going to take some time to actually have. And that person sat in that chair until I got off the phone to pose a question to me. Wasn't a big question. I remember it being that memorable of an issue or anything like that. They just wanted my time. Okay, so I'm like, how do I solve this problem? I thought, you know what, I'll put a sign on the door. Because in this moment, I'm like in the middle of my recruiting efforts. I look in my corner off in the corner of my office, there's a cardboard box. I take my scissors over, cut the lid off the cardboard box, take a marker and write in meeting, take a piece of Scotch tape. I walk to my door, my French door with the glass panes, tape it on there. I close the door and I go back to work. I'm back to my recruiting efforts. I hear the door open with the sign on the door saying in meeting while I'm on the phone again and someone sits down in my office. So I'm at this place now where I'm like really frustrated because I'm like, I gotta solve this problem. I'm super driven to meet my goals for the year. The only way I'm gonna meet my goals if I grow my team. The only way I'm gonna actually grow my team is if I'm actually intentional in the behaviors and the things that I'm doing in my day. I mean, I know these things. So I created a sitting area outside my chair, outside my office. It had a chair, it had a short table. On the table it actually had magazines. And I got a 30-minute, half-hour glass that was clear and it was about a foot and a half tall. And in it it had red sand. I still have that to this day. And I set that on the table. When I time-blocked for my recruiting efforts, I would take that 30-minute sand glass that had red sand in it, it was clear, and I would turn it upside down, I would set it on the table, and I had this conversation with the team. If that's in place, I'm doing the one thing that I have to do this year in order to accomplish my larger vision, which is to grow our team and to grow this market. It still happened. People wouldn't sit in the chair. People would look at the, the half-hour glass with the sand in it, would still come up to my door and knock on my door if they didn't think that I was on the phone. So I began to think about this. I'm like, I need to solve this problem. I relocated my office so that I wasn't in that hallway. It still happened. At one point, I drive down to Staples in the middle of the day. I get this whiteboard easel. It's about 5 feet tall, the easel is. The whiteboard is about 3 feet tall by 4 feet tall. I mean, it's a big whiteboard. You literally would have actually had to move The easel and the whiteboard to get into my office because I placed that bad boy right in front of my door when I was doing my recruiting efforts after I moved my office. And I would write on that board what I was doing. And if they needed something, there was a place for them to actually write something below the message so that I knew that when I walked out of my office after being intentional with what I was doing in terms of my recruiting energies, That I would see the message and be able to connect with them. And finally, in that moment, I solved that problem. So for you, the recruiting leader, this next little clip, listen to this. It'll be impactful. You have to figure out how to solve this larger problem, which is how do you carve out time to get to your recruiting efforts? Let's go to this clip now. I remember in 2000, I think it was 2010, It's been about a decade ago. July 4th fell on like a Wednesday. And I said, I'm gonna take Thursday, because Wednesday was automatic day off, I'm gonna take Thursday and Friday off that week and the following week. And I had never even taken a full week off. And here I was gonna take like 11 days off. And at the time I had strong operational leadership, I had a great team in place, but I mean, I was also at the time still producing myself. But also have a strong junior loan officer. I had my own processor and a great process built. But I was thinking when we went on vacation for 11 days that when we got to where we were going, that I would have cell phone service. Mm-hmm. And I got there and there wasn't cell phone service within 5 miles of the place we were staying. And I get there and my wife's like, why are you freaking out? I'm like, we're here for 11 days. I don't have any communication with anybody. Like, things are gonna— it's gonna be disastrous because we were extremely busy. And, um, and I drove— remember driving back to town to get a couple people on the phone to say, hey, here's what's going on. I'll be back in town periodically, but I'm not going to be accessible. It's all you. And about day 4, a new me kind of settled in. And I was like, in that moment going, I forgot what it feels like to be like this. Yeah. I was more available to, you know, just my own thought process and to my, my family and to just being there and being available. And I decided on that vacation that every year I was going to take at least a 1-week, a full-week vacation to get completely off the grid because of that. And when I got back, nothing catastrophic happened.

Yeah.

