Recruiting Conversation EP 79

Hey everybody, it's Richard here with 4C Recruiting, and I have had a lot of conversations this week that are prompting me to cut this video and to share it with you on a Friday afternoon. Here's the deal. I have heard over and over and over again this week, I don't have time to recruit. The challenge in that is anything of significance in your life, in my life, in anyone's life that has something worth talking about. Right. Any big objective accomplished, any large vision achieved has been accomplished through sustained behaviors, consistent behaviors, and long windows of time. Here's the challenge for you as a recruiting leader. We see the recruiting ball. You're a professional juggler. And so you've got all these balls in the air at one time, 12, 15, 17 balls that you're juggling right now. Okay. And the challenge in that is that we see a lot of the balls that we're juggling as leaders as glass balls. We will not drop them. Those are fires that need to be put out today. They're current team members that have problems that need to be solved. The reports that are due by 5:00 PM on a Friday. We see balls that are in the air as ones we have to catch, but almost always a recruiting leader sees the recruiting ball as a rubber ball. If I don't catch it today, it'll bounce back up and I'll catch it tomorrow. Here's the challenge in that. It's daily action aligned with long-term goals that creates sustainable success. It's ultimately that simple. Anything of significance in your life, in anybody's life, has come through consistent action in a specific area. When you drop that ball, pretend it's a rubber ball. It's not. You're inconsistent in an area that for most of you is part of your long-term vision. You've got a long-term plan for growth in your market, whatever that would be, whatever the number is. For some of you, it's percent of market share. For some of you, it's a certain number of people on the team. For some of you, it's a certain billion— number of billion dollars in terms of volume that you want to accomplish. But you will never get there without seeing the recruiting ball as a glass ball and refusing to drop it. So here's what I want to do with you today. I want to give you a simple plan, a very simple plan. How could you, in 30 minutes a day, be a successful recruiting leader? So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go to the whiteboard. I want you to see this. If we're going to lay out kind of a sequence here for recruiting, recruiting is very simple. Ultimately, it comes down to 3 behaviors, 3 consistent behaviors. The first behavior where you always start is by identifying the talent in your market. Okay, so you're asking yourself the question, what is the avatar for the person that you want to attract? And you're going and you're finding that person in your market. Now, you've got a— if you've got a tool that shows you who the top salespeople are in your market, great. You can sort a lot of that data because it will come around, maybe experience in the business, amount of production they're currently doing, There's— there are some things there for some leaders. I know they'll say like, this person is a top salesperson in my market. They've got to be active in social for them to meet my avatar, or they've got to have an online application if they're a loan officer in order to be relevant in the digital world. You as the leader get to determine what that avatar is. And so when you determine what that is, you've got to build a list around the avatar. Where everything begins is with the list. And today that list should contain cell phone numbers, email addresses, LinkedIn URL, Facebook URL, Instagram URL. Where do they exist in the world today, in the digital world especially? We're going to build the list. So when you think about this, and I just— I'm encouraging you to oversimplify some of this. 30 minutes a day, that's oversimplifying this. For most of the data that we see, the average recruiting leader says they work around 50 hours a week. Well, at 30 minutes a day times 5 working days in a week, that's 2.5 hours a week of recruiting. That's 5% of your role is recruiting is how you would say, I would see my role as the recruiting leader when I'm contributing that much time. A lot of leaders say that's not enough time to be a successful recruiter. That is not true. It is, it's not enough time for a recruiter to be a successful recruiter, but as a leader that's leading a team and is also responsible for recruiting to that team, start with something that you can commit to, that you'll catch every single day that you can build on. And 30 minutes is where you would start. So part of that behavior is build your list. The second part of this is going to be making first contact. And I'll just put a, put an MIC here, making initial contact. Well, that means that you better have a good script. And what I have found is that most leaders have an awful script. The script goes along the lines of, would you be open to a better opportunity? Ah, that's— that does not work. You need a better script than that. So work on your script, but you've got to be making initial contact. You should always be growing a list of people that know you in your market. Now here's the— here's the last thing. Once people know who you are in your market, you've got to have forever follow-up. So forever follow-up means this: you're showing up every single month forever. Pause there forever. As long as you're in the business or they're in the business, you're in front of them every single month forever. How do you do that? Well, in your script, at the end of your script, if someone said, I'm not interested, I'm not interested, I would ask a yes question. Can I at least send you my contact information so that in the event something changes in your career, we're connected and you could reach out? That's called a yes question. Can I at least send you a connection request on Facebook so that in the event something were to change in your career, you could reach out? That's a yes question. Okay, so I ask a yes question at the end of my script, and that leads me to a place where now every month forever I will follow up. Now here's what's really important. You gotta lay down the scripting that says, I'm just checking in. You've gotta stop checking in with people. You are wasting people's time as a recruiting leader when you're checking in. The truth is this. I'm gonna come off of the screen share for a second. There's an invisible scale that exists out here. You're on one side and their current leadership is on the other side. And what you have to do over long windows of time is bring value, bring value, bring value, bring value. You have to outvalue their current leadership. When you do that, that's when you become a viable option for someone. So when we go back to the whiteboard and we look at forever follow-up, what this means is this. Right? Value-centric follow-up. It has to be something of value, like solve a problem for me, help me grow my business, give me a good scripting to call and set appointments with, like tell me something about this marketplace that I don't already know that will help me grow in my career. Send me a book, send me a video, send me a podcast, be a person of value. And when you do this over long windows of time, and sometimes this doesn't have to take very much because There, there are a lot of people on teams where they're not getting any value. So when you start contributing value to me, what happens is you shift that scale very quickly when I'm not getting value. We call that the surrogate leadership principle. The word surrogate means in place of. Typically, we use this in the animal kingdom, right? We put a calf with another mom because it's— it no longer has a mother. So we put it with a surrogate mother. In place of where people are lacking leadership and you bring leadership value, you can insert yourself in place of leadership. So this is about showing up every single month now in rhythm and bringing something of value to the individual. And when you do this, what happens is this: when we bring value, we become in demand. The more value we bring, the more in demand we become. The challenge for most of the recruiting leaders that, that I meet, they don't bring value in forever follow-up. Their script says this: just checking in to see how things are going with you. So a better script is, I thought of you when I came across this, and I wanted to share it with you because I think it will help you grow your business. I thought of you as I was producing this. I thought of you when I read this. I thought of you when I heard this. I wanted to bring it to you because I thought it would bring you value in your business. That is the Forever Follow-Up Framework. Now let's just pause here for a second because I've kind of given you a map for a week. Okay, let's just add a couple of extra things here. There's 5 days in a working week. I've given you a Monday here, right? There's a Tuesday here, there's a Wednesday here, there's a Thursday here. There's a Friday here. Okay, so let me oversimplify this for you. On your Mondays, an easy way to map out your Monday in 30 minutes is build your list. Takes you about 3 minutes to identify someone as talent, to, to search them up, right? Maybe you're going to use LinkedIn and Sales Navigator for this. To search up a list of people, I have found to find all the information that you need takes about 3 minutes. In 30 minutes, On a Monday, you could put 10 people on a list as a recruiting leader. On a Tuesday, you could make that a day where you're going to make first contact, make initial contact. So you'll dial through 10 people in your 30 minutes, you'll have 1 or 2 conversations. Okay, that will take 30 minutes. On Wednesday, you'll redial your list, you'll have 1 or 2 more conversations. Okay, and so the rhythm for this could look simply like this. This is a 30 minutes, 30 minutes, 30 minutes, 30 minutes, and 30 minutes. And then on your Friday, You'll do your forever follow-up. And I love doing my forever follow-up on Fridays because it's just fun for me. These are people that I've crossed the relationship bridge with. I love bringing value to people. And so fun day— Friday's a fun day for me. So I love bringing value to people on Friday. And what I've given you is a map for 2.5 hours of recruiting consistently every single week. Now, here's the challenge for you. As a recruiting leader, here's what I know is that you're constantly putting out fires, you're constantly dealing with tension. And if you time block this, and I would recommend that you do, when you time block this and it shows up on your calendar, there's a, there's a moment where you either make agreement with what's on the calendar or you broke the agreement. So what I encourage every recruiting leader to do, because I realize that hair's on fire, ah, you get to this moment and your calendar, your calendar goes ding. And you make a split-second decision. I've got all these problems and all these fires, and I'll do that tomorrow. And what I have found is incredibly helpful is actually having what I would call a transition zone. Transition zone means that you're going to pause. Okay, I picked up a transition zone probably 20 years ago. My oldest son is 21 years old. I spent 15 years inside the mortgage industry, and I would show up in the driveway after a long day of work, and I would walk in on the phone All of these things going on. Okay, I made an agreement with my wife to no longer do that. And whenever I did, I would sit in my truck in the driveway, and I would transition mentally from being at work to being at home. It allowed me to walk in, allowed me to be present, and to be a person of influence and impact inside my own home. What I've learned is that we can do this if we're thoughtful when we transition into recruiting. So here's a great transition zone. Go shut down your Outlook inbox. Okay, some of you have to turn off the notifications on your phone. Some of you need to send a text message to 2 or 3 people saying, I'm walking into a meeting for the next 30 minutes and won't be available. A lot of you need to do some affirmations at the beginning of this. Here's a couple of easy affirmations. Every day in every way, I'm becoming a better recruiter. Every day in every way, I'm becoming a stronger recruiter. That's an easy affirmation. I'm not a victim of circumstance. I'm gifted to change, create, and lead things from what they are to what they could be. That's a, that's a great affirmation. Have a couple of affirmations you repeat over and over and over again at the beginning of your transition zone. That's a great way to transition. You have low energy, transition with some high-energy music, clap your hands, like do something to get some dopamine running inside your body, right? So that you can transition into the 30 minutes As the best version of you. That's a challenge for you. The best version of you is attractive, right? The best version of you in a conversation is magnetic. But most of us show up and we just do ta-da in that moment, and you're not at your best. It's not the best version of you. You're still over here trying to put out fires. You're still over here dealing with some other issue that you brought into this moment. You transition into this well, and I would rather you— rather you lose 3 or 5 of the 30 minutes and only have 25 to 27 minutes left to recruit and to make your commitment to the big 3 things that we've talked about here than for you to not do it at all. Create a transition zone. Here's the truth is that we always protect what's a priority. We always protect what's a priority. Your vision is a priority. Yes or yes? Yes. It's a priority. And every single time you make this decision to not catch that glass ball called the recruiting ball, every single time you decide to let that bounce, you are not making your long-term vision a priority. You're putting something else in front of it. One of my, one of the, one of my favorite quotes by Craig Groeschel said, everyone ends up— some people somewhere, everyone ends up somewhere. Few people end up somewhere on purpose. Every recruiting leader ends up somewhere. And what I have found as a coach is that few recruiting leaders end up somewhere on purpose. Go be intentional next week. You've got a perfect roadmap to do it. It's now on you. I've given you something simple. If I can help you any further, I've got a live calendar. It is www.bookrichardnow.com. And until I see you again in another video, have a great week, everybody.