Nothing. It was, it was seriously like pulling my finger out of the bathtub. And one of the things is I began to just kind of be aware of that. As I look at some— I've got some successful entrepreneurs around me that have sold businesses for hundreds of millions of dollars. One of the things that is a repeated theme amongst them is stress test your business, stress test your business. Well, how do you stress test the business? And they would say multiple times per year we pull out. We literally disappear. We're not available. We need certain things to actually fail so we can come back in and see where do we need to provide more support, create better systems, hire different people. So I need those failures so I can come back and actually identify them and get better there. So we stress test it. And so as a leader, I think some of these things are very relative to you. that you'll realize, we trick ourselves to think that we have to, it has to be a certain way when it really doesn't have to be a certain way. I think that 3 times a week you could carve out 30 minutes.

For sure.

And the truth is that it would not, it wouldn't fail. Whatever is around you wouldn't fail. So then if you can come to that agreement, I think you're nodding your head. If you can come to that agreement, then it becomes behavioral. Which is then I need to do it. I just need to do it. So how do I force myself to do it? And then you start, you start creating these things, these that you put in place that prevents you from falling into the old traps, which are your phone. Go get another phone that you pay $35 a month.

I mean, right.

Yeah, but sometimes it is behavioral. It's habitual. And you need to break the cycle of that. in order to get out of it. And so look, I had to do this. I've done this. The laptop that actually I set in my docking station that had 2 screens, guess what I went and did? I went and got a different laptop. I got a me laptop and I recruited from that laptop. That laptop went on the other end of my L-shaped desk.

Yeah.

'Cause I said it's behavioral, I'm gonna change it. I couldn't change it. That little Outlook thing would ding or I'd shut my inbox and I would open it back again. You know, it became so, it was so behavioral I said, How do I outsmart the monkey brain? And I was like, okay, I get it, a completely different computer. It may be a completely different location or an office. I've got leaders that have had to leave their office and go to another office to do this, to make it work, because the monkey part of our brain goes back to what's habitual. So I hear what you're saying, but sometimes you got to take, you know, where, where we are junkies when it comes to our outlook, or junkies where it comes to problem solving. We almost have to pull ourselves out of that entire environment to go to something completely different so that it's like a completely set of different rules and standards that we're operating

by.

It sounds silly, but it works.

Yeah, that's true.

Okay, so you got to hack you. And in that, you might make some funny, crazy, different decisions like I did, going and buying a separate laptop, going and getting a different phone. Right, going to a different location. Like, I actually left my office in one window of time for about 6 months to recruit because getting out of my office, I actually relocated my office inside my own building. Wow. And it was all centered and predicated around getting to more control of my calendar, of my time. And I seriously had a, my office was in front of a hallway leading to operations. And that was the worst place on planet Earth to have an office as a leader that could wave a magic wand and make things happen. So I had to relocate to the opposite end of the building, which was in a corner, which was actually a worse, worse office for me. But I was now out of the central traffic location where people could see I wasn't on the phone or wasn't in a meeting and just knock on the door and come in and say, I got a problem. So these are all things that I hacked, and it took me a long season to hack it. What I found is that Environment, which James Clear talks about this. I'm just connecting some dots here in Atomic Habits. He talks about how environment's critical to behavior, to behavior modification. I literally changed my entire environment to create this ability to recruit consistently. Okay. 'Cause you're a great recruiter because I know it because you're a relational leader that cares. That's what makes you a great recruiter. There's that, that's the intersection where recruiting and leading overlap.

You're

a relational leader who actually gives a crap, right? It's like there's 2 types of leaders. One is you-focused, the other is me-focused, right? You're the you-focused leader, and that kind of leader does well recruiting because the authentic version of you, when you can show up and be available to people, is like very attractive to people,

right?

Right,

right.

Well, I'm gonna get off my podium, my speech.

No, I, I agree.

That was good. Okay, I'm back. I hope you found some value in that. I pray that there's a part of this that you will actually apply to what you're doing as a recruiting leader. If you've got a big vision for your team, the only way that you're going to be able to accomplish that larger vision is through you being intentional in your energies and your efforts and your actions and your behaviors. Around recruiting. You will have to solve this problem. When you solve this problem, this battle's won. So all the best to you. Thanks for checking out Recruiting Conversations today. Look forward to bringing one to you again soon. Have a great week, everybody. Want more Recruiting Conversations? You can register for my weekly email at 4crecruiting.com. If you need help creating your own unique recruiting system, you can book a time with me at bookrichardnow.com.